I find the way the EX cameras blow out the highlights much less disturbing. It is still ugly though, specially again with cine gammas. But it's not only about blowing the highlights but also when it blows the highlights. Any little shiny spot or brighter spot on the skin will look ugly with the AF100 unless you pretty much kill it or is soft lighting, meaning the transition between highs and lows is very soft. The camera just can't handle sudden contrast changes that well. It's very limiting. This is true with cine gammas, B.Press, HD Norm with knee settings, doesn't matter. Not even soft clip in Resolve can help much. It also tends to produce some very ugly plastic like spots on the top of people's noses under direct sun light, like posteurization or something, even if the skin is correctly exposed. Very disturbing. I shot in an overcast day with very low contrast and soft light and got those ugly patches on the top of the noses. No blown highlights at all but the patches are still there. The worse thing is you can't see it till you get back and look at it in a large monitor. Not even an on board monitor will show it. It's still skin color and not really a different color than the skin around it, but it looks much smoother and has no detail on it. It's not blowing though.
You pretty much have to have a flatter look on the face for it to look good. Underexpose under soft light and it looks good. But I can only think what a nightmare it would be shooting a film noir project with the AF100. But to shoot KinoFlo ultra soft lighting with low 2:1 contrast ratios in a controlled studio environment the camera does well.
Unfortunately exposing properly with the AF100 means underexposing and pretty much killing ALL your highlights on the skin. This is basically what the proposed skin exposure method by Barry in his DVD and by others all over this forum do. When you set exposure to show 70% zebras only on the very very very hottest highlights it produces basically a flat image on the face. You effectively kill all your highlights. You can bring some of the contrast back in post but only so much before the codec starts falling apart. This is not something I'm assuming, it's something I have tested and something that there is no way around. Using this proposed method of exposing will flatten your image. You can play with how much 70% zebras you show in your highlights but there's a sweet spot between looking murky and the highlights starting to look ugly again and this sweet spot is still too flat unfortunately. This was the way I exposed skins for the remaining of the project because it was the only way it would look decent.
You know the interesting thing? The last 2 days I shot another project with the Alexa and guess what? Not a problem. I know it's way more expensive but it also goes to show that cameras can be blamed. It's just here that the general attitude is if somebody criticizes the beloved camera they have purchased it must be operator error and not a limitation of the camera. That of course until they sell their camera. Then it becomes limited and this is the reason they sold it. I can see that people who posted recently in this or other threads defending the AF100 have already sold theirs for example.
About all the requests for posting material showing the problem, I don't have permission to post the stuff I shot and I couldn't find anybody willing to volunteer to have their faces stamped on an internet forum for the sake of the tests. So I'm trying to describe the problems as well as I can and I know it's not that hard to understand them, specially when you can see all of it in AF100 footages all over the web. So I know I'm not the only one getting these results obviously.
I could shoot landscapes and buildings but this is not where the problem is. You have to have skin in the shot.
By the way, before people start defending the great camera and bashing the operator again, here's my basic workflow with the camera:
I white balance and black balance before EVERY shot.
When exposing skin I adjust the iris so that only the brightest highlights on the skin show 70% zebras while making sure nothing shows 95% zebras unless I have no control of it, as a building in the background or something.
The settings i used for daylight outdoors shooting was:
Detail level:-6
Vertical detail level:-6
Detail coring:-4
Chroma level:-7
Chroma phase:-2
Master ped:-2
Gamma:Cine-Like-D
Matrix:Norm2
By the way, the reason I chose the AF100 for this project was because the options were either a 5D, EX1R or AF100. So I decided to go with the AF100 since they wanted a shallow DOF look and the 5D is a very hard to work with camera. I was also only given 2 days to test the camera before starting shooting. All in all it turned out OK. Nothing breathtaking and nobody will mistake the footage for Epic or Alexa.
Don't get me wrong. I don't totally dislike the camera. From an usability point of view it's a dream! No DSLR or EVIL camera can touch it. The FS100 or FS700 don't hold a candle either. You need a F3 to compare.
It was also very reliable and never let me down while shooting 12-14 hours days for 2 weeks. The built quality is great too.
The 4/3 sensor was not much of an issue. It was annoying in the beginning having to shoot with wider lenses and almost never being able to go longer, and the deeper focus was a bit deeper than we would all have liked it. But it was fine once you got used to it. I'm sure shooting with ridiculously fast F0.95 lenses would produce shallow enough DOF. But shooting with normal F2 lenses and having to stop down at least a stop for better lens sharpness, which would have been perfectly fine in super 35, made some shots too deep in the focus department since we had to go so wide all the time.
I never really had any sharpness problems. A lot of people complain the camera is not sharp enough. Well, RED it ain't, yes. But it's more than sharp enough unless for very wide shots of foliage etc. I was perfectly fine with the sharpness and is not a complain at all.
All together I really like everything about the camera besides the highlight handling and some small dumb design things like the focus assist. Look, it's just dumb, stupid and retarded. Accept it and move on.
Also, why the camera doesn't give you the color temperature after you white balance? If you have it on the preset it will show on the LCD, but otherwise it only shows Ach or Bch. Not even shows after white balance is completed. it only says WB OK. Did I miss something?
On the subject of white balancing, how exactly the color temperature for the white balance channels work? You change it after or before you white balance?
