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I recently re-watched a great video on the visual style of Alfonso Cuarón and collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, and in delving into this more deeply, was reminded how the pair imposed their own limitations when shooting Y Tu Mamá También and how limitations can help focus the creative process and also keep costs down and allow amplified creativity. Who else does this in their own work? We likely all have limitations imposed externally, considering we're not world famous with infinite time and money, but even for those who are operating with limitations, how many of you are either consciously shaping your process in order to fit within your limitations, or even imposing more when you don't need to, in order to simplify and increase creativity? I have found that the limitations that Cuarón/Lubezki impose fit well with my own. They shoot only wide angle lenses, exclusively hand-hold the camera, use natural light, and feature the characters relationships to each other and to their wider surroundings. Further, the camera movement is deliberate and has a 'character', they use long takes at the climaxes in order to further the sense of reality of the situations. I shoot my families travel and the occasional event, shooting hand-held with a 35mm prime (and only changing lenses when a specific shot is called for), shoot only in available light, feature the moments of my family and friends interacting with each other and the environment we're in, and because i'm behind the camera and have a relationship with my family my movement and framing will take on that character. It almost seems to me that there will be a range of famous directors, DoPs, cinematographers, and other visual artists that will align well enough with your own style and preferences that we can learn a lot from it. Who else is studying the visual styles and processes of others to learn?

The s1h has All-I codecs. The s1 and s5 dont have all-I but their actual image is pretty damn comparible and cost like $1800 used. If auto focus isn't a concern, just get an S1 with the vlog upgrade, it's getting 6k 10bit and 4k 60 10bit internal and 6k raw external in a few months.

Have thousands and thousands of clips to sync with tight deadlines and I bet you'll start to think of TC as being "mandatory" too.

Nice thumbnail.:) @Matins 2 Daguerreotype, right. Pristine film look would be possible with a BMPCC as the cheapest option, in 4K one could try a used G9 in HLG with the 10bit update for 600 or 700usd. I already got a run for my money years ago filming 8bit HD, in natural profile and 100mbit with the GH5, because the 10bit codec was still new for Davinci Resolve :) Mission accomplished:) For even mored dependable results use a PMW F3 with its external 10bit output. They gotten more expensive now due to their good rep. Would love to get my hands on a F5 or shoot something meaningful with my F3 first. :)

Netflix's requirements is not only about having a minimum fidelity to the image, or even making it strictly easier in post, but having a standard workflow. They need to be able to send any one of their productions to any one of their post houses and have it be immediately workable, and that if that team gets shifted to a different project midway through, they can send that half done project to another post house and have them pick it up immediately, no questions. They've decided that TC is a mandatory element to their workflow, from capture through post. To be honest, if I were Netflix, I would specify a lot more of the technical and metadata requirements for my productions just to ensure that every piece is compatible across their entire billion dollar post workflow. On a much smaller scale we do the same thing at my work (outside the film industry). If the designer for one project is out sick and the client needs a change, other people on the team have to be able to open it up and immediately know how to make the change. We adopt standards, some of them because it's the easiest way, some picked randomly just to make sure we're all on the same page.

Loving the S1H viewfinder, coming from GH3, 4,5. Am I the only one that uses monochrome live view with colored focus peaking? I find it much more practical and effective to visualize exposure in black and white than in color. B&W has less distractions. Bonus: focus peaking stands very nicely. I like the bright green or orange. Just offering this out as a neat little trick.

I second that. The S1 with the Vlog update has an image too good to believe. No mushyness at all. Still gooling over the S1H for the OPLF filter. Maybe I should be goolin over some filming ideas instead and film something worthwhile with my S1. Seriously I feel ashamed not using this or any camera much these days. S1 is a cinema image quality powerhouse.

Hilarious and so true. I actually have a pretty good generator that is only 52dBA when run under full load and even quieter when run at less than full load. As soon as you round the corner for a building or go inside a structure and close the door you cannot hear it. I did a lot of research before I went the generator route, but none of the battery options were going to power a smoke machine, panel lights, and video lights for hours except a generator. I mainly just use it for music videos so I don't need the audio from on set. With my generator setup I can shoot in weird places like abandoned farm houses, rail yards, middle of a deserted road, etc without having to think about power. I like the power setup of the Clar better. The Godox VL power is pretty annoying to have to deal with but once its all set up its not that bad. I can tell you the VL300 is whisper quiet when running. I had to shoot a full days worth of content with the talent and a shotgun mic mounted on the camera cage about 8' away from the talent in a very small untreated room and not one bit of fan noise was picked up by the mic....now that's impressive. I'm not sure if the Clar is that quiet or if you care about sound at all.

