Could anybody guide me towards getting good results with the AF100?

[Mike Harvey]

Adamsenoj, you're being rude. Folks have shot features before and it's turned out just fine (The Raid:Redemption... which I still need to see). There isn't anything more demanding about shooting a feature as a commercial. Insulting Erik's work by insinuating it isn't as involved as a feature shows a remarkable amount of ignorance for what he does. I've helped on plenty of commercial shoots like the type he works on and and the idea that image quality isn't important is complete bunk. It doesn't make you look more impressive, it makes you look arrogant and condescending.

XSVpro, you're just being childish. There's no need to start calling people a blundering idiot or being condescending. [EDIT: I see you responded at the same time I did, so partly ignore this]

Cool it folks. We're all pro's here... or at least supposed to be... let's try and act like it. The "AF100 sucks because of the way it blows highlights blah blah blah" has been done to death. The O.P. had a question, let's try to answer it and not beat this particular dead horse into oblivion anymore. It's getting old.

 

[PaPa]

It's threads like this that remind me why the boards went from (2005) people very excited about getting 24p, shooting, sharing, helping, discovering, cinematography, gadgets, to (2012) if the title doesn't mention "test" in it, either no one pays attention, and if people do, it's bound to just start a little flame war at some point.

So sad to see this site head in that direction, really is a shame. Passion here is hard to come by these days. Guess that's why so many great contributors have given up posting.

Oh well guys, balls in your court.

 

[XSVpro]

Yeah it was childish, this guy just hacks me off with his ignorance and from multiple threads now. It always goes the same way "buy a fricken GH2" (I ALREADY OWN ONE!).

This side of the forum is for AF100 owners and I would think more of us owners want to talk to/read from like minded people to push the camera to its limits and get what we can out of it, be that from Eric's experience as a news broadcaster or HSScully and he's narrative shorts (limited knowledge from me on you both guys, sorry). I dont think we want to constantly read threads on why we are fools and have bought the wrong camera, if i want that I could just post a few times in a RED or any other camera forum which would make me a troll as I'm just trying to stir a negative response, flogging a dead horse is never more relevant here.

Its ignorant pixel peeping arguments from the likes of Adamsenoj that make cameras defunct or at the other end of the spectrum put them on a pedestal as the all knowing all powerful (I.e. the 5D2 GH2) I mean come on, a 5D2/5D3 is cheaper than an AF100? Sure! as a brain but you try and replace what your missing functionally and you will spend a lot more and still not have some pretty crucial elements and comparing an F3 to the AF100? Functionally the same but you pay more for the F3 for its superior image and that's how it should be but I'm told my camera should be as cheap as a GH2 and provide the image of the F3 and not to use the price per feature argument when I mention the AF100?. Opinions like this don't improve an AF100 owners ability to create great images, it doesn't improve me as an operator/DP or forward my knowledge of cinematography, it just shouts at me "BUY ANOTHER CAMERA!" That's neither helpful or relevant to me and I would bet most owners here.

Adamsenoj as an AF100 owner you should help us push things forward with wisdom, experience and examples of work, if not just stay the f@@k behind the line, your in the way.

 

[hscully]

Guys, sometimes the conversation gets personal and that's pretty painful. We could just stop doing that without changing anything else. That's pretty easy.

It appears to me that we consider the outlier conditions as more important than what's inside the curve. We talk so much about highlight handling and low light capability. I think it's your job as DP to manage that stuff. I don't think you can allow your highlights to blow out on skin, at whatever you deem reasonable with the camera you're shooting with, and complain any more than you can shoot in near darkness and complain about noise. What's all that stuff in the truck for? AF100 is a cinema camera. Do you get mad when your manual focus goes soft? Do you curse your lenses? If you want to be able to follow focus and rack focus then you need to nail focus. It's your (or that hungover AC's) job! Likewise exposure, and managing color temperature and contrast ratios, etc. IN a daytime interior, if you're lit with tungsten and your shot goes out the window do you complain that its' all blue out there? No, you CTO the window, or CTB the tungsten or light with daylight light. That's your job.

I like that cameras do well with extreme conditions but if you go outside the usable boundries of any camera then you're outside them. It's between you and the light. Cameras are not eyes with brains attached and honestly I wouldn't want one. I think it's my responsibility to manage it, not the camera. That's the work and the fun for me. It's what I love about it. Finding the balance, the compromise that works best. My latest solution to shooting in broad daylight and get good shots was to pickup a butterfly scrim. It works great!

