kyle_doris
Well-known member
today i went into DuArt (www.duart.com) to check out their DV to film reel in this is what i came away with.
First thing they showed us was a non-controled test of 35mm vs. Super 16 vs. Panasonic Varicam.
quickly i'll say that this wasn't a very great test since even though they were mostly the same shot, they were done at different times of the day in some instances, and it was hard to really get a feel for what you were seeing. everything in this control group, for the sake of the test was captured to HD tape (whether it be directly from the Varicam or to the tape through a digital transfer)... and then color corrected for film, and then shot out to 35mm as final print.
35mm was like 35mm, chrisp (almost to a fault for me, but nonetheless the clearist).
super-16 had a beatiful grain to me. some would consider it noise and prolly dislike it, but i thought the noise added some character to the print, but as you could tell with any 16mm filmout, it was certainly much softer.
Varicam i will say held up VERY well to the 35mm, but honestly, nothing to write home about. one shot of a brick wall yeilded a very very odd softness in definition. they are even thrown apparently as why this was the case. but overall the cine-gamma held up to my eyes. if i was given only the varicam and 35mm i'm not sure if i could distinguish EVERY time between the two. prolly most of the time, but not all. they are that close to me.
the next crop of footage they showed us was PAL video done all by indigent productions. all was done on the PD150.
first they showed a movie made by Ethan Hawke called "Chelsea Walls", then some of "13 moons", "Tape", and finally some of "Tadpole"
i can some this up as simply not good. great color correction by the du-art guys. you can tell they are uber-pro at what they do, hats off. bottom line though, the PD150 just doesn't cut it AT ALL to me. it's hard to get rid of all the artifacting and the image, especially on medium shots, simply looks like video. no two ways about it, i was pretty turned off by it actually.
Then they broke out some of "Pinero" shot on the Canon XL1-s, especially since it was after the PD150 it looked worlds better.
XL1-s footage it's so hard for me to remember. i remember thinking to myself it looked ALOT better then the PD150, aside from that it's hard to put my finger on it.
the rest of the stock that wasn't DVX100 was some of Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 3" (which i own actually), which was shot on HD, and some stuff shot on the Sony IMX (they are really in love with that camera, it's PAL, i didn't like it's looks).
Now for the DVX100 footage.
the footage was an out of box reel of a kid playing with a little toy car. this bothered me, because the rest was pretty "realistic" in their application, and this was just obviously thrown together. it did proove to me one thing though. now amount of rigging or working with either the XL1-s or definately the PD150, will make them look as good as what the DVX100 does to a film out.
and this isn't because i own a DVX100, i really don't care. i'll simply just get whatever looks the best. i'm not some fanboy. what impressed me most was its medium shots seemed alot more 'film like' then the other two cameras. they held their own to what film does at medium shots. the whole demo of the DVX had somewhat of a yellowish-orangish tone to it, so it was hard to really good a good grasp of the cine gamma. i still digged the super16 better, but i think that was purely subjective.
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after we watched the reel we talked quite a bit, especially with the cheif engineer Maurice Shecktor (Marcus Janner, the Video guy, had to leave right after the reel was done).
While they both were there though, i dropped on them a question of using the mini35. Marcus knew kinda what i was talking about, and he said he's seen someone use something like it in Statan Island and he said it looked pretty awesome, but he asked me not to quote him on that since it was a while ago.
their biggest thing they kept on emphasizing was... leave as much stuff manual is possibl; and i don't mean Autofocus and stuff like that. they said do not use digital stretch if you want to go to film out. either go anamorphic if you can, or just go 4:3 and crop it. this is because when going to a film out you want as little interpolation as possible. it's better for them in the end, to do any type of upressing instead of squishing an image that a 1/3" CCD figured the interpolation technique. i guess technically you'd squish it in post via a nonlinear editing system.
also, a big thing for them, and this might just be because of their propietary software. 3:2 cadence much better then the 2:3:3:2 for their purposes. because it's very hard to get that "quasi"-standard pulldown to work with their systems. one thing when trying to do a film out when using the DVX100, is to save money, and that would add yet another process to getting a filmout. not good. (i took this recommendation somewhat with a grain of salt, because i don't know if this is just them or not)
lastly they said, color correcting for video out is one thing, but color correcting for a 35mm print is completely another thing entirely, so just because you think the movie looks perfect on a nice monitor or TV, it doesn't amount to anything for a film out.
then maurice and i talked outside for about 45 minutes, and he was just about the coolest person in the world. through the course of that conversation a few things were discussed.
not much difference between the film out look of a SDX900 and the Varicam. he told me, that panasonic almost feels like they released it too fast. because it's SO good, it might actually diminish their sales of the varicam. i mean, it's only a difference of like 200 lines. he said the images he's seen from the SDX900 are simply AMAZING for SD.
HDV = crap, we talked about HDV for a good 15 minutes and both had a good laugh. haha. he had some great insight into why the standard is sorta short sighted for many reasons, one being that it will be very hard to figure out anyway to incorportate 24p, and that will sorta render the format useless to filmmakers.
we talked a little more about my mini35 rig and he basically said that 10-15 seconds of a filmout test wouldn't really cost me anything, so i might do that. i was thinking working with those guys would be thousands of dollars, but he said it wouldn't be anymore then 100 or so bucks, but not to quote him on it, because sales people deal with that.
all in all, it was a good expeirience, and i really did learn alot. hope something of this was of interest.
peace.