The question was raised to discuss and share information about the technical side of digital cameras, specifically their sensor technologies compared to film. Questions that come to mind are: which sensors come closest and why, in what way could they be improved, and what makes them better if their image quality has surpassed film (which I don't think is the case)? It wasn't exactly raised to discuss the use of certain cameras in productions.

I considered it but once I got a PC with a Ryzen and an RTX3080 the idea became a bit silly. I fear Apple's love of just dumping software and other things with no notice.

I do understand the power of standards. From that point of view I get it that TC is necessary. Thanks for explaining it to me!

Great topic! For me its an neverending ongoing process. The usage of natural light by lubezki, unnatural light usage by Darius Khondji. Found it also interesting that they filmed "call me by your name" with a single lens, not that the movie looked that spectacular, but it was a great film(due to the performances). Lately I was massively inspired by the visual style of the safdie brothers. The use of long tele lenses for basicly everything. But it isnt really that easy shooting that way where I live where spaces are quite small and tight (and dont have the funds for decent anamorphics, which offc would help)

I won’t be shooting another film without it

Pondering cameras

I own a mac with a nvidia card and the latest IOS platform doesn't support nvidia drivers anymore. Basically, program obsolescence is a problem for many mac owners. I don't see myself with a mac in the near future. I also have a PC, all the pieces can be replaced. For a environmentally friendly workflow, it makes more sense to repair and reuse. Mac is in the philosophy :" Buy expensive product every 5 years and throw away via there buy back option and start again."

Yep. View assist LUTs for Vlog (.vlt) You can do false color (my favorite). The only thing I wish they allowed was being able to bind a function key to a specific view assist LUT so you can quickly toggle it on and off. Currently you can only bind the menu and then you have to scroll to find the LUT. And then back out of the menu.