If you had a sport bike and you took a corner too wide and wound up putting it in the dirt, would you complain that this darn motorcycle doesn't handle corners very well?

The OP said he wanted to know how to get good results with the AF100. I only wished he'd shown us some of his work so that we could talk about defining the proper boundries to get good results... with the AF100.

 

[Jon Hout]

Guys, sometimes the conversation gets personal and that's pretty painful. We could just stop doing that without changing anything else. That's pretty easy.

It appears to me that we consider the outlier conditions as more important than what's inside the curve. We talk so much about highlight handling and low light capability. I think it's your job as DP to manage that stuff. I don't think you can allow your highlights to blow out on skin, at whatever you deem reasonable with the camera you're shooting with, and complain any more than you can shoot in near darkness and complain about noise. What's all that stuff in the truck for? AF100 is a cinema camera. Do you get mad when your manual focus goes soft? Do you curse your lenses? If you want to be able to follow focus and rack focus then you need to nail focus. It's your (or that hungover AC's) job! Likewise exposure, and managing color temperature and contrast ratios, etc. IN a daytime interior, if you're lit with tungsten and your shot goes out the window do you complain that its' all blue out there? No, you CTO the window, or CTB the tungsten or light with daylight light. That's your job.

I like that cameras do well with extreme conditions but if you go outside the usable boundries of any camera then you're outside them. It's between you and the light. Cameras are not eyes with brains attached and honestly I wouldn't want one. I think it's my responsibility to manage it, not the camera. That's the work and the fun for me. It's what I love about it. Finding the balance, the compromise that works best. My latest solution to shooting in broad daylight and get good shots was to pickup a butterfly scrim. It works great!

If you had a sport bike and you took a corner too wide and wound up putting it in the dirt, would you complain that this darn motorcycle doesn't handle corners very well?

The OP said he wanted to know how to get good results with the AF100. I only wished he'd shown us some of his work so that we could talk about defining the proper boundries to get good results... with the AF100.

I've refrained from posting in this thread because I didn't see much positive going on, but I have to say that hscully put it perfectly.

I've seen a lot of threads go this in this direction lately (blame the camera/each other), and I think it's hurting this place as a forum. Of course, there will always be trolls (not specifically referring to anyone here), but ultimately the personal comments are unproductive - regardless of how whether they're true, false, or in-between. I point people to this forum when they have questions or are looking for information, but lately I've had a couple of people come back to me and say they're intimidated by some of the responses they've seen to others' questions. That's not to say that some questions aren't worth answering (people who post questions with no footage, then misinterpret the answers), but attitudes seem to be getting out of control a bit lately. Just an observation.

I think hscully hit the nail on the head. We all know the AF100 has limits (as has every camera I've ever used since 16mm) but it can get spectacular results if you are aware of those limits and creatively work around them. It'd be nice if we could focus a bit more on that angle of discussion.

- Jon

 

[PaPa]

Back to something a little more contributing.. When I had the AF100, I discovered, like many of you, that the camera just won't allow any type of smooth transition to completely blown out without introducing some strange artifacts. Shooting something that was completely blown was fine. It looked completely blown, but the trouble was in the gradation of high exposure to completely blown. The comparisons here to what other cameras are capable of doing is a prime example of what the AF100 lacks. No reason to go in ot that any further, the subject has been beaten to death and warrants no place in trying to solve anything. That being said, there are certain things you can keep in mind while shooting. I began convincing myself that Panasonic created these Cine-like gamma curves to try and milk EVERY LAST BIT of information possible at the top end of exposure while still maintaining some type of detail. I reiterate, "SOME" type of detail. I think we can all agree that this detail is not useable detail. So, I changed the way I continued to use the AF100.

I tried doing a series of tests to see at what acceptable IRE did my AF100 produce acceptable image details while giving me a smooth roll off to either create in post, or play with. So i popped on a few lights, stuck a subject in front, turned on my marshal monitor with the "FALSE COLOR" option and started recording while adjusting my exposure by increments of 5 IRE at a time until i would begin to see unacceptable ( to my standards ) results. What I found out was anything on skin that went above 80-85 IRE exhibited that strange color shifting on skin tones. So? I just began treating 100 IRE as 85 IRE and went on shooting things that way as boosting 85 IRE to 100 IRE in post was a very small grade adjustment that allowed for a much smoother transition should i have chosen to bump things up slightly to a more blown look. Then I started adding more lights to my shadows and went on shooting happily ever after.