First thing they showed us was a non-controled test of 35mm vs. Super 16 vs. Panasonic Varicam.
quickly i'll say that this wasn't a very great test since even though they were mostly the same shot, they were done at different times of the day in some instances, and it was hard to really get a feel for what you were seeing. everything in this control group, for the sake of the test was captured to HD tape (whether it be directly from the Varicam or to the tape through a digital transfer)... and then color corrected for film, and then shot out to 35mm as final print.
35mm was like 35mm, chrisp (almost to a fault for me, but nonetheless the clearist).
super-16 had a beatiful grain to me. some would consider it noise and prolly dislike it, but i thought the noise added some character to the print, but as you could tell with any 16mm filmout, it was certainly much softer.
Varicam i will say held up VERY well to the 35mm, but honestly, nothing to write home about. one shot of a brick wall yeilded a very very odd softness in definition. they are even thrown apparently as why this was the case. but overall the cine-gamma held up to my eyes. if i was given only the varicam and 35mm i'm not sure if i could distinguish EVERY time between the two. prolly most of the time, but not all. they are that close to me.
the next crop of footage they showed us was PAL video done all by indigent productions. all was done on the PD150.
first they showed a movie made by Ethan Hawke called "Chelsea Walls", then some of "13 moons", "Tape", and finally some of "Tadpole"
i can some this up as simply not good. great color correction by the du-art guys. you can tell they are uber-pro at what they do, hats off. bottom line though, the PD150 just doesn't cut it AT ALL to me. it's hard to get rid of all the artifacting and the image, especially on medium shots, simply looks like video. no two ways about it, i was pretty turned off by it actually.
Then they broke out some of "Pinero" shot on the Canon XL1-s, especially since it was after the PD150 it looked worlds better.
XL1-s footage it's so hard for me to remember. i remember thinking to myself it looked ALOT better then the PD150, aside from that it's hard to put my finger on it.
the rest of the stock that wasn't DVX100 was some of Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 3" (which i own actually), which was shot on HD, and some stuff shot on the Sony IMX (they are really in love with that camera, it's PAL, i didn't like it's looks).
Now for the DVX100 footage.
the footage was an out of box reel of a kid playing with a little toy car. this bothered me, because the rest was pretty "realistic" in their application, and this was just obviously thrown together. it did proove to me one thing though. now amount of rigging or working with either the XL1-s or definately the PD150, will make them look as good as what the DVX100 does to a film out.
and this isn't because i own a DVX100, i really don't care. i'll simply just get whatever looks the best. i'm not some fanboy. what impressed me most was its medium shots seemed alot more 'film like' then the other two cameras. they held their own to what film does at medium shots. the whole demo of the DVX had somewhat of a yellowish-orangish tone to it, so it was hard to really good a good grasp of the cine gamma. i still digged the super16 better, but i think that was purely subjective.
-----------------------------------------------------
after we watched the reel we talked quite a bit, especially with the cheif engineer Maurice Shecktor (Marcus Janner, the Video guy, had to leave right after the reel was done).
While they both were there though, i dropped on them a question of using the mini35. Marcus knew kinda what i was talking about, and he said he's seen someone use something like it in Statan Island and he said it looked pretty awesome, but he asked me not to quote him on that since it was a while ago.
their biggest thing they kept on emphasizing was... leave as much stuff manual is possibl; and i don't mean Autofocus and stuff like that. they said do not use digital stretch if you want to go to film out. either go anamorphic if you can, or just go 4:3 and crop it. this is because when going to a film out you want as little interpolation as possible. it's better for them in the end, to do any type of upressing instead of squishing an image that a 1/3" CCD figured the interpolation technique. i guess technically you'd squish it in post via a nonlinear editing system.
also, a big thing for them, and this might just be because of their propietary software. 3:2 cadence much better then the 2:3:3:2 for their purposes. because it's very hard to get that "quasi"-standard pulldown to work with their systems. one thing when trying to do a film out when using the DVX100, is to save money, and that would add yet another process to getting a filmout. not good. (i took this recommendation somewhat with a grain of salt, because i don't know if this is just them or not)
lastly they said, color correcting for video out is one thing, but color correcting for a 35mm print is completely another thing entirely, so just because you think the movie looks perfect on a nice monitor or TV, it doesn't amount to anything for a film out.
then maurice and i talked outside for about 45 minutes, and he was just about the coolest person in the world. through the course of that conversation a few things were discussed.
not much difference between the film out look of a SDX900 and the Varicam. he told me, that panasonic almost feels like they released it too fast. because it's SO good, it might actually diminish their sales of the varicam. i mean, it's only a difference of like 200 lines. he said the images he's seen from the SDX900 are simply AMAZING for SD.
HDV = crap, we talked about HDV for a good 15 minutes and both had a good laugh. haha. he had some great insight into why the standard is sorta short sighted for many reasons, one being that it will be very hard to figure out anyway to incorportate 24p, and that will sorta render the format useless to filmmakers.
we talked a little more about my mini35 rig and he basically said that 10-15 seconds of a filmout test wouldn't really cost me anything, so i might do that. i was thinking working with those guys would be thousands of dollars, but he said it wouldn't be anymore then 100 or so bucks, but not to quote him on it, because sales people deal with that.
all in all, it was a good expeirience, and i really did learn alot. hope something of this was of interest.
peace.