Q: When will digital catch up to film? A: When you learn to colour grade properly. With a few notable exceptions (you know who you are), the colour grading skill level of the average film-maker talking about this topic online is terrible. Worse still, is that people don't even know enough to know that they don't know how little they actually know. I have been studying colour grading for years at this point, and I will be the first to admit that I know so little about colour grading that I have barely scratched the surface. Here's another question - Do you want your footage to look like a Super-8 home video from the 60s? I suspect not. That's not what people are actually looking for. Most people who want digital to look like film actually don't. Sure, there are a few people on a few projects where they want to shoot digital and have the results look like it was shot on film in order to emulate old footage, but mostly the question is a proxy for wanting nice images. Mostly they want to get results like Hollywood does. Hollywood gets its high production value from spending money on production design. Production design is about location choice, set design, costume / hair / makeup, lighting design, blocking, haze, camera movement, and other things like that. If you point a film camera at a crappy looking scene then you will get a crappy looking scene. There's a reason that student films are mostly so cringe and so cheap-looking. They spent no money on production design because they had no money. Do you think that big budget films would spend so much money if it didn't contribute to the final images? I suggest this: Think about how much money you'd be willing to spend on a camera that created gorgeous images for you, and how much you'd spend on re-buying all your lenses, cages, monitors, and all the kit you would need to buy Think about how much time you would be willing to invest on doing all the research to work out what camera that was, how much time you would spend selling your existing equipment, how much time you would spend working out what to buy for the new setup, how much time you would spend learning how to use it, how much time you would spend learning to process the footage Take that money and spend half of it on training courses and take the other half and put it into shooting some test projects that you can learn from, so you can level-up your abilities Take that time you would have spent and do those courses and film those projects People love camera tests, but it's mostly a waste of time. Stop thinking about camera tests and start thinking about production value tests. Take a room in your house, get one or two actors, hire them if you have to (you have a budget for this remember) and get them to do a simple scene, perhaps only 3-6 lines of dialog per actor. It should be super-short because you're going to dissect it dozens of times, maybe hundreds. Now experiment with lighting design and haze. Play with set design and set dressing. Do blocking and camera movement tests. Do focal length tests (not lens tests). Now do costume design, hair and makeup tests. Take this progression into post and line them up and compare. See which elements of the above added the most production value. But you're not done yet - you've created a great looking scene but it is probably still dull. Now you have to play with the relationship between things like focal length / blocking / camera movement and the dramatic content of the scene. Most people know that we go closer to show important details, and when the drama is highest, but what about in those moments between those peaks? Film the whole scene from every angle, every angle you can even think of, essentially getting 100% coverage. Now your journey into editing begins. Start with continuity editing (if you don't know what that is then start by looking it up). You now have the ability to work with shot selection and you should be using it to emphasise the dramatic content of the scene. Create at least a dozen edits, trying to make each one as different as possible. You can play with shot length, everything from the whole scene as one wide shot to a cut every 1s. You can cut between close-ups for the whole scene, or go between wides and close-ups. Go from wide to mid to close and go straight from wide to close without the mid shots in between. What did you learn about the feel of these choices? What about choosing between the person talking and the person listening? What does an edit look like where you only see the person talking, or just the person looking? Which lines land better when you see the reaction-shot? Play with L and J cuts. Now we play with time. You have every angle, so you can add reverse-angles to extend moments (like reality TV does), you can do L and J cuts and play with cutting to the reaction shot from some other line. What about changing the sequence of the dialogue? Can you tell a different story with your existing footage? How many stories can you tell? Try and make a film with the least dialogue possible - how much of the dialogue can you remove? What about no dialogue at all - can you tell a story with just reaction shots? Can you make a silent film that still tells a story - showing people talking but without being able to hear them? Play with dialogue screens like the old silent films - now you can have the actors "say" whatever you like - what stories can you tell with your footage? Then sound design.... Then coaching of actors.... Now you've learned how to shoot a scene. What about combining two scenes? Think of how many combinations are now available - you can now combine scenes together where there are different locations, actors, times of day, seasons, scenarios, etc. Now three scenes. Now acts and story structure.... Great, now you're a good film-maker. You haven't gotten paid yet, so career development, navigating the industry, business decisions and commercial acumen. Do you know what films are saleable and which aren't? Have you worked out why Michael Bay is successful despite most film-makers being very critical of him and his film-making approach and style? There's a saying about continuity - "people only notice continuity errors if you film is crap". Does it matter? Sure, but it's not the main critical success factor. Camera choice is the same.

Shooting S16 is a pain in the ass 😅 I am so spoiled I'd rather just use my S1 with the internal stabilization as gimbals and tripods are too tedious to have to carry and I don't want to have to rig anything up besides putting in a battery and SD card LOL That was my conclusion after filming a short on a C300 rigged up. My take away was I think I could have been quicker and actually got a better image off the S1 without any rigging.

Arri had a film matrix (page 9 I think) that allowed for colorists to intercut between film and Alexa footage more easily: https://www.samys.com/images/pdf/ALEXA-Color-Processing-White-Paper.pdf But they discontinued it. I've heard it's difficult to work with, but I think over time the digital look has become more standard anyway. The F35, C300, and Alexa all felt like different imitations of film to me, whereas today everything feels more like Alexa or an imitation of Alexa. Which makes sense. You imitate the contemporaneous standard format. There are technical difficulties from a sensor design perspective, but I don't really understand them. Full well capacity is a physical limitation (think of each photo site as a bucket collecting drops of light) that dictates highlight dynamic range (once the bucket fills, the highlight clip). Bigger pixels mean a greater full well capacity, but so do improved sensor designs. It's no coincidence that the Alexa has the lowest resolution and the most highlight detail. With film it's sort of the opposite: Kodak added smaller grains of film to get two stops more highlight detail in with 5219 500T film stock than with the prior generation. But if you like the look of S16... why not shoot S16? It is definitely the cool thing to do now.

Nah, the 1D C has exceeded film in some measures. Look and see how each looks at 3200 ASA..... Sure, if you mess it up then the 1D C will look sh*t But the same is true for if you screw up film. (and to be fair, most of us here are more likely to screw up a film shoot than a 1D C shoot...)

