Digital Bolex night footage
- Thread starter Razz16mm
- Start date
snowblindfilm
Carbonite Member
All the reds look not natural at all.
combatentropy
Veteran
I saw the same thing happen in the Ikonoskop's early test footage. I don't know if they ever fixed it or if I just didn't notice it in later footage. Yeah, the red channel looks like it's clipping before either of the others or something.
GaryNattrass
Veteran
Don't know if it's the lighting but it all looks very green to me!
David W. Jones
Veteran
Not very impressed.
Blue green mercury vapor street lights. It can be white balanced out, but that doesn't look exactly right for the scene.
resonance_image
Active member
The grading on the night test footage is way off, the stills posted look awesome. Shooting with CinemaDNG cameras requires an understanding of the workflow otherwise you can get funky results. I see it all the time with older Ikonoskop footage, some looked amazing and some looked terrible. The usual culprit is not treating the files right. I rent my camera out and really go over the workflow with people otherwise they won't get the results they're expecting. I'd love to get my hands on the DB and shoot it along with my Ikonoskop to see how they match up.
Contact Joe Rubenstein @theycallmejoe or @DigitalBolex on twitter. They are currently shooting tests with the production prototype in LA area. Maybe you can arrange a meet.
The chart shot is from a custom DCP D65 chart profile created in Adobe's camera profile editor, then white balanced off the chart in the shot. Processed in Raw Therapee.
Maybe I'm crazy, but i love the image coming off of the camera. That Kodak CCD sensor, really does something magical to the image to my eye. Very similar to the Ikonoskop, which i love and wish I could get my hands on. I'm pumped for this camera and will be in line when they are available. That being said I see what everyone is saying as well, I think in this day in age, its just pick your poison when it comes to cameras.
You're not crazy
The d16 seems to have a polarizing effect on people. Especially here. While some are really excited for s16 raw with pro audio from independent producers, others don't take it seriously or appear to have negative things to say about every little aspect about the camera, it's founders, and it's supporters even. Which they have every right to - don't get me wrong.
It has quiet ever since DB started releasing footage though ;-)
You're not crazy
The d16 seems to have a polarizing effect on people. Especially here. While some are really excited for s16 raw with pro audio from independent producers, others don't take it seriously or appear to have negative things to say about every little aspect about the camera, it's founders, and it's supporters even. Which they have every right to - don't get me wrong.
It has quiet ever since DB started releasing footage though ;-)
I'm really loving the tonal qualities I'm getting from some of these samples working with a sophisticated stills raw processing app: Raw Therapee. So far I'm using RT to debayer the DNG sequences to 4:4:4 best quality 8-bit JPEGS and importing them into Lightworks for editing and final touch up grades. Tried 16 bit TIFFs, but my old laptop choked on them. Have to wait until the new workstation build is finished for that. This is not a fast workflow. There is a lot going on the the raw processing stage and it took about 17 seconds per frame to debayer and encode the jpegs.
I used HDR tone mapping and micro contrast by detail levels to get the look along with just the slightest touch of noise reduction. I like the result of this better than conventional curves and sharpening techniques. but it is very processor intensive. Color is just white balance taken from an in frame reference point with saturation and overall contrast boosted a bit in Lightworks.
Here is a short clip that followed this workflow: DNG>JPEG sequences>H.264 using only these two apps. The original H.264 file was 90MB, Vimeo crunched it to 9MB, but it still held up surprisingly well. Shot with a 220 degree shutter, so there is more than normal motion blur.
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resonance_image
Active member
This looks really good, are you using RT on a Mac? I tried it and found it very slow compared to Lightroom but its free and you can add noise reduction. I use this type of stills workflow for tricky scenes like night shots that you really want to pull a lot of range and detail out of and need to clean up with noise reduction.
I'm using RT on a PC. Yes it is definitely slow. But it has such a wide range of options and I'm not time constrained by commercial production schedules. Except for noise reduction, as far as I can tell it is a single threaded app and uses CPU only. No GPU. Definitely like the results though.
I am also impressed with the H.264 encoding quality in Lightworks. Comes out very clean with no serious macro blocking or banding. Of course starting with a clean minimally compressed full color resolution source helps a lot. I think a lot of the bad artifacts in some videos come from re-compressing low bandwidth 8-bit 4:2:0 originals.
After RT, this is a 100% 8-bit workflow for now. That is all my old Core2 Duo laptop can handle. Don't have the data transfer rates to support 16 bit.
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snowblindfilm
Carbonite Member
I think it has more to do with marketing of the company. First of all, by now DB is on the same track as RED Scarlet, which is basically an endless delay. Second is the footage itself- if you watch GoPro footage reel, it makes you want to run out and buy the camera. It's supposed to be a camera for film makers- go and do a film, instead of releasing a bunch of shots. The hype build up, the hypster marketing, but the footage and the use of the footage doesn't simply live up to the hype. The other thing is this "in-crowd" mentality- that is really turning me off. The same way I would never buy RED, due to fanatical behavior of some of the board members. For me a camera is just a tool, it doesn't up my status, it doesn't make me a better film maker. The footage released looked so-so, and most definitely is not backed up by some great creativity.
Andrius Simutis
Veteran
Yeah, I agree with you too. One of the guys from Digital Bolex, and I'm paraphrasing here, said that it was purely test shots and that they're sharing the steps they're taking in the development of the camera and its color science. That's nice, but these days the bar is set pretty high and anything that carries your logo will be expected to be a finished marketing piece. They need to stop releasing complete videos until the camera is dialed in. If it's really just test footage, then drop it as a couple shots with no music and clearly label it as test footage.