FS7: "DP decided he wants an F5 instead"

A skilled craftsperson can make any camera sing, however there are differences in the capabilities of different cameras. One may be more appropriate for a job than another. Tools do matter.

This is why I got so upset at the shootouts that Zacuto id a few years ago. I refused to participate because I knew the premise going in was that "all these cameras are good enough now". We;; if I'm a producer and I hear DPs saying that they can make a 5D look just as good as an Alexa, then I'm gonna say, "Screw spending $8K a week on the camera rental -- go shoot it on a 5D". Equating the tools cuts you off at the knees as an artist.

The flip side is that I could climb behind the wheel of a Formula-1 car but I'll never be Mario Andretti. Even if I somehow start off with the same innate talent level as he did, 25 years of working those cars and strategizing the sport means that he would total ghost me in any race. Raw talent has value and experience has value. But if I'm in a Formula-1 car and Mario is in a Honda Civic, I will smoke him on the straightaway.

There were plenty of people who had careers the were pedestrian shooters at best. But they knew the gear, they could keep to schedules, understood how to talk to crews and work with the clients. Now it's a little tougher on them because being only basically competent doesn't make you as attractive anymore.

Wanna know what's important to get ahead? Everything.

Be talented, which means study art and the works of others and learn why they made artistic choices and how the resulting images impacted people.
Be skillful, which means learn what the tools can actually do and more importantly how to technically achieve the goals you set for yourself artistically.
Be political, which means that you know how to work with people, learning the proper hierarchy so that you serve the client and your crew serves you and you all do so happily.
Be responsible, which means that you take all of this upon yourself and you do so gladly because it means that you are manifesting your own career.

There's plenty more, but every time I hear a complaint that some newbie is undercutting or the old guard is shutting out the new generation, well I just shrug. No one has a responsibility to anyone else, other than the simple truism Thalt Shalt Not Be An Ass. Y'all know what it takes, and y'all better be committed to it on every level otherwise go be a dentist -- because if it wasn't just for the money why else would you stick your fingers in other people's mouths all day?

If you can't take the heat, don't fly MIG Alley.
 
As usual, well said Mitch. I would certainly add "communicate". Just because you're a visual "artist" - doesn't mean you don't need to learn how to talk and communicate with clients, producers, crew members etc. etc etc.
 
The trouble with the zac tests were that lighting budget was not considered.

Better cameras (and bigger lights packages) dont really make better pictures.. but they do make better pictures 'now' - simply with a decent cam and lights package you gain control. One can meet the directors desire in a controlled manner.. and a controlled manner controls the budget.

The thing about 'new' filmmaking is sort of about dropping stuff - walking away from shots that don't work with a minimal kit. Say my coverage of a recent festival.. if the clowns looked bad in the midday light.. no problem.. I just filmed the stilts girls at dusk instead to fulfil the brief of 'fun on the festival site'.

If my brief had been to film the clowns I could have needed a 20.20 scrim and a bunch of HMI!

Again with filming festivals a couple of clips on a 5d can look cool.. but will a 5d plug in to the sound desk and roll for a full performance with TC to jam to the other cams? No.

So in sniffing out the jobs one has to remain really canny on the brief from the client

'1min highlight reel of fun from the festival' - doable on a 5d $1000

'concert coverage' - minimum of 3 ops with long roll cameras, soundie, DIT, crane, certified grip to operate crane over audience, live mixing desk, whatever. $100,000

The next problems is that the 1 min highlight reel translates well to the showreel and communicating with the client what ones offer is is therefore more complex..

S
 
"Better cameras (and bigger lights packages) dont really make better pictures.. but they do make better pictures 'now' - simply with a decent cam and lights package you gain control. One can meet the directors desire in a controlled manner.. and a controlled manner controls the budget."

what ? an Alexa is a better camera than a Fs5 and will make better pictures.. there are many reasons for it,and thats why you pay more.. even camera,s with the same sensor. there will better processing in the more expensive version.. there is no lighting package or voodoo filter that will make an Fs5 look like an Alexa or even an F5.. there really are differences between camera,s.. are people not believing this anymore .. ?
 
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The problem with the Zacuto tests was that really it was a marketing campaign. A very good one too, designed to make the casual viewer believe they can use a cheap camera to get a look comparable to a camera many times more expensive. You'd just need a few accessories to make it work. Now, who makes accessories?
 