I'm going to disagree with all the sentiments in this thread and recommend something different. Go rent an Alexa. For practical purposes, maybe an Alexa Mini. Talk to your local rental houses and see if there's a timeframe you can rent one and get a big discount, often rental houses are happy to give you a discount if you're renting it when the camera wouldn't be rented by anyone else so have a chat with them. Shoot with it a lot. Shoot as much as you can and in as many situations as you can. Just get one lens with it then take it out and shoot. Shoot in the various modes it has, shoot into the sun and away from it. Shoot indoors. Shoot high-key and shoot low key. Then take the camera back and grade the footage. I suspect you won't do this. It's expensive and a cinema camera like an Alexa is a PITA unless you have used one before. So I'll skip to the end with what I think you'll find. The footage won't look great. The footage will remind you of footage from lesser cameras. You will wonder what happened and if you're processing the footage correctly. I have never shot with an Alexa, but I am told by many pros that if you don't know what you're doing, Alexa footage will look just as much like a home video as from almost any other camera. Cinematic is a word that doesn't even really have any meaning in this context. It really just means 'of the cinema' and there's probably been enough films shot and shown in cinemas on iPhones that now an iPhone technically qualifies as being 'cinematic'. Yes, i'm being slightly tongue-in-cheek here, but the point remains that the word doesn't have any useful meaning here. Yes, images that are shown in the cinema typically look spectacular. Most of this is location choice, set design, hair, costume, makeup, lighting, haze, blocking, and the many other things that go into creating the light that goes through the lens and into the camera. That doesn't mean that the camera doesn't matter. We all have tastes, looks we like and looks we don't, it's just that the word 'cinematic' is about as useful as the word 'lovely' - we all know it when we see it but we don't all agree on when that is. By far the more useful is to work out what aspects of image quality you are looking for: Do you like the look of film? If so, which film stocks? What resolution? Some people suggest that 1080p is the most cinematic, whereas some argue that film was much higher resolution than 4K or even 8K. What about colour? The Alexa has spectacular colour, so does RED. But neither one will give you good colour easily, and neither will give you great colour - great colour requires great production design, great lighting, great camera colour science, and great colour grading. By the way - Canon also has great colour, so does Nikon, and other brands too. You don't hear photographers wishing their 5D or D800 had colour science like in the movies. What lenses do you like? Sharp? Softer? High-contrast? Low contrast? What about chromatic aberation? and what about the corners - do you like a bit of vignetting or softness or field curvature? Bokeh shape? dare I mention anamorphics? But there is an alternative - it doesn't require learning what you like and how to get it, it doesn't require the careful weighting of priorities, and it's a safer option. Buy an ARRI Alexa LF and full set of Zeiss Master Primes. That way you will know that you have the most cinematic camera money can buy, and no-one would argue based on their preferences. You still wouldn't get the images you're after because the cinematic look requires an enormous team and hundreds of thousands of dollars (think about it - why would people pay for these things if they could get those images without all these people?) but there will be no doubt that you have the most cinematic camera that money can buy. I'd suggest Panavision, but they're the best cameras that money can't buy.

Osaka BlackCat's use on D-Cinelike night footage coming from such tiny sensor size going with that low light outcome still really impresses me... :- )

Add blur and you'll overcome the oversharpened outcome, pretty neat if you have the highlights over control as well.

A bit awkward for shooters used to photo camera form factor, I agree but take a look on this convenience for casual shooting considering such outcome even under low light conditions in the middle of a street setup:

AFAIK, I think so. Here's another review with parts 2 & 3 to come, the best available out there for now: Seems an improved lens with better chroma aberrations performance as well (minute 13:27).

Tricks. Here's some approach on topic:

(0% of usser including me are expecting and complaining about 10 bit h264 internal not RAW. I don't understand that obsession about size unless you want to do spy shots. I mean I can shoot RAW video with cameras that is smaller than my last dslr Nikon D750 and a flash on it. In fact I prefer and camera with an external recorder than one with all internal WOW spec that will overhead. In a any narrative, high end commercial and documentary filming where I think RAW can be warranted, those size a ridiculously small. I mean the z6 + ninja V might be barely bigger than a Canon 5d mark ii. So what has happened those last decade, everyone has become so much older that they can't hold less than a kilogram.

Here is a GoPro Hero9 Shot in 5K Linear Mode + Horizon levelling. Note that Linear mode crops and horizon-leveling + stabilization crops even more. So do not expect 5K resolution. This was shot in 5K and rendered in 4K: This was shot in 5K Wide with stabilization high only and rendered in 5K: