Jason Rodriguez

When is Superman slated for release? Are there any other "independent" films coming out earlier shot on the Panavision, i.e., like some of the early independent films that beat SW EPII such as "Up Michigan", "Nicholas", etc.?

Hey Phil Like everybody else, I don't think it looks THAT bad. What really seems like happend is that you went to telecine and got that really flat "dailies" look, you know, basically looks like somebody did a one-light, and overall it's pretty conservative, not a scene-to-scene correction with power windows, etc. Now I don't know about the "kissing scene", but I did do a slight adjustment, like Dominic here, on the first scene, blowing out the highlights a little more and crushing the shadows a bit using a curves adjustment in Photoshop. Also taking out that overall red tone too using color-balance. The Point is, shooting flat isn't necessarily a bad thing, what is bad is if you shoot flat and then transfer flat when you were wanting a more high-con look. And also I'm sure you discovered, and many other more experienced people that me have mentioned here on this thread, shooting "flat" doesn't necessarily mean shooting low-con and then trying to crank up the look in post-that can cause problems as well if the contrast isn't inherently in the scene. Okay, I'll shut up now :)

You're right, it's an extremely silly and immature comment, but I don't see the need to start a flame war over it either. Hopefullly he was just upset or mad when he wrote it, or else he's going to be in for a very rude wake-up call.

BTW Greg, If you're interested in high-end cinematography with reasonable rental rates, just wait for the Kinetta. At around the same list price as a Varicam, it should be fairly affordable to rent. Not only that, but it uses 16mm film lenses which you should be able to get much cheaper than video lenses. Of course they won't be digiprimes, but then again, Zeiss Super Speeds, etc. are pretty nice lenses nonetheless

Turning Sharpening/Edge Enhancement OFF!!!

Just curious, are you taking the footage to Bono Labs in Virginia? If so, then the footage looks pretty good of the Cineglyph, a lot like what I've seen from other Cintel products (it's based off a Cintel design from what I can tell). Overall I was pretty happy with what I got back, but if you're still interested, have them (if you're using Bono Labs) send you some samples like they did for me.

The only "DV" cameras I would even consider next to film would be the DVX100 and SDX900. If you're not shooting on those, then by all means, shoot on film.

Hmm . . . seems a little cheaper to me, most Varicam packages I've seen are around $3K a week for a simple package without any "deals". You want a nice set of Cine-Primes and all the fix'ns though, and be prepared for at least $7-8K per week with the F900/3.

Has anybody else here played with the 55mm filters? I really like the diffusion effects you can get out of them, and again, they render pretty fast on a G5 with After Effects (and work in 16-bit RGB too). Of course you have to balance the fact that this non-real-time workflow can take days to render, especially at 1920x1080. Even if it took 1 second to render per frame, then we're talking a 24 hour render for 1 hour of footage/film (this is per processor or machine, so render farms not included, but that of course increases the $$$).

Sorry, here's the link. It's under fact #3

Just curious, there's a "facts about film and electronic capture" on the Kodak website that I was flipping through, and saw at the bottom of point #3 where they were talking about the creative flexibility that film gives you, that motion-picture stock has 20-stops of dynamic range. Hmm . . . okay, so where's this "20-stops", and how to I take advantage of it? Seems like when I overexpose 18% grey by more than 4-5 stops things start looking pretty white. On the 20-stop scale that means I should have another 15-stops under 18% grey?? 20 stops means it can get a 1,000,000:1 lighting ratio-I don't think so. Just curious, I mean I love it when Sony comes out and claims some outlandish stuff, but that doesn't mean there's some mis-information or fantastic statistics being thrown around on the other side too. BTW, if somebody knows where this 20-stops went, and how to extract it, I'd love to know.

For uncompresssed capture to disk out of the Varicam, I'd take a hard look at the RaveHD from Specsoft (Ramona Howard is the contact there). It has a lot of nice features including the ability to remove the extra frames from the Varicam's output, so it's very easy to get off-speed effects or true 24p digitizing (instead of trying to fish frames out of the 60p sequence).

I believe that the "beta" of the Kinetta will be available at some specific rental houses around the country starting sometime in November. Right now Jeff's still waiting on chips from Altasens who have delayed the shipment of the 3560 that the current version of the Kinetta's based on. Based on this information, I'm not too sure the "beta" will be a "free" try-out; frankly IMHO that seems a little too good to be true since there's a lot of risk involved when you have such a wide beta release. Might be a cheaper rental rate, but I'm not sure about that, so don't quote me on that one. But either way, the Kinetta should be available for rental sometime around the November/December mark.

BTW, how are they planning on recording in "data" mode? I don't see a data connection on there anywhere, other than BNC's-in other words, no connection that I would call computer/IT friendly.

BTW, some friends from film school and another very good co-worker/dp saw OUATIM at the theatre, and didn't know it was HD until I told them! Pre-assumed assumptions are a big part of what I feel makes the digital versus film argument moot in many cases. If it looks good, it looks good. To say good=film, bad=HD is stupid, and frankly your only response to the two different formats would probably be subcioncious until I told you one way or the other, and then you'd say "oh yah, it looked bad because it was shot on HD," or if it was shot on film and looked bad, "Gosh, they must have been a sucky DP."

There are two cameras coming besides the offerings from Ikegami and JVC that will use the same chip as the Kinetta, but they're just camera heads, there's no "intelligence" on them. Basically they're just PCB's attached to the chip that funnel off the 12-bit RAW data from the camera head across Camera-Link to a framegrabber which then uses software to process the images. The potential is there to have the same image quality as the Kinetta since the A/D converter is on the Altasens chip, so everybody's playing with the same toys, but in a much more round-about way with these "dumb" camera-heads. One thing to watch out for is de-bayer mosaic algorithms. There is a world of difference between a good and bad one.

