Michael Rodin

Given the budget, 4K is out of question. With some time and luck, you could probably find a decent used graphics PC monitor (like certain Eizo models) that will display HD. Not sure about plasmas as they all seem to have auto black adjustment which renders them useless for grading. Maybe there are ones where you can turn it off. Will need a LUT box. It's possible to buy an actual grading monitor for cheap, but it'll be SD CRT, likely with a near-dead tube, likely not better than a good PC monitor because of that. And it goes without sayind that the monitor must be calibrated for '709 color.

What FFD would such a camera have? I mean equivalent light path, taking refraction index of prism into account. 120, 150mm? Now imagine, say, a 14mm T1,3 wide angle with a 150mm backfocus. Plus sharp and apochromatic. Then, a T3 10x zoom. It must be possible, but really, I mean, really expensive. So you end up with $2-3-4 million camera package that your customers (rentals) can sell only for its colorimetery. Which is the single most important thing for a motion picture camera, but hagglers (sorry, production companies) don't understand it. They won't do it. Too expensive in R&D and not marketable.

If a DoP choses to shoot on video for some reason (I can't imagine anything other than light sensitivity though) - no problem. But much more often it's a producers decision. And it sucks, because a) it shows hagglers are more and more involved in technica/artistic things which inevitably impacts quality and film is at risk of disappearing because some ignorant hucksters who've been only laundering money before somehow consider film to be obsolete. You're confusing yourself with the notion of "different tools with different looks". Digital cinema isn't something really progressive, it's, well, television tech trying to imitate the negative-positive process. Other than high sensitivity, there are no advantages. Latitude? It's comparable to film in numbers, but you can't use the extremes of video characteristic curve - you need to add a "roll off" in processing (in-camera or post) and elevate the exposure enough above the noise floor for image to look natural, all while sacrificing potential stops of latitude. Film has a linear response plus smooth toe&shoulder "dy default". Resolution? You don't care for it if it's sharp, i.e. has a good contrast at needed frequencies - which negative, both 16 and 35, does. See angular resolution of the eye and MTF. Color? The most complicated thing. Modern color neg has purer color dyes than any single-sensor camera. Look at Fuji Eterna spectral graphs. It has no problem reproducing any color video "see", plus hues that video blends and doesn't distinguish. Color saturates naturally of film - on video, lighter = more saturated, which's unnatural and just looks wrong. So if 100% of productions would be on film, DoPs will be still able to create images at least as subjectively good, and no movie will lose any production value. Quite the opposite. If it will be 100% digital though...

Are you going to have scenes set at night or in tunnels?

By the way. When everyone was talking about "death" of film (remember Fuji discontinuing Eterna, Kodak's bankrupcy) Yusov kept telling us, literally, "Film's gonna be back". Now we see he was right.

Not that long ago. He died in 2013 and was involved in Russian cinema and education till his last days. He was an active supporter of motion picture film and insisted cinematography students should be taught on film. Resolution and S/N figures have gone up quite a bit, surely. But a much more important thing - colorimetery - generally hasn't advanced much from the days of Varicam-27 and Sony F23. Alexa is an exception, a big step forward but hopelessly inferior to Vision, Eterna/Reala or any modern stock in terms of color reproduction. Depends on your priorities. If you're after a flashy sharp image (suppose you're not) and what matters to you is detail and cleaniness, then video is already better for you. If you want flexibility working with color and contrast and generally follow realism (I mean, for example, Yusov's realism, not the modern "a la documentary" fad), video will indeed be limiting.

Well, the person whom Deakins himself considered the No 1 cinematographer was a big digital sceptic and found even hi-end video tech very crude and limiting. And it wasn't because of Yusov being anti-progress or whatever: you can't call an inventor of a remote-controlled crane head and numerous other innovative devices anti-progress.

The remake's director is an owner of a large post house, a known CG fan with an advertising background - what do you want? :)

You got it right - you do an over/under exposure test on a neutral gray object. Better use a grayscale chip chart though.

It must have been MKBK (Moscow Cine Equipment Design Bureau). The mount was developed for a later type Konvas MOS camera - the one without a turret. It was "Конвас KCP1-2M". It's one of the sturdiest mounts out there, maybe the sturdiest apart from 65/70mm types - made with anamorphics and zooms in mind. Much more solid than earlier OCT18. By the way, OCT19 is an unofficial name. It comes from the mount being first described as a part of a ОСТ-19-144-83 standart for a cine camera bayonet mount (info from Olex Kalinichenko). OCT18 is also kind of a slang name.