My suggestion, especially when dealing with skin, don't let any skin tones ever hit more than 80 IRE, 85 IRE is pushing it. I believed, and still do to this day, that Panasonic simply tried adding every little extra grain of DR to it's sensor by manipulating it's gamma curve creating an image that just can't really hold together, but did it anyway for the DR numbers.

So that's it. Pretend you don't have that extra stop of latitude on the high end. Treat 80-85 IRE as if it were 100 ( unless you're shooting indoors into a window where everything outside is blown, which is fine, cause it will be blown without gradation ). This made me learn to control my lighting a little bit more.

A couple of images that I was happy with given the number of hands we had, the gear and time. Not saying these are perfect, but I think it illustrates my point well:

You can see footage of our web series at www.cubedtheshow.com - everything shot on the AF100 save for the opening hello video and the end of each clip.

 

[XSVpro]

Absolute fantastic work papa, ill look into your series. Great to see work like this being done with the AF!

 

[XSVpro]

Any chane of knowing your settings and lens choices? I think your above examples and sound IRE advice is the way to go judging by your results.

 

[Erik Naso]

PaPa you did a great job with the series. Not an easy task. The lighting is very good heck all around great job. Thanks for sharing.

 

[PaPa]

Thanks for checkign it out guys. Have had ilttle to no feedback in my thread or in the user films section, hence my frustration with where the site is headed in terms of user contribution. But hey, I'm going to play my part to keep these boards the way they used to be, fun, inventive and helpful.

XSVpro, all lenses used were:

Tokina 11-16
Nikon 24mm F2
Nikon 35mm F2
Nikon 50mm F1.4
Nikon 85mm F2
Nikon 105mm F2.5

I found getting most of my exposed image around 40-50 IRE made things nice and yummy looking.

 

[Barry_Green]

Once upon a time I did an examination of the chroma clipping effect, and found that when using standard gammas and standard color saturation settings, about 82 IRE was the max you could get before the red channel started clipping (on skin tones). Which, frankly, should be fine, in normal scenarios -- skin should be exposed at a maximum of 70 IRE in its very hottest brightest spots, so having a range up to 82 should suffice. But if you need to extend that range, turning down the chroma level gives you additional range, and using cine-D also gives you some more range. Using chroma level -7 and cine-D, you can get your skin tones up to the low 90's before chroma clipping comes into play.

 

[hscully]

Looks great Papa. I really like the lighting a lot throughout. The performances are great, just a nice job all around.

 

[hscully]

Once upon a time I did an examination of the chroma clipping effect, and found that when using standard gammas and standard color saturation settings, about 82 IRE was the max you could get before the red channel started clipping (on skin tones). Which, frankly, should be fine, in normal scenarios -- skin should be exposed at a maximum of 70 IRE in its very hottest brightest spots, so having a range up to 82 should suffice. But if you need to extend that range, turning down the chroma level gives you additional range, and using cine-D also gives you some more range. Using chroma level -7 and cine-D, you can get your skin tones up to the low 90's before chroma clipping comes into play.

Yeah I think that's where I got the idea to set the zebra at 70%... once upon a time

 

[XSVpro]

Thanks for checkign it out guys. Have had ilttle to no feedback in my thread or in the user films section, hence my frustration with where the site is headed in terms of user contribution. But hey, I'm going to play my part to keep these boards the way they used to be, fun, inventive and helpful.

XSVpro, all lenses used were:

Tokina 11-16
Nikon 24mm F2
Nikon 35mm F2
Nikon 50mm F1.4
Nikon 85mm F2
Nikon 105mm F2.5

I found getting most of my exposed image around 40-50 IRE made things nice and yummy looking.

wow! So not super expensive pl glass either just solid slr lenses the AF100 and a damn good eye for lighting! This is what it's about people, real DP craft, fantastic!

 

[Cinesota]

Sorry Papa, I have been over to that thread and looked at your stuff, just never commented. To echo the others, looks great. Dead on exposures.

Just want to make sure I read your previous post correctly. You use 85 ire as a replacement for 100 ire zebras? Will have to give that a try.

