Nathan Rosenquist

There is a pretty substantial jump between ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 on a Canon T2i. I would encourage you to do your own tests, but as a rule of thumb I think of it in these terms: ISO 100 - 400: virtually no noise ISO 800: a bit more noise ISO 1600: noticeable noise, as high as I would ever want to go, and only if I had already maxed out my light and lens options ISO 3200+: not suitable for serious work, grainy noise everywhere

You may want to watch the Emmy award winning Zacuto Shootout video series. They assembled a small team of cinematographers and DSLR experts. They performed a variety of fairly scientific camera tests on a number of DSLR cameras, and also put them in direct comparison with 35mm film. Participants included Robert Primes, ASC, and Philip Bloom, among others. They took the resulting footage to a first rate color grading suite, and projected the results in several first rate theaters, including the one at Skywalker Ranch, and showed the results side by side to an audience of cinematographers and industry professionals. Here are the settings that I have ended up using on my Canon T2i. They are based in part on the Zacuto Shootout results, and also on my own tests and preferences: Highlight Tone Priority: Off Auto Lighting Optimizer: Off Movie Exposure: Manual Picture Style: Faithful Sharpness: 0 Contrast: -4 Saturation: -2 Color Tone: 0 The big difference between my settings and the Zacuto Shootout settings is that I decided to use the Faithful picture style, while they used the Neutral picture style. I decided to make this change because in every test I have done, I liked the look of skin tones better with the Faithful picture style. According to Canon's picture style documentation on their web site, the Neutral picture style provides the most latitude, while the Faithful picture style provides the most accurate color. Personally I found that the latitude was fairly similar between them with the contrast all the way down at -4 and the saturation halfway down at -2, and that I cared more about the color accuracy than the small differences in latitude at that point. If you have a Canon DSLR and a computer in front of you, you have a couple of options for doing your own A/B tests. You can shoot video of the same thing using multiple picture styles and compare them. You can also shoot RAW images and use the Digital Photo Professional software to apply picture styles to the RAW files. In this way, you can compare the results of multiple picture styles after the fact on the exact same images. I went through several dozen random RAW pictures that I took in a variety of geographical states and lighting situations, and personally I preferred Faithful over Neutral almost every single time. I have learned from reading David Mullen's posts that he has a philosophy of getting the image halfway there in camera, and then getting it the rest of the way there during color grading. To me, the Faithful picture style seems more in keeping with that philosophy, at least based on my personal experience. Your mileage may vary, and I would encourage you to perform your own tests to decide for yourself which picture style(s) you like better. Shoot some footage in different lighting conditions and locations, and try to grade it. See which one gives you the best results for your projects. I haven't played with the third party picture styles too much, but based on some of the tests I've seen, it seems that some of them can do horrible things to skin tones to get a little bit of extra highlight and shadow detail. You only have eight bits per channel, and if you're stretching them too far across the light spectrum, you will necessarily capture less detail on the critical midtones. Again, I would do your own tests before going with what someone else recommended, including me. Best of luck, and happy shooting!

Social Sound Design is a good resource. The design of the site is a question and answer format, where the best answers are voted up to the top.

David Mullen is absolutely right about the current state of digital preservation. This is a problem that not only affects cinematographers and filmmakers, but anyone with high value digital data that should be archived for future generations. In the worst case scenario, major solar flares or EMP pulses could wipe out an untold amount of digital data. I wish someone would come up with a device that could use film as a digital storage medium. Obviously it would be expensive to use (film isn't cheap) and you would only be able to write to the film once. The upshot is that filmmakers, businesses, hospitals, governments, and anyone else with important data could archive it long term and it would survive a hypothetical "digital dark ages". If such a device existed, you could back up any sort of digital project or information in such a way that it would be able to survive far longer than computer tape backups or continual hard drive transfers. Just save your digital film in a really simple and universal file format, and archive the bits onto celluloid. Decades later, you could either transfer the film again using traditional optical processes, or read it back in digitally and encode it again to a new piece of film, or whatever the best technology is at that time. If you stick with simple file formats and store it with instructions, it should still be easy to read into the future provided that society doesn't entirely collapse. There are a lot of dead file formats from decades past, but most of those were obscure to begin with. Barring a major catastrophe, I'd be surprised if we as a society can't read TIFF and WAV files in 100 years. Any decent computer programmer should be able to convert raw pixel and sound data into the format du jour if the archival format is documented properly. I imagine such a system could be implemented on 35mm film, but the picture area would end up looking kind of like a high resolution QR code, or the data from the SDDS or Dolby Digital sections on the edge of the film. Error correction would need to be built in in case you lost a frame and had to do a splice or something. These are all solvable problems. We actually have all of the technology today (DI, film out, encoding digital data in a 2D picture format), I just don't think anyone has put all the pieces together yet.