Mei Lewis

I know nothing about film. To me that looks like a bizarre combination of sharp, loads of noise, contrasty, unrealistic retro colors, lots of DOF and slightly jittery. Overall I really like the way it looks!

Okay, let me put it another way, there is no situation in which decisions are made based purely on technical information. Such things as opinions, personal preference, marketing, handling and anything else you can think of always come into it. Two situations where the 5D2 has better resolution than the Red: 1) Shooting footage for a special effects shot. where a high resolution locked off plate is required for the background, and some footage of a person running across it is needed for reference to be replaced by a CGI character. On the 5D2 you can shoot a still of the background at 21MP, do HDR if you want, and shoot the video at 1080P. On a red you can shoot the video at higher resolution but it's not relevant as that's only a reference, but you can't shoot the still at as good a resolution as the 5D2. 2) A camera is placed behind the steering wheel of a car pointing back at the driver, where there's room fro a 5D2+ short lens, but a red won't fit. In this case the 5D2 resolution is 1080P (you can argue lower) but the Red's is ZERO.

I'm missing some subtlety here. Why would using a Red camera in natural light be much different to using it under artificial light? Why would using it lock you into a specific look?

There is no such thing as "a purely technical standpoint".

It seems kind of obvious when you say it like that! (Which means your explanation is a good one!) I guess the hard thing is composing a shot so that there are several distinct points of attention, relating to each other in the desired way and as prominent as they should be? For example in that Citizen Kane shot the person at the back is only as clear as he is because he has been silhouetted and because the straight lines of the banister, pillars and joists frame and point towards him. That took some artistry and it's harder to do that than it would be to just isolate him with a very shallow DOF, and have a sequence of shots like that alternating between characters. It seems that this might lead to fairly formal compositions, as in the case of the Citizen Kane shot. Also if there's more than one character involved and we want to see their faces then they're going to have to be facing toward the camera and at least one of them away from the others. That's true in all the above shots, except the shot from the forest where the T/S was used for a different effect. And that's not natural most of the time if the characters are interacting.

Would faster modern films or digital acquisition allow for the same shots to be done on a slower lens nowadays?

I've done a lot of still photography involving bands and it can be hard to get them to pay for anything. A lot of them seem to think they should get things for free, and being generally creative people they'll know other creatives interested in photography, video, graphic design etc. who will do stuff for them for free, because it's fun to do music videos. If you buy a camera instead of renting one you still have to pay for it, and you're still paying for it to be used on any free work you do. To put it another way, if you shoot a video for a band and they don't pay you, then effectively you're paying them for the privilege of filming them, which is ridiculous. I'm not trying to put you off, just saying be very cautious, don't expect paid work to necessarily come from free work and don't expect your customers (musicians) to be loyal to you. If you do work for free make sure you get something else out of it, like a good piece for your showreel ideally of a band who you actually like. Who are your investors? Do you have to show them a financial plan?

Being expensive doesn't make them stylish, and being stylish doesn't mean I'd like their photos.

I didn't mean that its use in the film was tacky, just that its use elsewhere almost always is (all the uses I've seen anyway). I haven't seen the film so I don't know how it works there, I was just surprised it was used at all. I suppose I should see the film because of this, though I have no other interest in it. Sin City is a very different movie and I'm not surprised by the technique being used there. The computer game Mad World has a very similar look that works well for it. And I'm certainly not hating wedding photographers! I photograph weddings myself! Some of the best photographers shoot weddings. It attracts talent because the financial rewards are there and it can also be very enjoyable and fulfilling. I know some people rag on wedding photographers but I'm not one of them. Still, like any other kind of job there are people who go with trends and do whatever they can to make as much money from people as they can. I'd describe them as cynical wedding photographers.

Wow, that really surprises me. The cheapest, tackiest gimmick that cynical wedding photographers use and that film got so much approbation.

David, on a thread about your "Star Trek obsession" you said What do you means by effective deep focus composition? Could you give a couple of pointers?

I've never seen Schindler's List, but does it really use selective color?!?!?!?!?