Directors like to talk about some distinct "look" of film, which they usually associate with flaws of old color neg emulsions - especially in post-Soviet countries, where classic movies were mostly shot on awfuly bad Svema and Tasma film. But for camera and post crew (at least for those I work with) the point of film is not getting a "look", it's getting a more natural image. For us film isn't a "different tool" or "brush" or whatever, it's just better, plain and simple. Sometimes, on a stylized picture, film is chosen for grain and texture (which they easily get on pushed Kodak '19). But many DoPs pursue realism - I don't mean the modern "realism" style created by amateurs, I mean Vadim Yusov's realism - and film allows them to create an image with more veracity, reality to it, because of how it handles color contrasts and saturation. You can't match it on video. Yet you can get a super-clean, similar to video, image with compressed highlights by shooting a very dense negative. Vision3 is just more flexible - to an extent you can get any style of image from it given enough light, at least any style video is capable of. And it still retains the properties of color negative, which you can make more visible if you want. As to pictures of the past looking different, there are many reasons to it, and if we take the last 30-40 years, the film stocks will be one of the least important. First of all, film lighting has changed quite a lot - a very lengthy topic to discuss. Then they lit for proper contrast on print, now they light for a DI grade, I could say.

Don't confuse the aperture size (Super-35/Academy/Silent) with the image circle diameter (Ø 30 or 35 mm). Different apertures have different diagonals which have to fit (and be correctly centered) inside the lens' image circle. "S35+" is not a format or some special term, it just means the image cirlce is more than 31,4 mm in diameter. 5. Why the image coverage of 45‑120mm on S35 is 33.34 mm and others 31.4 mm? If they could design all their zooms to cover a Ø 33-35 mm circle, they'd likely do it. But it's harder to do with other zooms as they're wider, thus a more radical retrofocus design, must be more difficult to correct.

A CCU, sync generator, setup unit and NTSC encoder (they usually came as output boards for a CCU, at least in later systems) should be enough. The real problems start with obtaining tubes.

Ideally you'd want a 1" plumbicon studio camera, but they're extremely rare. Newer hi-end 2/3" cameras like Ikegami HL79 or HL95 or Sony BVP330 would give a similar image. Many had star filters fitted to filter wheels, some even came stock with them. 1/2 Pro Mist is almost invisible unless you strongly overexpose large parts of the frame and it doesn't soften the image much. I'd go as dense as Pro Mist 2 or 3 on close-ups. Or a full White Frost plus Classic Soft 2. Are you shooting on a soundstage? How much power is available for lighting?

It's not as bad as F900 or Red One, of course. Where highlights can look noticeably unnatural is on skin given enough overexposure. And if skin meters at +2...3 it's usually where a kicker ("modelling" light I'd say in Russian, seems not really equivalent terms) hits - often at angle that makes skin more specular to camera, making it all even worse... And the giveaway is, IMO, mostly not clipping (which, again, happens not so early on Alexa) but highlight desaturation which looks artificial - because it is artificial: in video saturation rises with exposure, it's clever processing which tries to compensate. It's a subjective thing anyway, so I don't blame video much for slightly more blown practicals and windows, but when it comes to portraits, viewer will notice it, consciously or not. As to DR stops - well, we both know these figures can't really be compared between manufacturers as there's no standart for DR measurement. With film, there's density range and gamma which can be precisely measured. How many stops it gets you depends on how much of its curve's nonlinear part you can scan and use. With digital, you have properly measured signal to noise and you decide how much noise you can tolerate to get your DR. So the only real comparison is a test which's a very individual thing - too much variables, esp. with film (exposure, scanning, LUT/matrix, etc).

Triplets? What's wrong with double Gauss? :)

Yedlin's test doesn't show mid-to-low-contrast portraits with highly overexposed regions, like very hot wide kickers, rim lights, etc, as it's where Alexa will scream video. And what can been seen in the test already shows the usual weird oversaturation of highlights corrected by what seems luma-saturation curves and soft clip - which has made them flatter and less textured than on film. How high-key portraits look can be a deal breaker. A recent example - 2015 Russian TV series Quiet Flows the Don shot by Michael Suslov, RGC on Kodak V3 stocks in S16 - is half made of excellent high-key portraiture with broad hot kickers. Would have looked burnt and lit had it been shot on video - looks rich on 7203. Then, how film scans were processed remains a question. What can be said for sure, no special highlight recovery was done. Kodak V3-through-Arriscan has significantly more overexposure latitude than used in the test from what I've seen - and I tend to shoot a dense negative (1/2-1 stop over). Speaking about lenses - Mr Gourmaud touched the subject in the beginning. While they don't influence colorimetery and contrast properties as much as stock or video camera, they do make a difference. Shooting HD on F900 and then F23, I found fast spherical Elite brand (ex-USSR Ekran bureau) T1.5 primes to give the most natural, I'd say (as the word cinematic is overused :)), image. Compared to Digiprimes, they're lower contrast with more veiling glare but very little blooming, which allows you to stop down more for the same exposure and see more and smoother highlight detail. They were also soft wide open but I liked the softness of a Classic Soft 1/2 at T2 (their sharpest stops were 2.8-4) more than the softness of spherical abberations at T1.5. Slight blooming by the way can be a good thing with video - can help conceal clipping. For that reason I never removed "white" diffusion (Schneider White Frost) from an F900, the more "clippy" camera. So the old(er) glass is more about contrast than softness I'd say. Although the colorimetery of older-techology lenses is generally worse; old coatings introduce color shifts which have nothing special about them.

