Interesting Article about Panavision

[K Borowski]

Just go rent a 645 Mamiya, put it on a fluid head and try follow-focus as someone walks in front of the camera, then try it with a 35mm camera. You will throw away 90% of the MF shots because they will not be sharp. Also, my experience with 35mm motion film leads me to believe we're going to see a real shortage of good 1st ACs when these big chips start showing up. It tough to get many shots sharp even on S35, even with a good 1st.

 

Sorry Fran I am going to have to disagree. The close-focusing abilities of bigger lenses might be compromised because the money isn't behind the R&D as much here, but I would say that Super 16mm to 35mm 3-perf is about a stop to a stop and a half of extra stopping down to get comparable depth of field with the same angle of view equivalent lens.

 

So, by extrapolation, there are probably an extra three or four stops you'd have to go down with something like IMAX.

 

They've solved this problem already though. They managed to pull off Dark Knight without a hitch and they are making amazing nature documentaries still with this format.

 

Something more reasonable like 5-perf 65mm (roughly what you're talking about with your stills camera), is probably a reasonable "stop and a half less" depth of field when you are shooting.

 

If you can afford the extra film area, I assume your production can afford an extra stop and a half of light.

 

Outdoors, closeup, yeah, you are going to have to live with less DOF in some instances where you are dealing with wide-open areas where you can't add supplemental light.

 

BUT, these shots tend to be long shots anyway where DOF isn't as much of an issue.

 

 

Haven't seen it yet, but isn't a lot of "Transformers" also shot on IMAX, outdoors? Does anyone notice any objectionably shallow DOF in this film?

[K Borowski]

The point is, I was responding to someone who said they would have to double or triple their lighting package. My point was: not if you can crank up the sensitivity. I shoot at ISO 3200 all the time now, and the quality is amazing. Times are changing, my friends. Don't resist the future. ;)

 

I'm glad you winked at the end.

 

We are in another low quality era, like the '70s where they came out with true-3200 speed color films for still photographers that had grain like cannonballs.

 

I saw color stuff pushed to 64,000 or 100,000.

 

But what is the point?

 

You only need an ASA of 50 to shoot outdoors. You only need 500 to shoot city streets at night.

 

Big numbers are a marketing tool, not a necessity.

 

 

That being said, I have seen low light digital stuff that really is impressive, far better than film is capable of. But it still has objectionable noise that isn't organic like grain.

 

Hell, what's the ISO of the human eye at the point that color vision shuts off?

 

I would say that, better than faster films or chips, the BEST improvement would be further lens research, commonplace F/0.7 lenses, F/1.0 zooms.

 

That would be a far bigger improvement.

[K Borowski]

Like I said, I shoot at ISO 3200 5.6K RAW all the time, so I don't see why Jannard would be unable to make very significant gains in this area with his future CMOS cameras.

 

Ughh, you have bought into marketing hype so much it is getting tiresome. You have to realize, Tom, that every time noise goes up, resolution goes down, right?

 

Same thing is true when you are comparing a 500-speed film stock to a 50-speed one.

 

So unless you actually go in and count blockies, the numbers are irrelevant. The quality of the image is what is important.

 

 

Also, if you use a zoom, quality goes down. If you shoot any other stop than 2-1/2 down from wide-open resolution suffers.

 

This isn't old film fuddy-duddy stuff, it is physics and optics and geometric addition.

 

Every step in the process cuts down on quality, and then you are underexposing the sensor and interpolating and mathematically extrapolationg to try to make up for it.

 

True chip speed is still only, if I recall correctly, in the 200-800 ISO range for HD camcorders.

 

They probably COULD crank up the numbers you can "push" the chip, but they aren't going to because cinematographers are far pickier than still photographers, otherwise I wouldn't see half of the crap I see in the newspaper or on the walls at mall portrait studios.

 

Basically you are using large area (a "vistavision" frame) and the ability to pull severely-underexposed information out of digital sensors with sophisticated interpolation algorhythms, to compensate for improper exposure.

 

 

I guess there is a fundamental disagreement here: You want to make cinematography easier & cheaper; we want to make cinematography BETTER.

[Francis Kuhn]

Sorry Fran I am going to have to disagree. The close-focusing abilities of bigger lenses might be compromised because the money isn't behind the R&D as much here, but I would say that Super 16mm to 35mm 3-perf is about a stop to a stop and a half of extra stopping down to get comparable depth of field with the same angle of view equivalent lens.

 

So, by extrapolation, there are probably an extra three or four stops you'd have to go down with something like IMAX.