Normally I set my zebras at 100 and 75 ire. I use the 75 for closeups and to check skin tones. Using 75, I open up the aperture until I just see zebra stripes in the hot spots then back it off until the stripes disappear. I know the normal practice is to let a little bit of zebra show in the hot spots but my thinking is once those zebras show up I have no idea how far over those areas are. By bumping down the exposure just enough to get rid of the zebras I'm confident nothing is above 75 ire. If in doubt, I use the waveform to double check things and it usually puts me in the 65-70% range. Using this method I rarely clip.

I also use Low gamma with a mid knee and chroma at -3.

...and don't be afraid to use the DRS function. At 1 it has minimal impact on the overall image and it's saved my butt many times when I had a high contrast shot where I couldn't control the lighting.

 

[hscully]

Yes, if I have those skin tones hovering just above 50 they seem to do really well. I'll let them drop below a little bit to get a better shot if something's a little hot. Under is good. I have to admit that I have never tried the DRS function. I'm going to experiment a little with that.

 

[PaPa]

Sorry Papa, I have been over to that thread and looked at your stuff, just never commented. To echo the others, looks great. Dead on exposures.

Just want to make sure I read your previous post correctly. You use 85 ire as a replacement for 100 ire zebras? Will have to give that a try.

Normally I set my zebras at 100 and 75 ire. I use the 75 for closeups and to check skin tones. Using 75, I open up the aperture until I just see zebra stripes in the hot spots then back it off until the stripes disappear. I know the normal practice is to let a little bit of zebra show in the hot spots but my thinking is once those zebras show up I have no idea how far over those areas are. By bumping down the exposure just enough to get rid of the zebras I'm confident nothing is above 75 ire. If in doubt, I use the waveform to double check things and it usually puts me in the 65-70% range. Using this method I rarely clip.

I also use Low gamma with a mid knee and chroma at -3.

...and don't be afraid to use the DRS function. At 1 it has minimal impact on the overall image and it's saved my butt many times when I had a high contrast shot where I couldn't control the lighting.

I just meant that I try not to let anything in my image ( save for windows ) go beyond 85 IRE if i can avoid it.

 

[groveChuck]

Where do I start?

Erik- it wouldn't have surprised me if you bailed on the forum, much less this thread, but you're still here- class, man!
I admire you and your Emmy winning work (and know how demanding it is)- any insuation otherwise is absurd.

scully- words of wisdom, said with grace my man...

PaPa- I too saw the series, neglected to comment (forgive me), will here- lots of work, looks great, funny stuff!

Editman (as you were known in your AF100 days)- thanks for stopping by and continuing to share thoughts and advice on a camera you don't even have anymore!

All of you (and many, many others)- thanks for posting your work, sharing stills, giving suggestions, assistance and advice.

Last, (definitely not least) adamsenoj:
Why did you get the AF100?
Why do you still have it?
Why don't you stick to the GH2 if you prefer it?
Why do you spend so much time repeatedly pointing out one camera's weaknesses when you could be:
Out shooting.
Sharing your work.
Giving your specific examples of problems you've encountered?
Doing something, anything, more productive than repeating your "blown highlights" argument ad nauseum?
Sure, you're entitled to share your opinion, but it appears to many you only have one. Are you just a loop?

The forum may not be the community it once was (few things are as they grow exponentially).
But the AF100 sub-community is a good one- a wide range of all types of work, levels of experience, locations, ages, degrees of curmudgeoness- you name it, we've got it.

Let's just be sure to keep it... and keep filling those SD cards up with great images... cheers, gents :beer:

 

[Cinesota]

groveChuck I know you mean well but please don't encourage him. We were just getting this thread back on track. If I've learned anything about trolls is it's best just to ignore them. Barring that make it clear they aren't welcome. Speaking for myself I hope I don't see him on this forum again.

 

[Jon Hout]

Yes, if I have those skin tones hovering just above 50 they seem to do really well. I'll let them drop below a little bit to get a better shot if something's a little hot. Under is good. I have to admit that I have never tried the DRS function. I'm going to experiment a little with that.

I have to say, I was able to use DRS to good effect on a shoot a couple of weekends ago (thanks to some of Barry's advice in an old thread). The shoot took place entirely outside with bright sunlight both days, and I was still able to keep the sky in range with very little noise in the blacks. I found DRS 1 to be very useful, but I'd stay away from DRS 2 and 3. Here's a still from that scene (ungraded):



- Jon