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Aaton XTR - 250D/7207 small clip


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Friend and I tried 1 roll of Vision 3 250D on my Aaton XTR Plus (after it collected years of dust) with Zeiss s16 superspeed MkIII.

This was a casual shoot with nothing planned in particular, just that my friend wanted to use some of this footage for a clothing commercial.

I was mostly interested if my Aaton still worked ?

Here is a small clip. Below are screenshots.

My friend used as much ND filters as possible to control the aperture, keeping it around T1.3 <-> T2.8. This created a nice DoF but also made the Aaton viewfinder almost completely dark. We could barely see a thing most of the time 

After film development I received 180gb of .dpx files (http://haghefilm-digitaal.nl - 2k scan). I'm not an industry professional so not sure what to do with those, thankfully DaVinci seemed to accept them so today was my first day on Resolve 16. Must say I love it, works great on my Linux workstation.

As for the footage itself, came out sharper than I expected - amazing what these old cameras can produce.

DP: Simon Ruesink

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Edited by Sander Ferdinand
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Oh nice! 

Remember, the camera doesn't create the image like digital, the film stock does. So if there is anyone to be impressed with, it's the ability of the film stock and the lenses. ? 

Are you making a music video with this material or something?

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Some lovely images there, nice work.

With regard to a dark optical viewfinder, the best way to avoid this is to use the slowest speed film stock that you can get away with and avoid using heavy ND filters. Kodak 50D 7203 probably would have been the stock of choice. 

You can also try rating the stock slower by setting your meter to a lower speed and thus intentionally overexposing the negative by about a stop. This generally results in a more saturated, less grainy image and then you can also get away with using less ND.

You can also ask your lab to provide Prores 4444 files instead of DPX files next time, if you prefer that workflow. Most people find them easier to work with.

Best of luck with the camera!

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18 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Oh nice! 

Remember, the camera doesn't create the image like digital, the film stock does. So if there is anyone to be impressed with, it's the ability of the film stock and the lenses. ? 

Are you making a music video with this material or something?

The lenses (superspeeds s16 MkIII) were very nice indeed. I don't think ill ever want to use some other glass. Rental prices are OK, compared to the full-frame superspeeds.

Not sure what the plan is with this footage. Most likely slap some music over it, brand logo and call it an advert ?

16 hours ago, Satsuki Murashige said:

Some lovely images there, nice work.

With regard to a dark optical viewfinder, the best way to avoid this is to use the slowest speed film stock that you can get away with and avoid using heavy ND filters. Kodak 50D 7203 probably would have been the stock of choice. 

You can also try rating the stock slower by setting your meter to a lower speed and thus intentionally overexposing the negative by about a stop. This generally results in a more saturated, less grainy image and then you can also get away with using less ND.

You can also ask your lab to provide Prores 4444 files instead of DPX files next time, if you prefer that workflow. Most people find them easier to work with.

Best of luck with the camera!

50D would have been better, yeah. As for DPX, no problem with them. I can import them into Resolve and it'll play them smoothly without problem - with grading applied. Very impressed with that. 

I've also noticed that Resolve on Linux is quite fast with 2k footage. For my job I need a fast workstation so I have an AMD threadripper (12c/24t), 1070Ti, 32gb ram and a fast SSD, Resolve really benefits from that kind of hardware. Cutting in the timeline is fast and so is exporting to MP4 (I can see it uses all my CPU cores). Last time I edited videos was 10 years ago and things were different back then ? Had to use proxy footage and whatnot.

Edited by Sander Ferdinand
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amateur (and slightly off-topic) question: how does the 50D compare to the 250D in terms of grain? I haven't been able to find any direct comparisons with regard to grain structure. Just wondering how much grainier 250D is. Shot some rolls of 250D outside in broad daylight with a ND9 filter, and wondering, since this project is ongoing, if I should keep going or switch to 50D - would the difference be noticeable? 

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2 hours ago, Alexander Boyd said:

amateur (and slightly off-topic) question: how does the 50D compare to the 250D in terms of grain? I haven't been able to find any direct comparisons with regard to grain structure. Just wondering how much grainier 250D is. Shot some rolls of 250D outside in broad daylight with a ND9 filter, and wondering, since this project is ongoing, if I should keep going or switch to 50D - would the difference be noticeable? 

Here is some footage I found on youtube of 50D. Personally I would not mind mixing 50D and 250D. You could add some grain in post if the two stocks don't mix well together (doubt it's necessary). I don't think 250D is particularly grainy.

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The tech sheets seem to indicate that 250D is grainier, but also sharper than 50D. It also looks to have more of a toe in its characteristic curve, so more forgiving to underexposure while having less shadow separation.

I sure miss the XTR Prod. What a handheld camera.

Jarin

Edited by Jarin Blaschke
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On 8/16/2019 at 4:05 PM, Alexander Boyd said:

amateur (and slightly off-topic) question: how does the 50D compare to the 250D in terms of grain? I haven't been able to find any direct comparisons with regard to grain structure. Just wondering how much grainier 250D is. Shot some rolls of 250D outside in broad daylight with a ND9 filter, and wondering, since this project is ongoing, if I should keep going or switch to 50D - would the difference be noticeable? 

50D and 250D is negligible difference in grain/noise, especially if scanned well. Where I don't shoot 50D much, the few times I have, it's not been worth the lack of stop range. 250D works great in broad daylight with a 1.2 ND and even with gray skies, you can run a .9 and it falls in the F8 range. More important to grain is how new your stock is and how fast you process it. If you've got new stock, processed immediately after exposure, you'll literally have very little to no grain. 200T and 250D are the perfect stocks for 16mm. 

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Here are some of my frames from 5203 (50D), so 35mm rather than 16mm, but still maybe a good reference for the stock's look. When given a healthy exposure I find it to be plenty sharp, even with old Cooke Panchro lenses. 4K scan from Cinelab.

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