Art Adams

I'm late to this party, but I have an opinion. :) At the age of 12 I became aware of composition thanks to British television and film. At that time (the 1970s) I was often able to pick out the nationality of a film within a couple of shots based on lens usage, and my favorite TV shows of the era were British science fiction TV shows. Wide angle shots with lots of depth and perspective were common, and when I shot my own home movies I always favored wide angle lenses. Over time I came to appreciate other focal lengths and styles of composition, but wide angle lenses were my first (compositional) love. If you're like me, you go through stages where you prefer one style of working for a while, and then you switch to something else. At each stage, you learn something and incorporate it into your repertoire. When I was a freelance DPI didn't always use wide angle lenses, but I certainly wasn't afraid of them thanks to the fact that I completely overdid them when I was younger. I've heard people say that they find, say, 50mm to be a completely boring focal length. I disagree. There are no boring focal lengths. It's all in what you do with them. I've done a lot of stills work with the 50mm and captured some amazing images.

I think there was another camera company saying that about our cameras at one point. It's just a very expensive OLPF with a custom roll-off. We do something similar now with Signature Primes.

ARRI does not put a diffusion filter into its OLPF, but the design of an OLPF has a huge impact on the look of an image. We spend a LOT of money on ours. There's a balance between eliminating detail and preserving it, and every manufacturer makes different choices. There is some sharpening applied to ProRes material. As ProRes is compressed and often ends up being broadcast, it needs a little something or it appears soft. I believe the level can be adjusted in the Mini and the Amira (not sure about the SXT), although I wouldn't as our engineers tend to be pretty smart about such things. Any sharpening applied to ARRIRAW is metadata only and can be removed. A default amount is typically applied during format conversions. I remember learning about this with the Sony F900 years ago. We all though HD would be sharp enough without any additional sharpening, but that only worked for film outputs. For broadcast, eliminating all sharpening yielded a very soft image. Setting detail at -40 SAU (Sony Arbitrary Units) added just enough sharpening to create a great-looking HD and SD image for TV.

In older lenses there's some play to the aperture ring. If you always open it all the way and close down to the desired stop, you err on the side of overexposure, which is easier to correct than if you go the other way and underexpose.

I see some fairly noticeable differences. I think part of the problem is that the setup is being lit with what looks to be LED light, so you're not going to see very good color reproduction. The patches on the chart might look sort of normal, but skin tone has a much richer and varied response that's likely being lost with the lighting. The Cooke is much lower contrast (I can see more texture in the chart) than the Sony. The bokeh is also nicer, in my opinion. The Cooke's distortion is varied across the frame while the Sony shows a touch of barrel. Chromatic aberration is higher on the Cooke.