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Have you read that Vittorio Storaro is the next cinematographer to work with Woody Allen?

 

One Web site says "reportedly":

 

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/legendary-cinematographer-vittorio-storaro-reportedly-lensing-woody-allens-2016-film-will-be-set-in-1930s-20150807

 

the other one seems sure that it is the case:

 

http://www.woodyallenpages.com/2015/07/legendary-cinematographer-vittorio-storaro-joins-woody-allens-2016-film/

 

As always with Woody Allen's films, and many others, little is known about the film. It seems it will be set in the 1930s.

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No, Storaro has done a couple of digital projects over the years, plus some early analog HDTV back in the 1980's. I saw his last Saura dance movie, a sequel to "Flamenco", and it had been shot on a Red One about five years ago I think. But otherwise he has mainly shot film, which works better for his high-contrast lighting style but now with cameras like the Alexa and Sony F65, this is less of an issue. I think he resisted digital for a long time because it wasn't 4K but now that also is less of an issue.

 

I just looked at his "Zapata" movie on DVD, a poor non-anamorphic low-rez copy but properly letterboxed to 2.00 : 1, unlike many of his other Univisium movies where the home video copy is either 1.78, 1.85, or 2.40. I can't really judge the movie itself since the DVD was Spanish-only.

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No, Storaro has done a couple of digital projects over the years, plus some early analog HDTV back in the 1980's. I saw his last Saura dance movie, a sequel to "Flamenco", and it had been shot on a Red One about five years ago I think. But otherwise he has mainly shot film, which works better for his high-contrast lighting style but now with cameras like the Alexa and Sony F65, this is less of an issue. I think he resisted digital for a long time because it wasn't 4K but now that also is less of an issue.

 

 

Thanks David. Was the early HDTV stuff for the Japanese muse system or some early HD-Mac experiments? Sounds interesting!

I had no idea he did anything on the Red One. That slipped me by too! I'd like to see more of his work as I really like his style. I'm one of the few people who like the TV mini series of Dune. I think a lot of people think it looks cheap and chintzy but I'm really impressed at what they were able to pull off on a low budget and was surprised that the translite idea actually works some of the time (okay only some of the time but...)

 

Freya

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http://thefilmstage.com/features/vittorio-storaro-talks-frame-rates-experimentation-and-why-italians-do-it-best/

 

 


And shooting digitally on the Woody Allen film was a good experience?

Yeah. No, no, very, very good, because technology today is much better than technology of five years ago. Second, the movie was mainly, basically in New York, mainly morning interior — particularly in October, where, most of the time, it’s under control. I’m not happy about the fact that digital capture today is different than video cameras; it has so high a sensitivity sensor. It maybe can be used for night, it maybe can be used for different interiors, but it’s totally against the capture of image under the sunlight. So practically you have to use an incredible number of filters in order to record an image outside. That’s something that the modern technology should provide to us, what we had before. Before we had four different films: two for artificial light; two for natural light. And two different eye sensitivities. So you can choose the best, according to your location, in order to capture the maximum number of information. There’s larger range of images, according to the place where you are. Here, you have only one. This doesn’t work.

 

 

I wonder what kind of filters did he use for exterior shooting.

 

Is this the usual practice?

 

I do hope he pops up in the American Cinematographer when the film opens, which, I presume, will be at the Cannes Film Festival next year.

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The Sony F65 is sort of the Rolls Royce of digital cinema cameras, other than the newer Alexa 65. Since the photosite grid of the sensor runs diagonally instead of straight up & down (rotated 45 degrees), they count 8K worth of photosites across and can claim that it is an 8K sensor, but if you count the total number of photosites, you get something similar to what a 6K sensor would give you, like in the Red Dragon. So 6K or 8K, either way, they record that raw in 16-bit, so it's a very high resolution image with a lot of information.

 

"Oblivion" and "Tomorrowland" were shot on that camera.

 

It's considered to be on the bulky side, though no bigger or heavier than a 35mm movie camera rig. Truth is that weight-wise, it is not much heavier than an Alexa.

