Digital Bolex weeks away

Razz16mm said:
I have participated in the installation of 35mm film projection systems in small to medium size theaters, up to about 40 ft wide screens that included projecting resolution chart films. None ever exceeded 850 lphh. So if the D16 at 2k makes 800 lpph which is realistic with cine quality glass, does so without the aliasing common to most low end cameras because it has a higher fill factor sensor, a proper critically matched OLPF and is not limited to poor quality debayer algorithms like real time single chip video cameras then I and many others will be quite happy. I expect the D16 to resolve about like the Red Epic does shot at 2k S16 crop. Maybe a little better because it is optimized for 2k and the Epic does lose a bit from compression though it is still raw.


Suzy and I went to the Metropolitan opera's Live at the Met broadcast of Prince Igor last week in a 4k theater. Probably shot on Sony HDcam 2/3" 3-chip 1080p cameras and finished on tape from the look of it. The D16 looks significantly better on a large screen than that show did.
As to sensitivity, current gen DSLR's produce their best quality widest DR raw images at ISO speeds between 200 and 400 by DXOmark's tests. Their test cutoff point for ISO vs quality is at 18dB S/N ratio or 3 stops effective DR. No camera they have tested exceeds about 3200 ISO with the Nikons being the current champs. Thinking in extremes might give the wrong impression about how the D16 performs in low light, though that is not its primary strength.

Sample NY times square shoot by Brian Morgan:

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Being a native NY'er for 35yrs and having shot in Times Square (begrudgingly usually) many times, I have to say that I don't see what the appeal is to this new D16 image. Basically, if you cannot get your image to look great there, then it may be a lost cause.


I'm seeing a ton of magenta washed over most of these clips everywhere (including Bloom's), the dynamic range appears somewhat limited, the roll-off looks awful and of course there's that horrific pink highlight break at clipped levels.


This baby may need more time to cook. Being a freak for super 16mm film, this doesn't remind me of any that I've seen and or shot. Not even a little. I just don't get it and I've (like many of you) had experience with a ton of cameras. I'm honestly not trying to be a jerk, but mean to just give some honest feedback based on what I'm seeing everywhere from this camera.
 
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Samuel H said:
this

some clips have great color, others have a very weird cast
even within the PB video you can find examples of both
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As opposed to the green cast of most Japanese cameras that we have come to think of as "normal" ? It is pretty easy to correct being a raw camera. But they do still have work to do on calibration and people are still learning their cameras too. IMO it looks a lot like some of the Agfa neg stocks I used to shoot. Those were a bit more red/blue biased than the Kodaks.

A ahot sample that Joe posted with the following comment:

"I am finding that the "harshness" of the blowouts on this cam have a lot to do with the lens choice.


This is a shot looking almost directly into a daylight balanced 2K…"

To that I would add nailing exposures is critical too. The D16 rewards skill. It won't do the work for you.

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KahL said:
I'm seeing a ton of magenta washed over most of these clips everywhere (including Bloom's), the dynamic range appears somewhat limited, the roll-off looks awful and of course there's that horrific pink highlight break at clipped levels.
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Sensors do not have roll-off. Sensors do not have roll-off. Sensors do not have roll-off.* (Sorry, this is not aimed at you but at the many times I've heard this.)

Sensors capture light in an utterly linear way, with a hard clip at max fill. Any pleasant roll-off you've ever seen is the result of a two-step process: (1) underexposing by a few stops, to protect the highlights, and then (2) raising the mids in post without affecting the highlights. Hence, a curve.

As for the weird colors, I agree with you, but I'm seeing it as: whenever there's a strong red shade, it's like a radioactive red. But I'm not too worried because (1) I saw the absolute exact same thing in early Ikonoskop footage, which used a sensor of the same pedigree, and it disappeared from later footage, either from further sensor calibration by Ikonoskop or better grading from the camerafolk. I'm also not worried because (2) hello, it's just color, which you can fiddle with to your heart's content in post.

(* Okay, a few sensors have roll-off, but it's not the Alexa or F3 or any of the ones where you've seen nice roll-off. But there are a few industrial and scientific cameras with a logarithmic curve done before it reaches the ADC. And the CMOSIS chip, used in the Apertus and and the BlackMagic 4K camera, has a piecewise linear mode, which basically is a jagged roll-off. But most sensors in their normal modes are completely linear.)
 
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I actually kind of agree with Razz on the magenta thing... pulling it out of an image always seems to be a simpler chore than pulling green out of an image.
 
Kholi said:
I actually kind of agree with Razz on the magenta thing... pulling it out of an image always seems to be a simpler chore than pulling green out of an image.
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Tracking grayscale over a MacBeth chart, the magenta thing is due to a slight progressive increase in red/blue levels for the chips from middle gray down when white balanced to the second white chip. I've pulled it back with a slight toe curve applied to the red and blue channels in Capture1, or by adjusting red and blue black levels in the raw matrix in Raw Therapee. I'm sure DB will get it dialed in at some point, but doing this with a CCD analog sensor can get complex as tweaking one setting can affect others.
 
