After all those years still no camera can come close to Alexa's DR

[kye]

2 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Yeah I wish he had a wider variety of cameras. I sent him my Z-cam, which I no longer own a while back. He's still working on getting out the LUT for it. Understandable as its a tedious process and I doubt he makes a lot from it. 

 

I definitely get the push past 2k for VFX, however a lot of stuff is using minimal VFX and they are still shooting on 4k or 6k cameras like the LF. I meant the OG Alexa mini not the Mini LF, when I said it will lose demand in 10 years, like the Alexa Classic has. 

I am not sure where the Alexa LF will be in 10 years, it will definitely produce gorgeous imagery but the original Alexa Classic is still producing absolutely amazing imagery. Hard to say I guess. You'd hope a 60,000 investment is still good in 10 years.

You wouldn't catch me hoping that a 60k investment in a rapidly changing technological industry was still good in a decade!

I think the entire film and photography industry grew up in a little fantasy bubble about the way the world works because they started with film.  

Film was standardised and so that meant that any advancements were compatible with your camera and you were going to have to buy new film as you used it anyway.  Cost of upgrading image quality = 0.
Film was standardised and so that meant that your old camera was still good, basically forever, and was (almost) immune to obsolescence through innovation.  I say almost immune because stills camera manufacturers started inventing automatic features like auto-exposure and auto-focus which made people buy their cameras and lenses over and over and over again, but the film industry was immune even to this due to the manual workflows that the industry was based around (and still is).  Obsolescence of old equipment = 0.

These two things disguised the fact that buying cameras and lenses are investments in technology and technology is the most fertile ground for planned obsolescence that exists.  No, ARRI aren't deliberately driving the value of your investments into the dirt, but every manufacturer that makes TVs certainly is.

The evidence of this is the slow-motion car accident that is happening which is slowly bankrupting cinema chains, a computer company getting into the telephone industry and sending photography companies bankrupt, and the rise of online streaming services and decline of TV, etc.

[fuzzynormal]

On 5/9/2021 at 2:36 PM, kye said:

have very astute perception but lack the technical vocabulary to explain it.

Reminds me of anthropologist's wild speculation that humans have only recently learned to acutely experience the color blue.  The theory is that the capacity evolved through gradual etymology progress, which is a societal/cultural advancement not a biological one.

[kye]

5 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

Reminds me of anthropologist's wild speculation that humans have only recently learned to acutely experience the color blue.  The theory is that the capacity evolved through gradual etymology progress, which is a societal/cultural advancement not a biological one.

I've heard about that, but haven't read up on it enough to understand it.  Wasn't it a vocabulary thing?

[mrtreve]

The DR of the Mini LF is definitely worthwhile. Because of the small size, these are used all the time on shoots with small-to-moderate crews. I used mine yesterday with nothing but 2 camera assistants. One occasionally jumped in with a poly board for fill, but mostly leaning on the DR to let me expose for the subject and letting the clouds etc roll of to where they may.

It's a real get out of jail free card if you are thrown into challenging settings where you still need to work quickly and come out with nice results.

The new smaller cameras are getting close though which is also great.

[fuzzynormal]

7 hours ago, mrtreve said:

get out of jail free card

Well, the card itself cost 60K...

[kye]

13 hours ago, mrtreve said:

The DR of the Mini LF is definitely worthwhile. Because of the small size, these are used all the time on shoots with small-to-moderate crews. I used mine yesterday with nothing but 2 camera assistants. One occasionally jumped in with a poly board for fill, but mostly leaning on the DR to let me expose for the subject and letting the clouds etc roll of to where they may.

It's a real get out of jail free card if you are thrown into challenging settings where you still need to work quickly and come out with nice results.

The new smaller cameras are getting close though which is also great.

One thing that struck me from the tests was how neutral the over and under exposures are.  That's absolutely not the case on most other cameras, and I speak from experience here because I have routinely exposed things poorly in the past and then suffered in post when things didn't behave how I anticipated/hoped they would!

Once again, the cameras that most remind me of this trait is the original BMPCC and BMMCC, which use very little highlight rolloff, so the way you use them is to ETTR and pull things down in post, and they look very similar (I did tests), at least when overexposing things anyway, if things are underexposed then the results aren't so good.

It might even be that the usability of the DR of the Alexa is more useful than the sheer amount of it.

[IronFilm]

9 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

Well, the card itself cost 60K...

For some, that's cheaper than being in jail! haha

[fuzzynormal]

On 5/12/2021 at 2:18 PM, kye said:

I've heard about that, but haven't read up on it enough to understand it.  Wasn't it a vocabulary thing?

Yeah. And since this is a website about film and filmmaking, I’ll point out that this concept of vocabulary and perception is pretty much the entire plot of “Arrival,” fwiw. 

[mrtreve]

On 5/13/2021 at 4:46 PM, fuzzynormal said:

Well, the card itself cost 60K...

Haha fair point. The upside is things tend to sail through postproduction because they look so nice.

It's no fun being in editing jail, that's for sure.

[Eric lopez]

On 5/8/2021 at 12:40 AM, zerocool22 said:

I just wish they would place that sensor in a dslr/mirrorless body at an affordable price.

😂