Donny 123 said:
what ? an Alexa is a better camera than a Fs5 and will make better pictures.. there are many reasons for it,and thats why you pay more.. even camera,s with the same sensor. there will better processing in the more expensive version.. there is no lighting package or voodoo filter that will make an Fs5 look like an Alexa or even an F5.. there really are differences between camera,s.. are people not believing this anymore
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Ever since 'Reverie' cheap cameras have been client acknowledged as creating 'pretty' pictures and that may be enough.

Consider this from your clients point of view.
Your final 'broadcast' is unlikely to have a data rate above about 20mbs - I dont know the number but youtube or broadcast compression kills sharpness through compression - Yep in a cinema we need sharpness, maybe on the odd exhibition monitor or at a conference big screen we need sharpness but beyond that from the client POV the camera sharpness/resolution is basically irrelevant.

So the only difference between cameras is colour fidelity and dynamic range, well most DSLRs have great colour fidelity.. but they do lack dynamic range - but one only needs dynamic range when you need it - aka when you avoid midday sun and only point your camera at pretty stuff.


Clearly more expensive cameras create pretty pictures in more demanding environs and at higher resolutions, with synched timecode, long takes, efficient bulk workflows, no moire, lens data to motion track greensceen matchmoves whatever.

The show I did for Insight absolutely needed proper cameras and zooms due to the Multicam single takes, 50p 4k resolution requirement and other reasons. But many 'shows' I do do not need that gubbins, .. a 5d2 would do.

The client may not need those bells and whistles.

--
Back to my recent festival.. shot FS7, gopro, and GH4 and FS7 slomo crop mode.. clearly to a pixel peeper most of my images would be lacking (my personal opinion is that only 4k-HD with the FS7 comes close to being actual 1080 resolution, all the other options are about 720)

But we didnt care about resolution.. only getting a pretty film. So the gopro (interesting angles) make the edit and the client is pleased.

Now the other thing about the alexa/cinezoom is that it is too heavy for a solo op to rush around with.. so it could actually be worse than an FS5 for some filming tasks like making a pretty film at festival with minimal crew :)

An aside.. most of the shots that I have delivererd recently that clients noticed were shot with a X5 and Inspire drone. Again not really a resolution thing.
 
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Donny 123 said:
"Better cameras (and bigger lights packages) dont really make better pictures.. but they do make better pictures 'now' - simply with a decent cam and lights package you gain control. One can meet the directors desire in a controlled manner.. and a controlled manner controls the budget."

what ? an Alexa is a better camera than a Fs5 and will make better pictures.. there are many reasons for it,and thats why you pay more.. even camera,s with the same sensor. there will better processing in the more expensive version.. there is no lighting package or voodoo filter that will make an Fs5 look like an Alexa or even an F5.. there really are differences between camera,s.. are people not believing this anymore .. ?
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Well this is certainly not what I meant in my post further back. The point I was making is that the difference between cameras is not that great from a client's perspective. I don't have broadcast clients nor do I have AAA ad agency clients who I would expect to demand and require the best camera gear and talent. I work with large and small corporates who despite having large marketing departments do not stipulate any camera requirement other than make good looking images which I like to think we do.

Typical corporate clients are NOT Cinematographers the Alexa look would be invisible to most. I would expect most people on this forum to pick out Alexa, Red and F5/55 footage quite easily but do you really think your average Joe marketing suit could? If they could see the difference would they care? Could this same Joe Marketing Suit see the difference between an Otus and a Milvus? Then factor in the question, if they could see the difference then are they prepared to pay for that and in my experience they rarely are.

I'm very happy playing by the 80/20 rule and having equipment and facilities that are capable of dealing with the majority of the work out there and investing a fraction that would be required to take on the 20% level work. We are winning every single day we operate the FS7. I notice there are supply constraints on FS7s again, Sony can't keep up with demand so I suspect there are many other people realising they could win in the 80/20 game too. I recently saw Canon responded to the FS7 by dropping the price of the C300II.

Better cameras are better in all of the 'edge cases' where shooting is difficult, so the pragmatic jobbing filmmaker steers clear of those edge cases and delivers a quality product. This is DV Rebel filmmaking and it works.
 
