Arri Amira vs Sony F35

macgregor

Veteran
Well I have both cameras here getting some dust so I decided to play with them.

Some comparisons coming:

 
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amiravsf35.jpg

Amira on the left, F35 on the right. Veeery close to me. (download for full resolution). With the Davinci Alexa-709 lut the blues are a bit more electric than they should but easy to dial down, so I wouldn´t worry to much about that.

The Amira applies some kind of sharpening that makes the footage look like a nice 35mm scan. The F35 seems to resolve more details and shows no traces of sharpening. Interesting.

I am going to test setting the F35 on F900 color gamut instead of Sgamut. I think for normal users it might be better.
 
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thank you Mac so much for this - can you attach a larger screengrab? I'll paypal you money for doing this test - we should all chip in when someone does a test. Because you are saving me time and money - Mac you are a great guy - our leader, our hero.

the video was great - so basically just add some sharpening in the image to f35 and you are good to go!
 
The old lady is still in competition.

Both images are insanely filmic, just shooting a random object with absolutely nothing cinematic about it. They both really are quite remarkeable for digital images as someone who used to shoot 35mm.

So which package the Amira is in the test? 1080p, 2.8k or 4k (upscaled 3.2k) ? Recorded internally? To 4:2:2/4:4:4?

The F35 does scale down from a higher resolution sensor (5k vs 3.2k in UHD and 2.8k in 1080p), huge resolution difference, so I am not surprised if it does resolve more than the amira when both are delivered in 1080p.
 
I wonder if recording the F35 to 12-bit DPX would gain much (probably not too much)

Either way, awesome for you to test. Thanks! And thanks to Ed for working with CD. All of you rock! I love my weird heavy gray camera cubes called the F35
 
amiravsf35.jpg


Lets try now. (the browser resamples the image, "save it as" for full res)
I'll be posting more clips and stuff later.
 
Alexa on the left? really? Judging from these grabs, The image on the right is markedly better, better resolution without digital sharpening effect, better colors and just a better image to look at to my eye (there's even slight moire present in the left image on the left building). Same with the video but the difference is much more clear with the stills.
 
More more more!!!! :) :)

What's the shadow roll off and noise floor on both like? Also just general noise in the image and dark grey colours?

And the big question, do you like the motion more on one?

Cheers Mac!
 
This isn't the end all test comparisons, y'all. It's a quick test thank you Mac - I'm sure once you start going at it with test charts, etc etc then you'll see differences. But further proof to my eyes, that old tech if it's good, it's still good forever. Mac's philosophy. A 2003 Porsche is still better than a 2015 Kia. As I quote his gospel.
 
Awesome like always mac! But no suprise F35 look better right? Amira image basically same as Alexa I think and you always said you like F35 more:

To me, the F35 delivers the best film look of all current cameras. Yep, above Alexa and F65. And I´m not saying it's the best. I´m just saying it produces the best looking footage. The alexa might have more DR, the F65 might produce cleaner footage but to me they don't look as good as the Genesis/F35.

You think anything change with Amira image compare to Alexa?

But F35 is a monster! Umbelieveble.
 
More more more!!!! :) :)

What's the shadow roll off and noise floor on both like? Also just general noise in the image and dark grey colours?

And the big question, do you like the motion more on one?

Cheers Mac!


I think mac already asnwer that question with alexa. I think it maybe same with amira?

To me, the F35 delivers the best film look of all current cameras. Yep, above Alexa and F65. And I´m not saying it's the best. I´m just saying it produces the best looking footage. The alexa might have more DR, the F65 might produce cleaner footage but to me they don't look as good as the Genesis/F35. Of course this is subjetive to everyone. But I could support my pov with 2 facts.
The Red One or the Alexa for example have tons of Dynamic range, but it's mostly allocated in the shadows. To the point of having something like 7 stops of shadows and just 3 and a half stops in the highlights. Film doesn't work like that. Film shows way more dynamic range above mid gray. The F35, up to a point works in that way, delivering more detail in the highlights than in the shadows (I think it´s the only camera to do this actually, about 6 stops of highlights and about 5 stops of shadows). So this produces footage that resembles how film stock portrays reality. And I like that.
Also the tone curve is very pleasent and doesn't scream digital as many other cameras do. Skintones looks just right and not plastic (ie: Red).

You could say, hey but the F3 shoots in Slog! Isn't that the same then? Meeeh, nice try, but the short answer is not. I've shot a lot with the F3 and while it produces very clean images, it doesn't look very filmic where the F35 does. Not the same colorimetry. After all, Sony use to sell the F35 for like $180K for a reason I guess...

The 2nd reason why I decided to go with this camera (besides the drop in price) is that we no longer need to carry a heavy HDCAM SR with it. Today, an inexpensive Hyperdeck shuttle will record beautifull 10bit 422 DNxHD files, ready to edit in real time (premiere, vegas, AE, Scratch...), easy to grade and really fast to copy. Perfect workflow.