 

They've solved this problem already though. They managed to pull off Dark Knight without a hitch and they are making amazing nature documentaries still with this format.

 

Something more reasonable like 5-perf 65mm (roughly what you're talking about with your stills camera), is probably a reasonable "stop and a half less" depth of field when you are shooting.

 

If you can afford the extra film area, I assume your production can afford an extra stop and a half of light.

 

Outdoors, closeup, yeah, you are going to have to live with less DOF in some instances where you are dealing with wide-open areas where you can't add supplemental light.

 

BUT, these shots tend to be long shots anyway where DOF isn't as much of an issue.

 

 

Haven't seen it yet, but isn't a lot of "Transformers" also shot on IMAX, outdoors? Does anyone notice any objectionably shallow DOF in this film?

 

Hi Karl,

 

Sorry, you lost me there. I'm not talking about close-focus or lens R&D. Just that going up that much in chip size might cause a lot of focus problems down the line. I've never shot 65mm, but I've always heard it's challenging to focus. The only thing I can compare it to is my experience with jumping from 16mm to 35mm in motion film and 35mm to medium formats in stills.

 

Here's one example: My clients were always having me shoot a lot of 4x5 film static beauty shots of motorcycles for a brochure interior, and the difference in resolution between these large-format beauty shots and the accompanying action shots (done on 35mm film) was a little jarring. Solution? Shoot action on medium format.

 

Except it didn't work because the medium format cameras had such shallow DOF at wide-open apertures we had to go to higher speed film to get barely enough DOF to get 1-3 shots on a 16-exposure roll that were acceptably sharp. In the end, 50 speed Velvia shot in 35mm format had not much more grain than the 400 speed 645 film. And you had many more useable 35mm frames because they were actually in focus. I can't explain why, this is just what I saw with my own eyes. Every year I would convince myself to try medium-format action again, always with the same result.

 

Look, I'm not saying it won't be possible. Just that myself (and about a half-dozen other stills guys who are a lot more talented than me) could NEVER get MF to work anywhere near as well as 35mm. Probably why you don't see many MF systems at NFL games.

 

Maybe we should try to get one of those Dark Knight focus pullers to explain how much more difficult it was to pull 65mm. Or how easy it was. I'm open to hearing new ideas, I just think the push for bigger chips is being done in large part to accommodate a shortcoming of electronic capture. Of course, the marketing department won't sell it that way. . . :)

 

 

BTW that extra stop and a half of light you casually refer to is three times as much light, as I'm sure you know. Not insignificant in this economy. :(

 

-Fran

[John Sprung]

It will take longer for the rise in ASA/ISO sensitivity. Everything just take longer with motion, but rest assured, it is all happening slowly but surely.

 

I'm surprised that someone as astute as you are, John, is arguing the opposite.

 

Actually, I think back in post #86, that I'm arguing the same thing -- that it'll be a while before we see 800 or 3200 in motion.

 

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[David Mullen ASC]

It mainly depends on how low they can get the noise floor. We can shoot at 800 ASA now if we wanted to, it's just that on some digital cameras, it's not that great, noise-wise.

 

Bigger photosites, better fill-factor, more sensitivity hopefully... combined with less noise and hopefully we'll be at the 500 to 800 ASA range with good results in terms of noise. The Genesis / F35 is already 400 or 500 ASA at 0 db.

[Keith Walters]

No, here is the progression of numbers (which are rounded to avoid obnoxious numbers): 100, 125, 160, 200, 250, 320, 400, 500, 640, 800.

Pardon?

 

3 stops means exactly what John said: 2x2x2=8

That's either eight times as sensitive. eight times as much light, eight times less sensitive, eight times less light, eight times as much (or less) development by running it through the tank and different speeds and so on.

 

8 x 320 = 2460

 

However motion Picture stocks have a larger range of speed increments than still film.

So where most 35mm still film goes in straight one-stop speed increments (100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 etc) motion picture film is available in 1/3 stop increments (theoretically, at any rate) So you get (rounded) 100, 125, 160, 200 instead of just 100, 200 etc

[Keith Walters]

Ughh, you have bought into marketing hype so much it is getting tiresome. You have to realize, Tom, that every time noise goes up, resolution goes down, right?

Which can be equally applied to video cameras, and cinematography forums.

Where's Emmanuel? He'll bring some badly needed common sense into this discussion.

[Tom Lowe]

One last thing: Thanks for the amazing Terrence Malick tribute. I'm a huge fan of those films. Really astonishing anyone is allowed to shoot something so beautiful. I'm jealous, especially since for myself, the move to digital stills and video seems to be moving in lockstep with a total abandonment of all quality standards, I've shot more crap in the last six months than I did in the previous ten years combined. Amazingly, the clients don't seem to notice. Or care.

