AF100 vs the Rest shootout

T

Thomas Church

Active member
Is anyone planning a AF100/5D/60d/GH2/RED shootout soon?

I obviously want to get an AF100, but the price (and availability) of the Birger mount was a bit of a letdown for me, to be honest.

I wish we had someting cheaper (around 300 bucks) that I could just walk into BH and buy.

It's gonna cost a lot to be able to use the Canon glass we already have.
 
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A shootout would be cool. Been checking Adam Wilt's site - he usually does this sort of thing. Have to wait 'til we start seeing the AF100s shipping, I guess.
(Maybe add the EX-1, too)

I'm in the same boat with the Canon lenses. The Birger does look pretty cool, though. Especially if it will have remote control capability.
 
The price isn't nearly the bother for me as the availability. Mid-February? What happened to a concurrent release?
 
Film definitely has the advantage with latitude - hands down. Now, how they compare on the big screen - side by side, might be another matter - with 16mm' s grain.
 
I'd imagine a proper shootout would want the same lenses across the different cameras- in this case the easy choice would point to PL.

If anyone wants to set up a shootout in LA, I can have my CP.2s setup for PL, and hopefully Abel will have an AF100+HotRod waiting for me next week. Any GH2/HotRod setups floating around to match up with a RED?
 
The grades were done by the same colorist, with me in the room at the same time. We weren't necessarily trying to match the grades. Instead, we worked with the AF-100 in the context of the edit, and worked with the film in a way that it "felt" it wanted to go.

If that makes any sense.
 
Grading the footage for the film is, of course, essential, but I don't understand the merit of calling this a comparison when the grades are so dissimilar. My natural bias is to prefer the warmer look of the film grade, but how can we tell if the AF100 is capable of the same look from this? I guess I just don't understand the philosophy of not grading the film to look like the AF100 grade; seems to me that would have been more instructive, but I do thank you for sharing the clips.

Good shooting and best regards,

Leo
 
Wasn't the color on the AF also tweaked down a bit and desaturated when filming? The film definitely has more "Umph" to it. But I'd say it's mainly the color that is throwing people off on this comparison. If the AF footage were a bit more saturated and graded to match the film I think the differences would be much more subtle.
 
The AF-100 footage was shot to be more "flat," as we knew we were going to be grading for the look we wanted.

Again, I would provide examples of the raw film clips as well, but I don't have them at the moment.
 
Jarek Zabczynski said:
Wasn't the color on the AF also tweaked down a bit and desaturated when filming? The film definitely has more "Umph" to it. But I'd say it's mainly the color that is throwing people off on this comparison. If the AF footage were a bit more saturated and graded to match the film I think the differences would be much more subtle.
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I agree with you. At this point the footage from the AF100 cannot be pushed to the saturation of the film stock...So what would be nice is to see the film de-saturated in the same fashion, and then a comparison made.

Obviously it would be possible to match the film stock to the AF100 footage so that they look identical.
 
Paul Vicente said:
At this point the footage from the AF100 cannot be pushed to the saturation of the film stock.
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Whoa -- hold your horses there... the AF100 can be configured to be way, way, way, way more saturated than any film stock! Our palette that we shot "Verse" with was very muted, I think the color level was set to all the way down to its lowest possible setting, -7. Set at +7, it would have blown the doors off the joint with color. Would have looked like The Wizard of Oz.

Obviously it would be possible to match the film stock to the AF100 footage so that they look identical.
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That's the thing about shootouts, and why I never really want to do one ever again -- everyone will always complain about how you did it. If we graded the film to look exactly like the AF100, people would then say "well what's the point in that? We want to see how the film can do more than the AF100" or, on the other hand, they'd say "what's the point in that? We want to see how the AF100 can do more than film" or ... whatever.

I have encountered no more thankless job than "the shootout"...
 
lol @ it would have looked like wizard of oz
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Seriously, you've got major control over the color saturation. In a prior test I did between the HVX and the XHA1, I found that if you set the XHA1 on its most-saturated-possible mode, it barely matched what the HVX did at its midpoint (0 on a scale of -7 to +7). You could keep cranking that color up and up and up... and the AF100 has the same settings and the same mojo.

Here's a sample of the AF100 at -7 versus +7. Look how the color just burns your retinas out.
chroma-levels.jpg

And that's without the cine-matrix! Turn that on and it takes it from +7 to, well, more like +9 or so. You can get really, amazingly saturated color out of an AF100.
 
OK, time to be a little more direct. As a 16MM film v. AF100 test, this exercise is of almost no value. You might be able to infer some aspects, such as resolution, but the most important attributes, color and dynamic range, cannot be determined by this footage.

When dealing with film v. digital cameras the job is complicated by the very wide range of settings on the digital camera. Film is easy; you expose properly on test charts and then transfer accordingly. You can then test the range of grade you can achieve without introducing unacceptable problems. With the digital camera, what settings do you choose? In this case, it seems the camera was not set for what might be considered "nominal" and then the grade was applied to create a look dramatically different from the film grade and not to show the color capabilities of the camera.

The AF100 was setup and the footage was graded to suit the director's vision; this is as it should be, but no valid judgement on 16MM v. AF100 can be drawn from this.

Good shooting and best regards,

Leo
 
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