John Miguel King

This truly is, and I'm definitely not trying to be arrogant, a non problem. In answer to your question, 709 cannot be any better than Log. If it is speed that you're after all you need is a 3d LUT in your post pipeline. All major NLEs have the capability of applying a 3d Lut, so it's just a matter of dropping the effect on the clip/sequence. What is more, the 709 that Arri provides is just their interpretation of a Log to Lin colour transform, and not a very good one at that. As Mr. Mullen says, Arri's LUT condenses the highlights just a bit too much. I'd add that it also crushes the blacks. Never, in my DIT work, do I use Arri's LUT. When going for a "one size fits all" I either use the one created by the guys at Assimilate or work in ACES colourspace. Assimilate's is as contrasty and saturated as Arri's, but both knee and shoulder are much much softer. In all other cases, when time has been allotted to work on looks, I use the LUTs created during prep for each job. To finish this, shooting in Log gives you the awesome opportunity of creating your very own luts and looks. Log is freedom!

I believe Coppola's Dracula made extensive use of the process. Maybe one of the reasons why it's so mesmerising and unique?

Uhmm, then poverty would be impossible by design as the very concept of money would not exist. It might just even lead to a society where goods would be designed and built to last, where energy and materials would no longer be wasted in pointless consumerism, where we'd be aware of the fact that we inhabit a planet with finite resources and that without it we can't surive, where a person's worth would not be determined by their account but by their capacity to improve the lives of her/his fellow humans. I LIKE IT. It's called STAR TREK. :D

Samuli, my pleasure. My degree was literature and film. In the literature half we spent three years talking about narrative perspective and how it determines style and form. The theme was touched so briefly on the film side. I always thought of it as limiting given that narrative is as old as humanity itself!.

Thanks! The Guadix plateau is stunning. There's snowed mountains anywhere you point the camera at. :D

A bit of self promotion, but also what I think is an example of F55 raw with an effective colour pipeline. Our colourist, Joseph, truly smashed it. Or so we all think. Glass was Sony and Fujinon, which was a tad too clean when added to the F55's inherent sharpness. I personally love the watercolour feel Joseph brought to it.

I'd suggest doing some parallel reading of this. It might just help in seeing the conversation from a less formulaic approach, as it frames it within other forms of narration. Perspective is a fundamental element of style. Barry Lyndon, for example, plays the perspective game in a masterful way. It just would never be the same movie without the third person narrator. It'd be a realist bore fest! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_mode

There is no such thing as a tbolt hub. At best, on the computer side a port is multiplexed resulting in two ports instead of one, although it remains a 4x PCIE lane at a physical level. The extra port on the device is meant to allow daisychaining. And, to be honest, you don't really want to daisychain two bandwidth hungry devices on the same port as the performance drops real fast.

Amen. Here in London we've one of those called the Hackney Rio. It might just be the one you're describing. And it's actually doing pretty well!

What I'm going to write goes against the way I like watching movies but... IMAX is projected at 2K. A standard TV set is 1080p. It might just be that the whole theatrical release first, then the rest is a thing of the past. And on top of this we have 4k screens getting cheaper and cheaper. I do think that watching a beautifully shot movie in a great cinema is what it's all about. But maybe it's another instance of an industry stuck in a certain rusty definition of itself.

It could also be the Schüftan process used in Lang's Metropolis and Coppola's Dracula. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%BCfftan_process

An addendum to this. I might be wrong and my data old, but the fact that Denmark is the only country in the world where the law requires creative HODs, including cinematographers, to be named as copyright holders does somehow point towards a massive injustice in the whole system. Thanks for understanding that my argument attempts to put the debate within the context of what's practical and beneficial to us, and not within right or wrong.