From what I understand, it's not going to stream out at 60fps, but 24 or 30fps, making something shot at 60fps slow-motion. You're right, there's currently no standard for 60fps 1080p footage.

The Altasens is true 1920x1080/60p.

Were they going direct from the monitor to the film-out, or were they going through a color-correction stage first? From what I gathered from the AC article, they were overlighting faces so that they had something to work with in post, so that grain wouldn't be an issue when they tried to color-correct the image and the faces were in the dark, not that the HD monitor and film-outs didn't correlate.

Hey David, Is that "Jason" me?? I hope I'm not labeling myself as anti-film, if anything I'm making plans right now to shoot my next "film" on film (S16), and do a DI from a 10-bit uncompressed Quicktime source bypassing tape compression (direct from Telecine into Mac and from there onto hard-drives to my Mac). Actually I'm quite excited, it looks like it's going to be a very neat process, and with uncompressed 10-bit, I should have exceptional quality, especially with the new Vision 2 stocks. So please don't think I'm anti-film. On the other-hand, I do see many advantages to shooting digital, except I'm waiting for the day when you don't have to excuse yourself for opting out with digital than with film-which is the way it seems right now, and I think what spurs a lot of this "film is dead" sentiment. Nobody like to feel as though they or their product is "second" class, so naturally you get people on both sides bantering away at the supposed advantages of each format, why one should supersede the other, why one is better, etc., as if shot on film = "high quality", and digitial = "cheap wannabe." I also think that George Lucas had a nice point when he mentioned that people point out the elephant in the living room when it comes to digital's artifacts, but they simply ignore the "elephants" of film, that by film being "first" or "established", it's inherently "more right" or "superior." We can throw around all the objective numbers or subjective statements we want, but in the end, there are simply some things that are inherint with both systems, that depending on which one came first, the other would be somehow offensive. For instance, suppose film came after digital? You'd reached the end of digital's limits, the dynamic range, resolution, etc. Here's film now, more resolution, more dyanamic range, etc. But I bet you'd have Sony, et. al. complaining that until film solved the grain issue (to match digital), that nobody should use film. Film is "dirty", film is "grainy", film can get scratched, you can't see what you're exposing, etc., etc. These are all things we accept because film came first, and as a result, we compare digital to the pluses of film, not the minuses. And why not? Film's been around for 100 years, and we've worked our way around the shortcomings, so why complain. Instead, digital doesn't have the resolution, doesn't have the dyanmic range, doesn't have Marshall Mcluhan's "hot" medium label, etc., etc. I think David you have a very balanced viewpoint towards the whole thing, and that's the way it should be. Digital's getting better, one day it will supersede film, and in the meantime lets do what we can with the tools we've been given, although I will be perfectly honest in that I am biased towards digital, although I think film looks great too (and why I shoot on that also).

Where did you get that figure? I'm sure if you give Plus8Digital a quick phone call you'll see that the F950 is $2,000 per day, and the SRW-5000 is another $2000 per day. And I believe they have a three-day week. BTW, none of this even includes the lenses, that'll be another $1,000 per day for a set of Primes and the Pro35 (and you can't get that from Plus8). Even Bexel wants $1800 per day for the SRW-5000, but I don't believe theirs has the RGB option installed. I'm curious to know what rental facility you got your numbers from, because I might want to use them for the next green-screen shoot I have.

Well said David. BTW, I would like to add one qualifier to the still photography situation. 35mm film is on it's last legs and dying quickly. Practically every journalist/pro-photographer I see that was shooting 35mm is now shooting digital. Also 99% of the pictures I get across the AP or Reuters news wire are now digital, not film. The main place I still see 35mm film cameras are among pros or high-level amateurs who have a lot invested in their film gear and don't feel ready/compelled to make the jump to digital-but it's generally not a quality issue, just more of a convenience/familiarity issue to them. Also I still see a number of film-based photographers are art shows who feel that digital is "low-brow", and by saying their stuff is shot on film they can demand higher pricing. Of course a number of these art photographers are shooting medium format too, I'll get to that next. But I've seen this at a number of art shows with my own eyes, there are 35mm still photographers that when you mention digital, or they see something shot on digital, they immediately knock it down or disparage it as "photoshop cheating", "consumer point-and-shoot", etc. Of course not helping the situation out are digital photographers who are blowing their pictures up beyond the resolution that their cameras can adequately hold without breaking up and resorting to questionable sharpening techniques that do give their pictures a digital "look" to them. They should be shooting medium format, but instead are trying to blow-up their 6-megapixel pictures to 20"x30", or even larger sizes! For most subjects that's just not going to happen! Medium Format is still going because portable digital cameras that can compete with the resolution of MF are just coming to market now (or have been out for no more than a year-tethered MF digital backs don't count), so you're not likely to see photographers who have invested years of work in MF to simply dump their equipment. Although product and catalog photography is mainly digital now, not film, especially when you can buy RGB scanning backs that will go up to 81 megapixels and more!

From what I understand, the chips are on a daughtercard, that's what houses all the chip-specific stuff, so it's like doing a processor upgrade in a Mac G4, you simply swap out the daughter card for a faster pair of chips. Sure your lenses might not be good enough for the higher res, but you will have better chips :)

Does the comments/questions box on the downloads page not work/help? Yah, that's kind of wierd, I'd have thought they'd have an email address up too.

Phil, no need to worry about Quicktime and 10-bit DPX log. Blackmagic has a new free 10-bit RGB 4:4:4 Quicktime codec designed for dual-link cards and for 10-bit Log files. So you can now seemlessly convert your DPX files to Quicktime without wasting space and maintaining the Log profile (AFAIK).