Alexa looks plasticy. And while you can set mid grey where you want it easily, it is no that easy to cut the dr in the shadows to a given amount.
 
thank you Mac so much for this - can you attach a larger screengrab? I'll paypal you money for doing this test - we should all chip in when someone does a test. Because you are saving me time and money - Mac you are a great guy - our leader, our hero.

the video was great - so basically just add some sharpening in the image to f35 and you are good to go!

Not sure I like more sharpness add to F35. IMO is sharp enough in the screengrab.
 
Took the images in Vegas and looked on a calibrated highend Eizo monitor,

first of all, apart from these specific cameras, I am extremely impressed with the JPEG compression quality. I mean I can puch the shadows, bring down highlights, push and pull the image with no and visible degradation in quality occurs from what I am used to from these cameras. Only issue is banding from an 8bit container, other than that I think these Jpegs do represent the actual quality. Is there a secret to getting such HQ Jpegs mac? Mine are certainly not!

On to the images, the F35 has a significantly more red in the mid tones, while the Amira has less red (more green-ish), so to match both images I reduced the red in the f35 midtones just ever so slightly, and they match perfectly, at least here on my monitor.

The resolution: these images are extremely close, in all respects. There's a very minor resolution advantage for the f35 over the Amira image, but what's more important regarding this point, is that the Amira's image has a digital sharpening effect/look while the F35 shows no trace of that feel whatsoever, just pure organic detail. They're close anyway in resolution, especially if there's a setting on the Amira to turn off the sharpening.

The colours are also quite similar here, where they differ radically is in the blue palette, the blues in the Amira image don't look realistic at all, film doesn't show blue in that cartoonish way if I may say but it can be corrected either way to match, not that easy though!

Dynamic range is the worst quality to judge here from a compressed jpeg, but for what it's worth, they are about the same here, with similar shadow cleanness and similar highlights. I am sure the Amira original image contains more DR than the f35, it should.

Artefacts, I can see there's no artefacts (aliasing/moire and digital edges) on the f35, even on the finest of lines, while the Amira shows a minor amount of moire on the left building, which is quite odd, it shouldn't do that should it? It's a pretty demanding pattern though to be clean.

This is all I could gather from these JPEGs, that they are pretty damn close, but the f35 is very slightly just better overall. (More files please! Hopefully 16bit Tiffs to really judge DR accurately)

Thanks for the great opportunity you're giving us to compare these hard-to-find-online cameras!
 
Just FYI...

The Amira has debayering level detail and sharpness settings. The "Detail" parameter seems to be how much luma resolution the debayering algorithm adds back into the image.

You can get incredibly snappy images on the Amira by upping detail to +4 or 5.
 
Just FYI...

The Amira has debayering level detail and sharpness settings. The "Detail" parameter seems to be how much luma resolution the debayering algorithm adds back into the image.

You can get incredibly snappy images on the Amira by upping detail to +4 or 5.

Right. I have it at 0 at the moment.

The Amira has more DR than the F35, hands down. If I look closely at the blown out window I get to see like more stop at least (and I bet there's at least 1 more stop in the shadows). And the Amira shoots 50p, all the way up to 200fps! And it does 800ISO and decent 1600iso. And it has built in ND filters. And records internally in a very nice codec. I mean, the clear winner is going to be the Amira of course.

Now, for the current price of the F35, look how damn close and how good the F35 looks to the Amira. I think it's a bargain.

Regarding sharpening/detail. The F35 resolves more with zero unsharp mask artifacts. That's astonishing. The Amira/alexa can't get that level of detail at 1080p. There are pros/cons with this though, as the slightly softer image of the Amira/alexa in 1080p seems more like film stock (I some times blur the F35 a little bit in post and resharpen it to get this effect to emulate film stock), but this F35 advantage is great when stabilizing or resizing shots because you´re not enhancing sharpening halos.

Properly exposed they both seem to show the same level of noise. I can see that in the couch for example.
In low light conditions the Amira is better, the F35 needs more light for some reason to look good.

The F35 produces warmer pictures than the Amira (and pretty much any other camera). It´s a topic we've discussed before. You need to cool it down in post to get the right balance.
I was also surprised to see how similar the tone curve on the Amira+davincinresolve lut looks to the F35+myslog lut.

If you noticed it I didn't even mention which camera is which on the clip I posted. That's for you to decide (you can probably tell by the blues or the detail).
But it was a good test. Now I can shoot with the F35 with enough confidence to say that the end result will pretty much look the same as if I had shot on the Amira/alexa.

BTW, check that other clip I posted Amira vs A7s in 4K, they also look pretty close, but it´s not strange since the A7s was not that far off the F35 if properly graded.
 
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More and more its becomming lens and lighting and grading choices. All cameras are getting more and more similar sensors and processors
 
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