Donny 123 said:
"Better cameras (and bigger lights packages) dont really make better pictures.. but they do make better pictures 'now' - simply with a decent cam and lights package you gain control. One can meet the directors desire in a controlled manner.. and a controlled manner controls the budget."

what ? an Alexa is a better camera than a Fs5 and will make better pictures.. there are many reasons for it,and thats why you pay more.. even camera,s with the same sensor. there will better processing in the more expensive version.. there is no lighting package or voodoo filter that will make an Fs5 look like an Alexa or even an F5.. there really are differences between camera,s.. are people not believing this anymore .. ?
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I thought BertLUT automatically turned an FS7 into an Alexa?!
 
Nirv said:
Typical corporate clients are NOT Cinematographers the Alexa look would be invisible to most.
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This is not true. In certain situations clients will notice shots that needed an Alexa (or whatever) or rather they will notice the problems given to them by a 'cheap' solution..

-buildings covered in moiree (jumping and purple bands)
-scene DR well beyond camera DR (aka horrid flouro highlights)
-huge bills for post when 'cheap' cameras shot odd codecs, whacky timecode, off synch sound
-complete reshoots due to flat batteries, corrupt data, non monitored audio, poor focus (due to low res monitoring)
-codec not flexible enough to create a desired 'brand feel' through colour

I think there are some jobs (mainly low stress ones) that cheap cameras do fine, there are other jobs beyond cheap cameras, but to suggest that an Alexa is always better is wrong.. it will either be
-better
-indistinguishable
-too heavy on set
-push the rates too high

S
 
Forget what the client knows or doesn't know about a camera. As someone with a bit of experience there's been plenty of times when I've known my FS7 wasn't up to a certain job, let alone a 5D or BMCC, and that I knew from now on it was a 'minimise the damage' job.

They might not not know specs but a client will have no problem saying something looks noisy or soft or if it doesn't pop or similar, or simply if it doesn't give them the look they had in their head.

Edit: what Sam said. ^^
 
morgan_moore said:
This is not true. In certain situations clients will notice shots that needed an Alexa (or whatever) or rather they will notice the problems given to them by a 'cheap' solution..

-buildings covered in moiree (jumping and purple bands)
-scene DR well beyond camera DR (aka horrid flouro highlights)
-huge bills for post when 'cheap' cameras shot odd codecs, whacky timecode, off synch sound
-complete reshoots due to flat batteries, corrupt data, non monitored audio, poor focus (due to low res monitoring)
-codec not flexible enough to create a desired 'brand feel' through colour

I think there are some jobs (mainly low stress ones) that cheap cameras do fine, there are other jobs beyond cheap cameras, but to suggest that an Alexa is always better is wrong.. it will either be
-better
-indistinguishable
-too heavy on set
-push the rates too high

S
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I was talking about the 'Alexa Look' that je n'sais quoi that no one on this forum could adequately describe when pushed. It would be invisible to most clients and if it wasn't they wouldn't pay for it anyway.

Most clients will and do measure the product that we deliver to what they would generally expect from Broadcast TV, they are not expecting Hollywood level cinematography if they do then that's my fault for not managing their expectations. I believe the FS7 more than allows us to deliver broadcast TV level work in fact I think we deliver vastly better quality images. Not Alexa quality but by some margin better than the typical broadcast output one might expect on daytime and early evening. I'm not competing with TV advert level or primetime drama level productions which are the realm of the Alexa and big budgets, I have no allusions of grandeur.

I've had issues with moire but that has been solved by Mr Tiffen and shooting UHD but broadcast TV cameras **** up the image even worse. I've never found myself running out of DR with the FS7 and the tippex nose is a distant memory.

I wouldn't describe our work as low stress, it is always a struggle to get all of the shots you want in the time managed because we're dealing with people and it's like herding cats some of the time.
 
There are plenty of times where it would not be acceptable to mask a camera's deficiencies by adding filtration. If you don't have those jobs or clients then great but it's a massive generalisation.

Also Ive seen plenty of awful FS7 work both on here and on tv.
 
Lol, this escalated quickly. Play nicely folks...

*Back on topic*

Last year, I shot a doco on my FS7. There was one sequence, shot on F5, and supplied to me by the client that looked so awful it never made the edit.

This year, I've shot a doco which also has footage from Red Dragon and GH4. All three cut nicely together. Go figure.
 
That's the thing mate. While you're receiving poor quality F5 footage from someone who though having a more expensive camera made him talented, Dave has been out there grafting and throwing out all sorts of shapes and moves and making it big and stealing your clients. Deal with it, man.
 
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