Sean Cunningham

Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 (2009)

Of course there's also "real" IMAX to consider. That's a helluva lot higher resolution than 4K.

The Film Fact #1 is only comparing spatial resolution still-for-still but the resolution of film and its ability to convey detail isn't realized without the temporal component, because grain isn't fixed unlike the rigid row and column of a digital display or scanner which creates exactly the type of edges our visual system is tuned to key off most ricky-tick. Digital needs even more spatial oversampling to compensate, or it needs to otherwise overcome the limitations of fixed grid sampling. This is the principle behind the unfortunate Aaton Penelope. The 4K scanning employed for 16mm reversal film, in the case of the remastering of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre might seem like bonkers overkill but that's closer to where 35mm scanning needs to head if you're interested in more than just "good enough".

All of the Canons (including the MkIII) will exhibit aliasing and moire to some degree because the 1080P video image is arrived at through line skipping rather than supersampling from the however many megapixel sensor. The built-in codec is also rather marginal with factory settings and Magic Lantern, in addition to RAW, has added higher quality compression of double or more the bit rate if you've got media fast enough. I had to deal with the chroma moire on 7D footage and was able to virtually eliminate it by doing a small median filter to just the chroma while sharpening just the luminance.

Yet you never hear about make up problems, reduced realism in production design or sets with 65mm acquisition or IMAX. The problem with how people look on screen at high resolution has more to do with digital sensors than the number of lines. Just watch SyFy's Face/Off. All the short-hand and tricks of the trade with impressionistic detail that craftsmen have taken for granted for decades goes out the window even with 1080 lines if you're using a digital camera to get there. There's no place to hide anymore. The show does its contestants a very real disservice by never addressing the reality that most of them will never actually work in film and they need to re-learn how to make make-up effects not look absolutely fake. The folks working The Walking Dead have the cards stacked in their favor, essentially, given it's a Super 16mm show. Most anyone else, if it doesn't look absolutely real to the naked eye it doesn't look real on screen. But the simple fact of resolution isn't the enemy of make up artists and production designers. Take the resolving power weilded in the close-ups for something like, say, The Master. That's a lot more than 4K equivalent lines there yet it was jaw droppingly amazing to behold. Arri (and previously Aaton) seem to be the only manufacturer acknowledging this phenomenon.

Five feet is very close to be watching a television. Didn't your mom ever warn you about that, David? Notice on the graph above though, that is to be expected. At 5' you start to see the benefits of 4K over 1080P on a 50" set. But I'll bet you weren't looking at that 4K set from 5' away in a livingroom presentation type scenario. That was a demo which, by design is going to show what they're selling on their terms. Even in a typical LA apartment or cracker-box West Side bungalo that's close. 5' would be like sitting on the edge of a couch, with only a small coffee table and slim path between you and the screen. Perhaps that's why these things are, if you listen to some pitches, selling quite well in Asia but while I've seen closet-sized livingrooms in LA I don't think these are quite the norm and something closer to the 10' would be closer to average. Get out to the 'Burbs or out of SoCal where folks other than millionaires can own real houses and I'm sure of it.

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The public is interested in size more than pixels. The most common sizes sold has more to do with cost, I'd say. If you could buy an 85+" set for what common 40-55" sets are going for there would be a lot more giant sets out there which, ironically, would allow more people to actually enjoy 1080 content. 1080 content is wasted on most sets in common living room viewing situations as it is because of the most common sizes. People aren't watching from a couple feet away like a computer monitor or demo at a tradeshow or consumer electronics showroom, they're watching from across a room, 6-10' away. 4K is inevitable because folks like Sony and others selling the hardware are simply going to keep applying pressure at the consumer level hoping that this trickles up, I guess. They're going to keep selling people stuff they don't need or care about to create a foregone conclusion that theatrical and motion picture production simply must be done at 4K or higher and finished at 4K, which isn't standard right now. 4K on ~50" sets in typical living room scenarios is the equivalent of Sony selling consumers on magic beans. They don't know any better but if they're successful that will force everyone else who should know better to get in line. Somehow consumers aren't supposed to be able to tell every source for HD content is compressed all to hell but they're craving more pixels? Sales and marketing hogwash.

Your "color grading made easier" segment is irrelevant to the issue of 4K, other than greater stress on the data pipeline and increased cost which is why it's still not the norm for even huge tentpole pictures to be finished in 4K. This begs the question, if $150M+ productions aren't uniformly or even predominantly finishing in 4K why is the prosumer, regional or independent being sold so hard on it?

It's likely the "full range" setting. I forget now if Canon shoot full-range or broadcast range but I'd set it to broadcast and see if that does a better job. You also need to be mindful of your color management within something like After Effects because the video is natively at a different gamma than your computer's display and in a different color space (rec709 versus sRGB). You can ask AE to "compensate" or treat the values as-is with respect to your working color space and then you manually adjust the footage to look appropriate.

