Ehetyz

Eh, Bokeh is alright and good bokeh and separation are important "tools" for a cinematographer, much like any other visual styling. Being for or against distinctive bokeh is kind of moot. It's like going "yeah three-point-lighting is bad, you shouldn't use it because it's artificial". Cinematography doesn't always aim to reproduce reality in an accurate manner. I'd say it's more often the opposite. With pronounced bokeh, like with any tool, you just have to have some taste and brains. Sometimes it works for what you want to achieve, sometimes it doesn't. Edit: I guess I should mention that the times I HAVE messed round with the bokeh in my work, be it with vintage lenses or with self-made bokeh modifiers, they've always garnered praise and astonishment from peers. You can do a lot by reshaping the out of focus areas of your image.

Agreed. If you're at all into post-processing and grading, the BM cameras are godsend, because they leave all the processing off to your own consideration. That's why they come with Resolve included - and I'd dare say it's way more powerful as a processing tool than any in-camera processors.

I like big cams and I can not lie

I was only mildly curious at first but that rec button placement seals the deal. I love it. Looks like they might finally truly nail the ergonomics.

Loving the aesthetic here. XH-A1 was my dream camera back in the day - though I never got to actually use it before it had become obsolete. This is a feature film I shot with an HV30 back in 2009 with a bunch of my friends. It still remains one of my favourites - I pulled every trick in the book to make that camera look filmic on an absolute zero budget. Our dolly was a skateboard on a wooden plank that we dragged around the woods, but I still look upon the the film with extreme fondness.

I shoot a big variety of things but I tend to most enjoy doing dark stuff. I think this is, while not necessarily my favourite work due to the issues we had in the production, the most visually accomplished; And on the flipside, this one was shot in one day, had a ton of fun and I'm extremely happy with it, even though it's not technically as accomplished: Both are NSFW and contain violence.

If it's in RAW and you're using Resolve, a little spatial NR on the first node will do the trick. I've gotten away with some serious underexposure when shooting in 4,6K RAW that way.

I'm actually forced to do this a lot - or, more specifically, shoot in 4K with center framing for an instagram crop, because I do a lot of commercial food videography and most of that is going on instagram or FB. There's definitely a need for vertical video in some productions. Artistically, I've repeatedly pondered about shooting an art film on a 5D vertically, so I'd have high resolution and sort of a portrait aspect ratio. I do most of my hobby photography in portrait AR and the stuff you can do with framing would lend itself for some interesting atmosphere in video as well. I think it would work well for an artsy/oppressive atmosphere.

Lol, the video was banned from Youtube. Censorship sucks. It's up on vimeo now.

So a while ago I was offered to direct and DP a music video for the black metal band Dependentium. They didn't want to go the usual BM "woods and corpse paint" video route, but instead wanted a video that would not include the band themselves and would instead be story based - and extremely bloody. I used this as an opportunity to do a bit of a splatterpunk homage, as it's a literary genre I'm fascinated by but it thematically usually falls on the fringe of acceptability. This time that wasn't an issue, so we went all out. The video is very obviously NSFW - and not for the faint of the heart. For best results I'd suggest watching at 1440p or higher, because on lower resolutions all the film grain disappears and you're left with just a lot of banding. I shot the whole thing with an Ursa Mini 4.6K, in Raw 4:1 4.6K60p. Shooting in mainly slow motion posed a major challenge because outside of the hallway scenes I wanted to stick to very small light sources. We used very little usual cinema lights in this, there was one CCT 650W firestarter in the hallway scene and we had two Aputure Amaran panels as backups on standby but ended up using them in only one shot. Instead we shot everything using a whole bunch of various E14 and E27 light bulbs and led spots, even a bunch of small IKEA clamp spots. I wanted the video to have a dingy and grimy look to it, so we lit with a lot of uneven led bulbs with various unclean tints to get a sickly green look to the torture room. We had an autopole stuck above the set and we hooked a whole bunch of leds on that, then had a few more on stands on the sides to give us a little bit of boost when necessary. We also used real candlelight to paint contrasting warm spots on the background, and boosted that with E27 flame flicker leds. They had a little intense red hue, but other than that the effect is pretty convincing and I was happy with how they worked. We built the lights to essentially work as a 360 degree set. This was due to the fact that we had an extremely tight schedule. We had one day to do the whole video, from setbuilding to wrap, and in that one day there were 80 shots to get - 40 of them physical FX shots that required prep. So we couldn't do shot-specific light for most shots - instead we had the 360 degree set with a few booster lights and a bounce. I think we managed to pull it off. To give the sensor enough light for slow motion, I stuck to large-aperture lenses. I would've loved to shoot completely with vintage glass, but those would've required double the amount of light. So I mainly ended up using the Sigma 30/1.4, Pentax Super-Takumar 50/1.4 (the one with thorium, yay!) and a Samyang 85/1.4. Wide f*ing open, obviously :D I graded the whole thing in Resolve - and on that note, I love how easily the Ursa Mini image grades. Compared to the BMCC it's a bliss to work with. I used a very light film emulation and did the rest by myself, gave the highlights a bit of a glow and softened the image to give it a little bit of an 80's italian gore flick feel. That's all I guess, I'm personally very happy with the end product. I hope you guys like it!

I agree, Bright was a decent, fun movie. The critical reception it got was perhaps a good reminder that critics are just as prone to bandwagoning and empty virtue-signaling as any average joe.

Should've phrased that better. I'm sure it'll come to the sub-5000 market eventually, but I find it more likely we'll see them become common in upscale cinema cameras first.