I saw this a few nights ago on DVD at a friends house. I'm not that into horror films, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The picture in several scenes exhibited a strange problem, where it seemed things nearer the far left and right of the screen were squashed horizontally somewhat and the centre was stretched. It wasn't really noticeable during static shots, but when they camera moved things seemed to enlarge and shrink. I wrote it off as a problem with the disc, player or TV setup somehow, but then in some scenes near the end of the film where there were car headlights or torch lights in the frame they had extremely wide flares that went the whole width of the screen, so I thought it might have had something to do with an anamorphic lens, but I don;t know enough about that to say. Anyone know?

Yes the speed of the card matters. I don't know what the minimum is, but I'm pretty sure it's in the manual which you should be able to find online.

I don't think dropping frames is an issue. While shooting video there are no moving parts, so a bit of motion of the camera body shouldn't do anything.

Are "witness marks" the distance markings? Sorry, I've not heard the term before.

On one of the fxguide shows they mentioned this (think it was this camera they were talking about). It's not the exposure time that's varied but the sensitivity I think. Each pixel has two analogue amplifiers or outputs, a high gain and a low gain.

As for grain in the 5D2 image, it all comes down to taste, just as it does with film. Grain also probably varies depending on what color temperature you're shooting. ...and it's a 5D (mark 2), not a D5! In all likelihood there'll be a Nikon camera called a D5 in a few years, then you'll be confused.

There's a method for fixing hot pixels that I've tried and had some success with. It's so easy it's worth a shot: 1. Put the camera in live view mode and shoot a video of anything, letting it run until the card is full or it times out. 2. Put the camera in manual sensor clean mode for five minutes. 3. Turn camera power off. That's it. The theory is that when you place the camera in manual sensor clean mode, when it comes back out it tests itself for hot/stuck pixels and from then on maps them out automatically. Step 1 is just there to try to warm up the sensor to exagerate and bad pixels so that they get noticed by the camera when it decides what to map out. The first time I tried this it sounded like complete nonsense, but I tried it anyway and it has successfully got rid of some stuck pixels for me.

I just notice the dpreview forums changed recently, is that just a coincidence?

You might be right about 160 being the lowest 'true' or 'native' ISO. I don't share your optimism about it all being sorted out though! It never really has been for any previous camera. The best I've seen is people shooting complicated tests and analysing the results with programs like DCRAW, and the results there are inconclusive, depend on the situation, or contradict other tests. From everything I've read and tried, on the 5D2, I avoid ISO50 as it's a pull of ISO100 and loses highlight details. I pretty much never shoot over ISO6400 because the two higher settings are just too noisey. Between 100 and 6400 I just use the lowest ISO I can get away with. I think the amount of noise plotted against ISO _is_ non-linear, and there may even be some inversions, but in practice it probably affects dynamic range too and it's too complicated to be bothered with for very small gains. I'd prefer to concentrate on getting the right photo than on slight noise level benefits. E.g. it _might_ be that ISO6400 is just ISO3200 pushed a stop in camera, and in that case it would probably be better for technical image quality to shoot at ISO3200 and push it myself in RAW conversion. BUT if I did that the image on the camera's screen would look a stop underexposed and I'd have to meter differently for just that one ISO, so I couldn't make proper artistic judgements about the photo or show it to people on the camera. BTW I'm a pro using a 5D2 ;-) Despite all the problems, I love it.

A changing look through the years and decades is even more obvious when you look at still photos, family snaps and so on. I always assumed it was down to differences in film stocks, partly a result of progress and partly of fashion. Now that most things are shot digital I wonder if there'll be the same changes? There are certainly styles that come and go, even faster than before, but when we can always go back to the RAW file and apply whatever look is current now will it seem odd that events 50 years in the past look exactly modern, apart from clothes etc.?

"...we handled all of the cameras at their lowest ISO rating of 160 and used this number (on a suggestion from Canon's onsite rep) as the interval for all of our ISO ranges." But 160 isn't the lowest ISO of either camera, no matter hw you cut it, so is anything else they said correct either?

No idea, but you may want to factor in non-obvious costs, such as how much energy is used to transfer film prints VS transferring electronic files.

Just noticed this, also from the first link, which explains what I just said another way: "One consequence of this way of ISO implementation is, that shots made with ISO 160, 320, 640, etc. appear less noisy than with ISO 200, 400, 800, etc. Some users believe this is a reason to use these ISO steps. The reason for the lower noise is the 1/3 stop higher exposure, not the ISO difference itself. One can always reduce the noise by increasing the exposure, with any ISO, but this may cause clipping. "