Comparing anamorphic to Super 35 (or FF35 for that matter) is often limited to their horizontal FOV context but it's really the difference in vertical FOV that matters in this case, no? Because anamorphic uses the full sensor/negative height you're always closer to a subject with anamorphic, at a closer focus distance, than you would be on the same lens in a Super 35/APS-C situation. DOF is usually a factor when filming people and this has more of a vertical context. Once you're framed vertically for a CU or MCU or Medium shot your extra width becomes more of an aesthetic concern than a technical one. Anamorphic 35mm is effectively a larger format than FF35 if you're masking the spherical footage to a "scope" aspect ratio. I think that aspect is largely overlooked when folks try to decipher its aesthetic.

You don't need CG to remove the wire, you likely don't even need a clean plate. Importing the clip, scene setup and configuring the output render settings would all likely take longer than the business of removing the wire in AfterEffects.

The trailer just (or mostly) represents but one of the three looks presented in the film. It should be interesting, though I'm guessing the progression from square-ish to wide is more for narrative continuity than a realistic representation of cinema through time.

It's called CGI ;) This may be this year's Life of Pi. Prime Focus has a little demo of their 3D conversion technique with some Gravity footage on their website as well.

And you don't have to throw a stone very far to find people who will, quite strongly, assert that most of these films are terrible, or failures, or every negative description I've read hurled at Only God Forgives. Not saying I'm one of them (though there are a few), but I'm stating a truth here. And a lot of them can back that opinion up with something less indefensibly subjective than "it sucked."

Sorry, but you're going to have to do better than "because I said so." It did not have a poorly developed story. It had a very simple story that was very easy to follow. All I read is opinion that doesn't jive with the fact of my experience or any meaningful examples or dissection to back any part of it up. What's repetitive and failing is the repeated rhetoric without substance falsely credited as criticism. ITT very wordy youtube comment hating.

Again. Story is not script. Dialog is not story. The number of pages are entirely irrelevant. Dialog is what pads the length of a script, most of it saying nothing of consequence. I'm sure there's a mumblecore forum around here somewhere though with a writer-centric view of the filmmaking process. Until we humans evolve to have greater motivations that love, hate, revenge, greed, etc. then I reject the notion that a "simple" revenge plot is somehow low grade storytelling. Yes, we've seen it before, like everything else. By your own judgement Yojimbo is a bad film. It has no compelling dialog. None of Leone's masterpieces do either, or most of the Kurosawa films that I've seen, all of which can be reduced to simple stories based on basic, human motivations. The story was there. Simple and human, like what you'll find in a majority of the best films ever made, especially the classics. Personally, I prefer complex, compelling visuals to a writer's attempt to be clever by making a simple story more complicated than it needs to be. Filling a page with needless exposition that will ultimately affect the audience less than a carefully constructed held frame or series of images.

Thanks for posting this.

And I don't believe that at all. There is no evidence of this based on previous films or listening to the director himself talk about filmmaking and storytelling. The fact that a solid story is present there, beneath the stylish means of telling the story, is evidence enough. It is only the disregard or unawareness of the story that's there with its very easy to follow characters that would create such a theory, IMO. There was purpose to the visuals. They were not random. That's why I reject any comparison of this film to Lynch as rather lazy, pedestrian film commentary. NWR isn't throwing in imagery of young boys in phallic Venetian masks hopping around out of the blue. The visuals and odd circumstances are all related to character. They're not an artificial, disconnected layer of aesthetic meant to provoke an emotional response without a direct connection to either the story or character. His influences have no regard for plot. If you want to see what that's really like take a look at maybe NWR's greatest influence, the collective works of Kenneth Anger. Anger's Lucifer Rising is his favorite film. That is what a disregard for plot looks like. Look at Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos. You will see many of the visual motifs seen in NWR's films but, thankfully, he tempers this influence with a very solid underlying story.

Oh, because I saw it mentioned more than once in this thread... Getting ahold of an old 1.33x anamorphic adapter like the Century Optics, Optex and Panasonic LA7200 is going to cost you. These will run you anywhere from $1K for the Century/Optex to as high as $1500-1800 for the LA7200. They're being used and sold to DSLR shooters because they turn native 16:9 720P/1080P footage into 2.36:1 "scope". That's how I use my Century Optics and why I got it. These older adapters originally designed to squeeze a 16:9 image onto a 4:3 DV frame may or may not come down some in price as we go into 2014 as both Letus and SLR Magic are introducing similar but updated products designed specifically for today's shooters, ideally working at faster stops and offering higher resolution with close focus functionality. For instance, my Century Optics can offer a passable image at f/2.8 on a 24mm lens but isn't sharp until nearly f/4 at 35mm prior to using an achromat (Tokina +0.4 doublet). The SLR Magic is sharp at f/2.8 on a 35mm and still usable at f/2 on a 35mm prior to sharpening up with an achromat. At 25mm they're stating reasonable sharpness at T0.95 with their hyper prime.