In the words of William Goldman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ay5GqJwHF8

I'd like to know why the "debate" needs to be framed within morality, within right and wrong. People using illegal streaming websites aren't doing it to make a moral statement, they just want to watch movies when and how they want. My point, if it wasn't clear before, is that it is impossible, chimeric, to attempt to shape the consumer. The music industry has accepted the fact and moved on. The publishing industry has accepted the fact and moved on. The movie business, meanwhile, wants to be god and shape the consumers. Taioist philosophy has a fantastic concept called the Wu Wei. Methinks our fortunes would improve if we stopped the delusion that it's within our power to stop the fundamental changes in our culture and society brought about by the biggest technological leap in the history of humanity since the invention of the printing press. Look at the world, who is making billions year after year? Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay. Yes, it's called those that have made the best possible use of the internet instead of spending their waking lives whining.

It's happened before, of course, and guess what, we've ended up using the best possible solution. The one that makes it easier for the consumer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents

First thing I did! It's possible that the black shading wasn't done in the perfect conditions, as we had to get the camera ready to go in a record time. So maybe the sensor wasn't yet at its normal temperature?

Alright, here goes a different opinion. We live in the internet age. I pay six pounds a month to be able to stream all the music I want from Google Play. Google then shares this income amongst the copyright holders according to the number of plays each one gets. I have not yet been able NOT TO FIND an album or single I want to listen to. It works, it's simple and pretty cheap. They've accepted their distribution costs are near zero and have accordingly changed their pricing structure. It's on my phone, my laptop, everywhere I want. However, when I try and pay for movie streaming services, call it Amazon, Netflix and whatever, the offer pales in comparison to what is available on any "illegal" website. If I'm following a certain TV show, and I happen not to live in the country where it's premiered, the best I have available online is one season too late. Sure, certain shows like House of Cards and Extant are premiered online and to a worldwide audience. But these cases are so few they're essentially a grain of sand in the big machine. When I go to the restaurant I ask for the menu, then I choose what I want and the lovely waiter brings it to my table. Yet, when it comes to watching movies, the restaurant tells me what I have to eat, and threatens me with the fires of hell if I eat somewhere else. It's a business model from the 20th century being kept in intensive care by a legion of lawyers. It is absurd, as absurd as trying to stem internet piracy. The only cases that end up in court are cases such as the one starting the thread. In essence, people get caught for being stupid. There is one solution, of course, accepting the inevitability of how cultural artifacts are consumed in the 21st century. Until then, sorry for my language, every one is busy peeing against the wind whilst asking themselves how they're getting oh so wet.

2015 will be quantum processors and storage. :P

Alexa is...

Hello mate, I am not too sure "perfectionism" is helpful on set!. The small variations in luminance you're mentioning are easily matched and corrected at any stage of the colour and data pipeline. However, if it helps, when I work as a DIT I'm very often in charge of setting iris. When outdoors this translates as riding the iris remote during takes due to changing cloud cover. Provided you've got good density, a healthy waveform picture and the variations are not extreme, you can get away with murder in the grade and nobody will ever notice. Life and schedules are too short for perfection.

An FS700 with an Odyssey 7Q costs roughly that, but gives you 4k 12 bit raw up to 30 fps, 2k raw up to 240 fps and even prores 4444. It's more sensitive and has roughly the same DR. And it's just one of the many options.

Arri's got the edge on usablity over Sony. But even with this development the fact remains that for less rental cash Sony provides 4K raw with 16 bit depth at up to 200 FPS, all of it with a global shutter. Arri needs to reassess its priorities. Either that, or with Sony's colour science being more widely understood, there's going to be a lot of hurt indeed. Mostly if one adds Sony's addition of prores, or the Aja Cion into the equation. They've got way too lazy over the last two years whilst the competition's been working real hard to come up with appealling alternatives. My humble thoughts.

Anytime buddy. And if they run out of units before you buy, well... you know who to blame!

Satsuki, we were doing RAW. Luckily not a big issue on this one shoot as the concep calls for very inky blacks. However, it's now a matter of pride to find the cause. I'm betting it's the OLPF.

No money worth being counted! Unfortunately, as two weeks passed between shooting the main bulk and this one shot... director's decided he doesn't need it. I hurt!!