New video by Matt Ryan shot with the Sigma 18-35 Nikon mount and BMPCC speed booster on a home made lens mount with the latest firmware upgrade.

 
Razz16mm said:
Tracking grayscale over a MacBeth chart, the magenta thing is due to a slight progressive increase in red/blue levels for the chips from middle gray down when white balanced to the second white chip. I've pulled it back with a slight toe curve applied to the red and blue channels in Capture1, or by adjusting red and blue black levels in the raw matrix in Raw Therapee. I'm sure DB will get it dialed in at some point, but doing this with a CCD analog sensor can get complex as tweaking one setting can affect others.
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I'm not sure if it's accurate or not, but speaking with some colorists (as that's what I primarily do now, love it as much as shooting) that are far more experienced that I am, they've said that the red/blue - slash - magenta thing is the way you arrive at better skin out of the box. Alexa's got something for the color blue, and reds can go quick. F35's got a purple/blue thing going on, could be from IR but I've never explored that. BMD cameras are somewhere in the middle, only after you balance out the heavy green cast which I am not a fan of at all.

Would rather see magenta, green can be really offensive to me when it comes to base.

While I'm not a fan of the camera overall, one thing the DBolex does have is color, the magenta cast doesn't bother me one bit.
 
One thing the DB has shown in footage is a pretty deep image and color.
It would be good to know a bit more about the post on the recent footage.

And producing with cameras that skew green and that skew magenta, correcting for magenta is much easier - especially skin.
 
Last weekend I had a chance to shoot behind the scenes on a small production using russian arm. The lack of SDI out and TC in on D-16 is absolutely crippling to any possibilities of high end productions.
 
jimagine said:
One thing the DB has shown in footage is a pretty deep image and color.
It would be good to know a bit more about the post on the recent footage.

And producing with cameras that skew green and that skew magenta, correcting for magenta is much easier - especially skin.
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It seems like it's a matter of not using filmconvert hahaha. That last video proves that the camera's base color's outrageous. I'll give it that over most digital cameras right now, especially anything Canon.

The problem with green, for me, is that I feel as though you balance to green much faster than you do magenta. So when you go to tear the green out of the image, your want to go back to green, you need to look away for a while, come back, etc.

With Magenta, it already looks "okay" where skin's concerned, and you just need to add a little this or that. I'm finding I need to reset my eyes much less... this holds true when I come across an image polluted with IR say from an F35.
 
snowblindfilm said:
Last weekend I had a chance to shoot behind the scenes on a small production using russian arm. The lack of SDI out and TC in on D-16 is absolutely crippling to any possibilities of high end productions.
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There is an add on module planned for that in the future. Mounts to an access port at the bottom rear of the camera, one reason for that up swept duck tail shape. Joe's been talking to Convergent design about a possible interface to the 7Q too.
 
Kholi said:
It seems like it's a matter of not using filmconvert hahaha. That last video proves that the camera's base color's outrageous. I'll give it that over most digital cameras right now, especially anything Canon.

The problem with green, for me, is that I feel as though you balance to green much faster than you do magenta. So when you go to tear the green out of the image, your want to go back to green, you need to look away for a while, come back, etc.

With Magenta, it already looks "okay" where skin's concerned, and you just need to add a little this or that. I'm finding I need to reset my eyes much less... this holds true when I come across an image polluted with IR say from an F35.
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Yeah, no log compression or filmconvert applied to any of Mike Ryan's footage. Just straight out of the Lightpost app that comes with the camera to Prores HQ. The still frame I processed in Raw Therapee. Still prefer that or Capture One Pro to any of the video centric raw processors for the looks I'm after, which is more like modern high end digital stills than trying to emulate any particular film stock. Takes some processing time, but my new workstation dropped the time from 10-20 seconds per frame on my laptop to around 3 frames per second in C1pro, comparable to some of the motion apps I've tried. Definitely serviceable for hobby use.
 
Razz16mm said:
There is an add on module planned for that in the future. Mounts to an access port at the bottom rear of the camera, one reason for that up swept duck tail shape. Joe's been talking to Convergent design about a possible interface to the 7Q too.
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Does it have TC in?
 
Razz16mm said:
Some recent samples shot with a Canon 8-64mm S16 zoom. Really nice match for the D16.



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These videos look great, I love the Canon S16 zooms, I tried the Canon, a Cooke 10-30mm and the Zeiss 11-110 on my ikonoskop and I actually liked the colors the Canon rendered more than any of the others. The Zeiss won out for me due to it being more compact and lightweight than the others but it breathes like crazy while the Canon does not.
 
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