 

Thanks. FYI, Malick was shooting pickups in LA last month for "Tree of Life," and he was shooting on a Red One package. ;) Since Kurosawa and Kubrick passed away, I don't think anyone can dispute that Malick is the high king of cinema -- a true artist who is deeply revered and who is closely tied to film -- including anamorphic and even 65mm. If Malick is shooting some shots in digital, that tells you something. Of course, he's also shooting many scenes on 15-perf IMAX cameras.

 

Stephen, lol, you are going to have a meal of those words about FF35 in the not-too-distant future, my friend. You better get some worcestershire sauce ready. :lol: :lol:

 

In terms of ASA/ISO rating, let's keep in mind that Jannard is likely to make large gains in sensitivity with the next-gen Mysterium X sensor. The sensor we are talking about for FF35, however, is yet another generation forward, a third-gen sensor called Monstro. My guess is that sensitivity will be increased significantly over what today's motion cameras are shooting. The performance we are witnessing from the Nikon D3X and Canon 5D2 are harbingers of what is coming.

[Keith Walters]

Pardon?

 

3 stops means exactly what John said: 2x2x2=8

 

Sorry, what Stephen said.

Stephen Williams, John Sprung - I just can't get the hang of all these Forrin' names :lol:

[Daniel Sheehy]

...Well, why do nearly all serious photographers shoot on full-frame or larger format still cameras? Why don't they shoot on APS-C "cropped" body cameras, which are similar in size to S35?...

Lenses.

I think the answer to that realistically has less to do with the sensors, and more to do with the range and quality of lenses available.

 

Choosing MF or larger is a completely different ball game.

[Ruairi Robinson]

Stephen, lol, you are going to have a meal of those words about FF35 in the not-too-distant future, my friend. You better get some worcestershire sauce ready. :lol: :lol:

 

Tom, don't you know that digital will NEVER be as good as film. Even if all development on film ceases tomorrow, and a billion dollars a day is put into development of digital sensors, in a hundred million years of technological development it will never, ever, ever match film. This is not just my opinion (though admittedly my opinion is awesome) but it was actually told to me, in a dream, last night, by Jesus, while Mary, Joseph, and all the angels and saints gathered around watching, while the lord God himself sat above, overseeing. Weirdly, he was sitting on an umpire's chair, and the dream turned into a tennis match between jesus and the archangel michael (Jesus kicked his ass btw) and then Jesus told me he was bored with being the messiah and wanted to pass the torch of leadership to me. Then he produced an actual torch, which burned my hand when I tried to take it. I'm not sure what that means. But for the purposes of this discussion, that's not important. The important thing is that digital will never be as good as film. True story!

 

R.

[John Sprung]

Sorry, what Stephen said.

Stephen Williams, John Sprung - I just can't get the hang of all these Forrin' names :lol:

 

No problem -- I would agree that 2x2x2=8 ;-)

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

We can shoot at 800 ASA now if we wanted to, it's just that on some digital cameras, it's not that great, noise-wise.

 

Bigger photosites, better fill-factor, more sensitivity hopefully... combined with less noise and hopefully we'll be at the 500 to 800 ASA range with good results in terms of noise. The Genesis / F35 is already 400 or 500 ASA at 0 db.

 

Yes, it's always a matter of taste as to how much noise you'll accept as a trade off for speed.

 

The other thing to consider is three chip versus single chip. Using chips of the same size -- which we don't unless you compare Red's 2K mode with a 2/3" camera -- I think might yield a speed/noise advantage for the dichroic/prism approach. At least in theory, dichroics should be more efficient than dye filters. What do you think?

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Keith Walters]

Yes, it's always a matter of taste as to how much noise you'll accept as a trade off for speed.

 

The other thing to consider is three chip versus single chip. Using chips of the same size -- which we don't unless you compare Red's 2K mode with a 2/3" camera -- I think might yield a speed/noise advantage for the dichroic/prism approach. At least in theory, dichroics should be more efficient than dye filters. What do you think?

-- J.S.

This has been brought up numerous times.

 

Dye filters simply block the unwanted wavelengths, meaning at least 67% of the incoming photons are discarded.

 

Dye filters have to be formulated from whatever chemicals are available that can withstand being applied via photolithographic processes, and are able to stand up to years of exposure to light without changing their spectral response significantly, entirely apart from being the right colour! Those are a lot of conflicting requirements.