It's pretty obvious the 5K is dead. I think it'll be a while before we'll see an actually good Super35 high-res global shutter sensor and I doubt it's going to come from the sub-5000-dollar market either. The one in BMD4K and Aja Cion was pretty much a disaster and it's likely Kinefinity hit the same problems they did (bad light sensitivity, insufficient DR with global shutter). Remember when BMD was saying the 4,6K sensor would have an on/off global shutter mode? Back then they said activating the global shutter would have a DR hit of 2-3 stops. I'm sure it ended up being way more, as the DR hit would indicate they probably weren't able to do a dual gain readout simultaneously with global shutter. I'm pretty sure something similar happened with Kinefinity - they just couldn't wrangle a competetive image out of the 5K GS.

I've yet to see any pleasing footage from the Cion. Though to be frank, after the horrible demo reels and the ugly videolike footage from early adopters, I haven't really sought it out much either.

Jesus Christ please don't turn this into an identity politics forum. That cancer has destroyed enough platforms already.

This is taking me back to memory lane, lol I used to underexpose back in the day quite a bit, mostly to protect the highlights, but also because imho on older HDV/HD cameras like the HV30 everything looked much more filmic when underexposed in the Cine gamma mode. I did this on the 550D as well, protected the highlights and underexposed by one stop. I got some pretty unique looking results that way. This was a feature I did on HV30. And this was on the 550D. Of course the subject matter in both is well suited for, well, a murkier look. Haven't found any reason to do that with any recent cameras though, and with Blackmagics I've swinged to the other side and stick to ETTR most of the time.

Having used Yuneec in a bunch of commercials (and full disclosure, having shot a few commercials for the Finnish branch of the company) I've taken a liking to their products. The drones themselves are pretty easy to use and surprisingly well built, there's a good amount of features packed into them and the image quality is surprisingly solid and I'd say easier to match to Blackmagic than say, an RX10 MK2. Also the controllers are a godsend. I hate having to use an Ipad/cellphone or whatever as a controller for a camera, having a robust controller with everything built in from the get go is just so much better it's not even funny.

Check your bitrate privilege.

The RX 10ii was the most disappointing thing since my son. Kidding, I have no son, but the RX10ii is definitely my most regretted camera purchase. The originally much-hyped "great 1080p" is camcordery and mushy, the colors are Sony at their worst and the sensor is noisy as hell. Combined with the slow (and painful to use due to shit focus-by-wire) lens it made the camera require insane amounts of light to produce useable slow-motion. In bright daylight or with huge lighting setups it could produce decent-for-youtube results but jesus christ was it a pain to use and completely soulless. Can't say I miss it one bit.

This is an old post, but yeah, the Tokina 11-16 is pretty bad in that regard. Very much an overrated lens imho, I've personally found it to have a very unpleasant look and some weird QC issues like elements getting out of whack and thus focus plane being uneven.

Just went and tested this out, 4,6k60p is available in lossless RAW as well as 3:1 and 4:1. The RAW/Prores compression ratios are completely separate from the frame rate/resolution.

The DSLR filmmaker community is funny. It's like "Gimme 8bit proxy, 10bit, RAW, Canon colour science, Log, 4K, IBIS, DPAF and HFR in one package, in A7S form factor, max 2500 bux. I need a silver bullet that covers all cinematography and videography scenarios but make it cheap because I'm not a pro and want to shoot flowers/cat in my garden with it. Also has to shoot on SD cards because Cfast is too expensive". There's no silver bullet for everything in cinematography. Every camera body and ecosystem has its compromises. You can hold out for the perfect dreamworld unicorn camera, or you can pick up one that fits your shooting style and then actually shoot something. Also, the C200 looks awesome and exciting - and daaaymn, official 4K RAW on an affordable Canon frame, without the unreliability of hacking stuff. Had I not sprung for an UM4,6K recently I'd be throwing my money at the Canon.

Yeah, that was BMCC. In Homecoming I used one LUT throughout the movie to have a consistent look, a Kodachrome emulation. So, one node, the rest was manual adjustments.

Yeah I completely agree when it comes to the small sensor BMD cameras. It was especially apparent when I was shooting BMCC and ML Raw side by side. The BMCC took a painful amount of grading in Resolve, something like 9-15 nodes, for the images to start looking good to me, whereas ML Raw it was just some small adjustments, something like 1-3 nodes. Same with ML Raw vs. any Sony I've used. There's something about the tonality and color separation that's leaps and bounds better on the Canons. The Ursa Mini 4,6K is the first Blackmagic I feel is approaching Canon when it comes to the ease of grading. It still requires some color separation in post, especially when it comes to isolating the skin tones, but it's way better than the old ones. I can get away with 4-6 nodes when using the Ursa.

Actually having used both side by side, I'd go out and say UM4,6K has the edge on the BMCC when it comes to dynamic range. You might have to shoot RAW and denoise the lowest few stops to get the most of it though. I feel UM4,6K has even more of the milky, high DR alexa look than the BMCC - not to mention the obvious things like resolution, frame size and frame rate it has going for it. Also the tonality and color separation are leaps and bounds better than the BMCC, not to mention something like the Sony cameras which tonally can't hold their own even against the older Blackmagics. Here are some of the stress tests I shot with the UM while urbexing with it. No controlled light, just direct sunlight and deep shadows. I'd say any of those would have issues on the BMCC with either the highlights or would exhibit heavy shadow grain. These were on Prores HQ so theoretically there might have been even more headroom if I had shot RAW.