 

The Red Dragon is probably the closest competitor resolution-wise, and the Alexa 65, but the other high end digital cinema cameras are all close depending on whether you care more about resolution or dynamic range. From what I've seen, the Sony F65 has a nice combination of the dynamic range of an Alexa but the resolution of a Red Dragon.

 

(I edited this post because I mistakenly said the sensor had 8K of green photosites across when I meant just 8K of photo sites across.)

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That's wonderful. :)

 

Thank you for the information.

 

So since this film will be shot at 4K, how does that work? The cameras has such a setting, similar to how still cameras have various file sizes available for pictures to be recorded at? It won't be shot at 6K or 8K and then downsampled?

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So far I found that these films were shot with the Sony F65 CineAlta:

 

Kickstart Theft (2012)

Made in Jersey (2012)

Tears of Steel (2012)

Save Me (2012)

The New Normal (2012) – partly

After Earth (2013) – partly

Belle (2013)

Evil Dead (2013)

Vénus à la fourrure (2013)

O tempo e o vento / Time and the Wind (2013)

White House Down (2013)

The Smurfs 2 (2013)

About Last Night (2014)

Deliver Us from Evil: Sarchie (2014)

Kış Uykusu / Winter Sleep (2014)

Let's Be Cops (2014) – partly

Lucy (2014) – partly

Testament of Youth (2014)

The Dark Horse (2014)

Ex Machina (2015) – partly

 

I see that Alexa 65 has only so far been partly used for Spectre.

Edited by Alexandros Angelopoulos Apostolos
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So since this film will be shot at 4K, how does that work? The cameras has such a setting, similar to how still cameras have various file sizes available for pictures to be recorded at? It won't be shot at 6K or 8K and then downsampled?

 

Yes, the 16-bit raw file is converted to 4K RGB. You can think of that vaguely as "downsampling" though remember when converting a Bayer pattern image, you have 50% green pixels and 25% red and blue pixels each to convert into an RGB image with an equal number of pixels for each. And the Bayer-to-RGB conversion does not simply mean doubling the green pixels and multiplying the red and blue pixels by 4X to get there.

 

So it is not downsampling in a traditional sense, that would be more like if they converted the raw file to 6K or 8K RGB and then downsampled that to 4K RGB. But definitely one of the advantages of starting out with a sensor with a higher count of photosites is that you lose less resolution in the conversion from the Bayer pattern. When the Sony F65 first came out, they marketed it as the first "true" 4K camera:

https://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/assets/files/show/highend/includes/F65_Camera_CameraPDF.pdf

 

It's a bit academic because measurable resolution is not only based on more factors than just the sensor, but also the 4K model is all based around a notion that 35mm film is a 4K RGB "gold" standard, and the truth is that each color layer in motion picture film does not resolve equally -- the red information is softer than the green information, for example. But as a rough guide, if you figure that a conversion from a single Bayer filtered sensor to RGB loses roughly 25% of the measurable resolution, you'd want to use a sensor that had 25% more photosites than 4K to get a decent 4K RGB image, so ideally you'd use a camera with a sensor that was a bit more than 5K if not a 6K camera, so the Sony F65, the Red Dragon, and the Alexa 65 all fall under that category.

 

But as I said, there are other factors that affect resolution, like compression in recording.

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What's the difference between the F65/Super CCD's turning a 2x target resolution sensor 45 degrees and the Alexa's using an unrotated 2x target resolution sensor?

 

Speaking of oversampling, does anyone know of a production windowboxing 5.6K in the Red, to be posted the same as ARRIRAW, for 4K delivery?

Edited by cole t parzenn
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I wouldn't crop the Red sensor to 3.5K (Arri Open Gate) or 2.88K (regular Alexa) in raw mode just to match Arriraw's pixels dimensions, I'd probably shoot 5.6K or 6K raw, whatever, on the Red and downsample after debayering to 4K RGB, if that's the final delivery size.

 

Not sure what you mean by Alexa's "2x target resolution sensor".

 

As for the advantage to the rotated sensor, the primary one seems to be to avoid aliasing artifacts with fine horizontal and vertical lines or grids (but if you've got diagonal fine lines in the subject, I guess you've lost that advantage.) But maybe the way the image is debayered to RGB, there is some ability to take advantage of the extra number of photosites across the horizontal plane, I don't know.

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