 

Dichroic mirrors/prisms actually separate the incoming light into its red, green and blue components, without throwing anything away

Dichroic filters are made from precisely engineered multiple microscopic layers of chemically stable colourless glass, giving exactly the spectral response required.

[K Borowski]

This is not just my opinion (though admittedly my opinion is awesome) but it was actually told to me, in a dream, last night, by Jesus, while Mary, Joseph, and all the angels and saints gathered around watching, while the lord God himself sat above, overseeing.

 

Thanks for being a smart-a$$, Ruairi.

 

As the owner of a film processor and an optical printer, I can say that film has about a decade left before digital matches it.

 

Until that point, all the fan boys need to STFU. We're not going to go backwards for convenience and plug-and-play compatibility's sake, sorry. :rolleyes: USB compatibitlity isn't a priority, the best f^cking possible quality is. Hell, we're not even at the same level with 35mm that Ben Hur was back FIFTY YEARS ago. Doesn't that bother you? It bothers me. . .

[K Borowski]

No problem -- I would agree that 2x2x2=8 ;-)

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

 

 

It isn't math, it's a convention, just like, in terms of seconds, it's 1/45 of a second on a shutter, not 1/48. It's a favorable rounding to keep the numbers from getting ugly.

 

But, 2,560 is just someone being totally ignorant of the convention. That's like saying you are driving 88 feet per second or 27 m/s, or 97 kph in a 60 MPH zone when you get pulled over.

[K Borowski]

8 x 320 = 2460

 

Sorry, I don't have an ap for that or an easily available computer calculator, but, in my head, it's 2,560 when you multiply three hundred twenty by eight, no?

 

Sorry, I'll give you time to write it down on paper; the metric system made numbers easy for you, right?

 

Out here in the real world, 3rds 4ths 8ths 12ths and 16ths work better :P

[Ruairi Robinson]

Thanks for being a smart-a$$, Ruairi.

 

As the owner of a film processor and an optical printer, I can say that film has about a decade left before digital matches it.

 

Until that point, all the fan boys need to STFU. We're not going to go backwards for convenience and plug-and-play compatibility's sake, sorry. :rolleyes: USB compatibitlity isn't a priority, the best f^cking possible quality is. Hell, we're not even at the same level with 35mm that Ben Hur was back FIFTY YEARS ago. Doesn't that bother you? It bothers me. . .

 

It doesn't bother me, because you can shoot on film, to your hearts content. Most filmmakers still do.

 

R.

[K Borowski]

It doesn't bother me, because you can shoot on film, to your hearts content. Most filmmakers still do.

 

R.

 

I guess what I don't understand then is your contribution to this thread. Most people have a point to which they argue, rather than just arguing for argument's sake.

[Thomas James]

Yes you can of course still shoot on film but all of the cinematographers will have to switch to 8 perf 35mm Vista Vision in order to compete with the better quality of 6K FF35 Red digital.

[Ruairi Robinson]

I guess what I don't understand then is your contribution to this thread. Most people have a point to which they argue, rather than just arguing for argument's sake.

 

I am amused by the absolute certainty of predictions that people making regarding technological evolution, and the wild leaps, and assumptions made. The arguments are usually driven more by emotion than objective analysis of facts, etc.

 

R.

[Keith Walters]

It doesn't bother me, because you can shoot on film, to your hearts content. Most filmmakers still do.

 

R.

Mr Robinson, I do wish you would refrain from bringing FACTS into this discussion.

You know how reality upsets some people.

[Keith Walters]

Sorry, I don't have an ap for that or an easily available computer calculator, but, in my head, it's 2,560 when you multiply three hundred twenty by eight, no?

Rubbish.

[Keith Walters]

Yes you can of course still shoot on film but all of the cinematographers will have to switch to 8 perf 35mm Vista Vision in order to compete with the better quality of 6K FF35 Red digital.

At the moment 35mm film competes very well, since "6K FF35 Red Digital" does not actually exist as yet.

And, I think you will find that it will also outperform "6K FF35 Red Digital" when they do get round to actually manufacturing them.

 

I know this is beyond most people's comprehension here but

"4K" as in the ability to photograph a "4K" chart of 2000 white lines on a black background is NOT the same thing as having 4,000 horizontal picture elements

A 4K sensor can only usefully capture 1000 white lines on a black background (ie 2,000 lines)

So a 6K sensor will only produce about the same resolution as ordinary 35mm film.

 

 

But for the eleventy-seven-thousandth time, resoultion is not and never has been the only issue.

The real issue is dynamic range, which is something of a technological brick wall that people insist on banging their heads against.