The way colors saturate (depending on degree of under/overexposure) on film, which looks very natural to eye, hasn't been reproduced on video so far, and it's an extremely difficult engineering task. Then, to have equivalent overexposure latitude and highlight handling on video, you have to severely underexpose it and apply a very smooth rolloff in post - and have your shadows hit the noise floor and look like crap. So no, you can't fake it, only get somewhat close with G&E virtuosity, filtration and careful production design. Concerning Red's 8K camera. Resolution has nothing to do with image quality as long as it looks sharp on projection. For example, last year I chose Kodak 7203/07 over Alexa XT based on pure image quality, even though resolution of a 2K scan was lower. K's make no difference, it's 1) colorimetery 2) latitude, which are responsible for a good image.

There has been a prominent style change in cinematography, for sure. Yes it's inevitable as Mr Mullen said, styles always change; this time it's a less sophisticated, less artistic, lazier stylistic that we're shifting towards. You can see it more in cheap comedy or lo-fi drama movies, but it affected A-list pictures too - maybe because producers/directors have accepted it as a 'modern look' I'm talking about how film lighting has changed, for example. It seems they forgot about fill light today. If it looks harsh to them, they diffuse their key 'till it's fixed -forgetting about the No1 most important thing - contrast. I just couldn't help noticing the sloppy attitude to contrast that comes with the "digital" mentality of "it's OK if it fits the dynamic range". You couldn't be so careless when limited with a very high gamma of print stock and no contrast/gamma control in color timing. And greatest DPs of the past were masters of contrast, they used their G&E arsenal to very subtly control tonal distribution in frame. You had to thing how dense everything's going to be on a print and carefully place every lit detail on your chosen stock's H&D curve. Quite similar to the zone system of still photographers. Actually, this approach is heritage of B&W era, connected to the established system of B&W "precision lighting" (Russian term, not sure about the English equivalent). How many DPs can freely use precision lighting on B&W these days? It's close to a lost art. Not that I'm good at this art, and I don't suggest looking down on colleagues shooting the "modern" way - more like looking up at Yusov, Hall, Toland, Rerberg instead. And sadly there isn't much to replace the "old school". The hyper-realist lighting style is temporary, as it plain sucks. You can't just imitate sunlight, at least because an eye doesn't have a H&D curve of film or a gamma curve of a video camera. Then, production design generally tended to more harmonized color palettes with coarser, I'd say, textures in the classic days. Combined with softer optics (more lens diffsion and less microcontrast in old lenses), it resulted in a detailed but not overloaded background. Films used to be shot at generally higher light levels too, which gave more contrast control.

Are you going to rent it out? M18 will certainly be a more popular rental item plus more durable and more&better ballast options. For myself I'd buy a Joker, seems to have a cleaner beam with a Zoom beamer and more flexible (open face, PAR, bare bulb aka Bug).

Cable gets abused in location work, so we prefer heavier H07RN-F. Titanex brand is popular for both stingers/extension and HMI feeder cables. Of cheaper cable, General Cable (Italy) and Elpar (Poland) seem to be OK, haven't had problems so far. Look at the cross section of the cable, not the amp rating, which can be sometimes, well, "optimistic". 2,5mm2 is the smallest gauge used in film here in Europe and more than enough for 16A. As to connectors, on small lights we sometimes leave factory Schuko plugs, but almost everything (except 250 and 400A runs) uses CEE.

If you can't get it with one filter, use two. Or more. And if you want to apply a lot of correction to a big light (especially a PAR) it's better to add a couple spaced gel frames than a single dense gel. The so-called LED gels shift tint, not only color temp. They're for daylight LEDs only, on HMIs they can give magenta color casts.

Your HMI's color temp will be roughly 180 mired (= 1 000 000 / Kelvin CT). Then you find out the mired shift of a certain CTO and add it. Or subtract if it's CTB. More mired - less Kelvin - warmer Less mired - more Kelvin - colder

Soy Cuba must have been shot on Soviet panchro negative, KN2 I guess, which is quite far away in grain structure from '22, and Urusevskij could have asked for special processing. It was also 35mm shot mostly on a 9.8mm Kinoptik wide angle.

And don't have that "keep rolling" and "don't cut" bulls-t with film either.