The original Magic Bullet Suite did the best transformation from interlaced DV footage to 24P, with filtering to help smooth reduced color sampling and DV artifacting, leveraging the slight increase in temporal sampling to the spatial field. That was its original design before it became a color correction tool or, more specifically, a means for folks to just apply a pre-made LUT to their footage. This would likely provide the cleanest input to something like InstantHD or other specialized up-sampling tools. That said, everything that Magic Bullet did/does in this regard is possible through the basic AfterEffects interface. That's how Stu prototyped and created the recipe for what would eventually become the product for sale. Somewhere I even have this recipe on an old exabyte backup tape. Sticking with on-the-cheap, a recent suite of tools that could make the Magic Bullet like pre-processing redundant is the Windmotion package. It's a set of tools designed around a collection of freeware Windows image processing (avisynth). It started out in a similar vane as Magic Bullet, as a means to synthesize that which is no longer in 4:2:0 AVCHD footage from DSLRs, creating high quality interpolation back to 4:4:4 sampling. Since then he's added scaling techniques and shown some impressive 1080P -> 4K results. http://snovidenie.com/ ...it might be worth checking out. Some very effective 60i (and 50i) to 24P work was done before Panasonic rendered that effort as pointless with their introduction of a proper DV camera for the independent filmmaker with the DVX100, during the DV format's swan song.

They have the option of doing that when they fake it but this means that they will often be forced to un-couple the flare from its source in the eye they're having to fake, which could cause odd shimmering or other strangeness. If you were to actually photograph a flaring light source in deep depth with an anamorphic system it would most likely create what appeared to be a "V" shaped structure pointing away from the view (if there were obvious areas of frame representing closer depth at the same screen height as the flare). Because the structural center of a flare will be over its illumination source in a strict two-dimensional relationship, for both eye. That means, in stereo terms, it's at the depth of whatever is causing it.

You can really tell the difference in the episodes directed by David Slade. There are so many shots that you'd think a normal producer would have been flipping out over because of how dark he lets most of the frame go.

I honestly don't understand the controversy here. Only God Forgives has an easy to understand, revenge-based plot. The characters I also found easy to read. Underneath the visuals is a very straight forward, almost conventional story the likes of which you might see in the Western or Samurai genre. Revenge is a universal, human theme that's found in both. Granted, there are some ambiguous motivations here, regarding Gosling's ultimate subversion of his mother's agenda and self-fulfilling prophecy but it's easy enough to come to a likely conclusion, also a universal human theme: Guilt. Gosling's character killed his father, either to legitimately protect her or through manipulation. It has a lot to do with why he's in Bangkok. The mother character is a monster that he feels love and loyalty to while at the same time knowing what she is. He carries the guilt of what he's done for her. Too many conflate "story" with "dialog" and/or "character development" with "exposition". Story is not script is not dialog. I believe most critics, and most viewers, simply cannot deal with a normal visual narrative anymore that shows and doesn't tell much less the extra layer of symbolic or abstract imagery related to Gosling's character and his internal conflict. They watch Inception and pat themselves on the back for feeling smart when ultimately the whole thing is explained to them through exposition so transparently meant for the audience that only breaking the fourth wall would have completed the primer experience more completely. Several of the more abstract moments in Only God Forgives would otherwise be classic foreshadowing sequences if they were bookended by coded scenes depicting the sleep cycle. The fluid melding of scenes both actual and internal to Gosling's character is just too much for viewers in need of constant prompting for how to feel or how to interpret what they're seeing. Is it really important to know why the inspector unwinds after a hard day's work of dishing out justice with some pop karaoke at a local gay bar? No. But the film establishes him as a man of ritual and this is part of his ritual. It's all there if you just watch. Watch and process what you're seeing based on the assumption of a decent cultural, social repertoire to pull from. But some just throw up their hands and then can't, or don't, follow the obvious story unfolding in front of them once encountering a challenge to their expectations. It's sad. It didn't help that so many viewers walked into this with only Drive as their introduction to the filmmaker and that being his most commercial, most traditional narrative in form and structure (that I've seen). If they'd seen and appreciated Valhalla Rising and Bronson they might have been more prepared.

I've worked post on a few stereo projects, both native and conversion (T23D, Meet the Robinsons). What I found is the human brain really wants to make sense of what you're looking at. It does an amazing job of filtering and averaging out certain discrepancies from each eye, particularly if they're specular in nature. It has to do this for natural human vision after all. Strong anamorphic streaks would create an interesting depth dilemma. Placing them at the depth of their source could look very cool or it could look very weird and ultimately will create problems elsewhere in the frame, eventually, where they will overlap objects at conflicting depths.