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Hey guys, I'm DP'ing a short film soon and need a little advice. I've not DP'd since exactly a year ago and have stepped away to 2nd AC and trainee in the "real world" so to speak. As such while I'm confident of my abilities on the camera side of things, my lighting experience has been limited to say the least! The script is mostly exterior - the A plot is a man in a car. I was wondering - how should I go about getting a consistent "look"? My plans at the mo are to use two HMI's and fire them at a 12x12 frame w/ two silks to create a big bounce. For closer stuff I made a reflector last year that work really well - it provided a strong eye light (a favorite of mine) while wrapping the subject in light. I've two choices of camera, the Panavision Genesis and the Arri D-21. The D-21 blowout is far more "filmic" and controllable (something I've found the Genesis not to be) but the black are far and away better on the Genesis. I have a lot of experience w/ the D-21 from past shoots, while the Genesis I've only been able to get my hands on a couple times. The D-21 can export LOG-C at 4:4:4 DPX files (no ARRIRAW), but the Genesis can only export REC-709 4:2:2 (no PANALOG), which with me being a post kinda guy is making me lean toward the D-21... but whadda you guys think? For anyone interested, here's the trailer for the short I mentioned, "Loved App" (shot with a Sony F3): If anyone's interested in seeing the full short and providing some critique, I can send the link! Thanks all!

Digital cameras can do some amazing things nowadays considering where they were just even five years ago. One thing I sometimes struggle to understand is how these newer cameras with 13+ stops of dynamic range are actually quantizing that information in the camera body. One thing we know from linear A-to-D quantization is that your dynamic range is a function of the number of bits of the converter chip. A 14-bit ADC can store, at best (and ignoring noise for the moment), 14 stops of dynamic range. However, when we do introduce noise into the mix (sensor, transfer charge, ADC, etc.) and linearity errors, there really isn't 14 meaningful stops of dynamic range. I did a lot of research on pipeline ADCs (which I believe are the correct type used) and the best one I could find, as defined by the measured ENOB (effective number of bits), was the 16-bit ADS5560 ADC from Texas Instruments; it measured an impressive 13.5 bits. If most modern cameras, Alexa especially, are using 14-bit ADCs, how are they deriving 14 stops of dynamic range? I read that the Alexa has some dual gain architecture, but how do you simultaneously apply different gain settings to an incoming voltage without distorting the signal? A pretty good read through regarding this technology can be found at this Andor Technology Learning Academy article. Call me a little skeptical if you will. Not to pick on RED, but for the longest time, they advertised the Mysterium-X sensor as having 13.5 stops (by their own testing). Of course, many of the first sensors were used in RED One bodies, which only have 12-bit ADCs. Given that fact, how were they measuring 13.5 in the real world? Now, with respect to linear to log coding, some cameras are opting for this type of conversion before storing the data on memory cards; the Alexa and cameras that use Cineform RAW come to mind. If logarithmic coding is understood to mean that each stop gets an equal number of values, aren't the camera processors (FPGA/ASIC) merely interpolating data like crazy in the low end? Let's compare one 14-stop camera that stores data linearly and one that stores data logarithmically: In a 14-bit ADC camera, the brightest stop is represented by 8192 code values (16383-8192), the next brighest is represented by 4096 code values (8191-4096), and so on and so forth. The darkest stop (-13 below) is only represented by 2 values (1 or 0). That's not a lot of information to work with. Meanwhile, on our other camera, 14-stops would each get ~73 code values (2^10 = 1024 then divided equally by 14) if we assume there is a 14-bit to 10-bit linear-to-log transform. As you can see here, the brighter stops are more efficiently coded because we don't need ~8000 values to see a difference, but the low end gets an excess of code values when there weren't very many to begin with. So I guess my question is, is it better to do straight linear A-to-D coding off the sensor and do logarithmic operations at a later time or is it better to do logarithmic conversion in camera to save bandwidth when recording to memory cards? Panavision's solution, Panalog, can show the relationship between linear light values and logarithmic values after conversion in this graph: On a slightly related note, why do digital camera ADCs have a linear response in the first place? Why can't someone engineer one with a logarithmic response to light like film? The closest thing I've read about is the hybrid LINLOG Technology at Photon Focus which seems like a rather hackneyed approach. If any engineers want to hop in here, I'd be much obliged--or if your name is Alan Lasky, Phil Rhodes, or John Sprung; that is, anyone with a history of technical knowledge on display here. Thanks.