F23: Public Enemies was shot with REC709?!

Mike Krumlauf said:
https://theasc.com/ac_magazine/July2009/PublicEnemies/page1.html

Came across the old ASC article about PE and saw they used the F23 in Rec709.... I really dont understand why in the hell they would do that when they have the option for hypergammas and SLog for better color and contract/DR.
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Not the first time Mann does that, he is averse to "fixing in post" to the extreme. He is almost 77 and it is fair to say he did not grow up with digital techniques.

And yes, I think it makes zero sense. If you want to see what you are filming use a LUT to monitor.
 
That film looked awful.

I can't hate it too much though, as it was actually a terrific teaching material for me in those early days of the digital transition.

You've got a film shot by Dante Spinotti, so there SHOULD have been no cause for concern. His lighting and compositions are always superb, right? So what could possibly go wrong?

Well... the digital stuff.

And almost all of it went wrong.

This is purely conjecture on my part, but I have a suspicion that some iDIoT suggested to Dante that shooting digital with a 360 degree shutter would add more motion blur to the image, and that the extra motion blur would help hide some of the "digitalness" of the 2/3" sensor.

What it actually did, was make the film almost unwatchable. A smeery mess with a motion cadence that felt way off.

The colour timing too was a bit of a disaster. They just failed miserably to wrangle a pleasing image from it, and the result is this very coarse, utterly bland palette, that doesn't have the old-timey desaturated look it seems they were going for - it just looks wrong.

So the end result was these lovely images, DESTROYED by mishandling. Both on-set and in-post.

There's a lot to be learnt from it.
 
Whats the problem shooting 709?

Basically then one was delivering 709 anyway.

709 aquisition gets the best quality result for 709 delivery as grading degrades the images somewhat.

The big caveat is of course you have to get it perfect on set.. but in a feature situation with enough lights and control and good enough monitoring one can get it perfect on set.

The main reason to go non 709 is lack of lights/control and poor monitoring so you cant really see what you are doing. Most of us mortals dont have enough lights and cant monitor properly.
 
I believe Public Enemies also used the EX1 or EX3 for some material (car inserts & crash cams?). Those cameras did not have alog mode, so perhaps that's why they limited everything to Rec709.

But yeah, it looked quite poor and everyone said so upon release.
 
I always thought they shot Public Enemies on the F950, but after looking it up, I guess I was mixing it up with Crank. I never saw either film, but I did see a clip of Crank on TV, and I thought it looked bad, which was more of a grade issue than a camera issue, but it definitely looked like video.

I had no idea the Dawn Treader was shot on the F23, I guess it makes sense, since they made a big deal about it being shot in 3D. I remember that one looking pretty good, but oddly enough, I thought one scene from Prince Caspian looked really bad, because they blew out all the foliage, and that was shot on film.
 
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They used EX1s inside the cars on Public... Speed Racer used the F23 for deep DOf and 4:4:4 for composition. Benjamin Button used the F23 in the modern hospital scenes only

As for crank.. it was a mix of the f900, f950 and canon xl2 if you can believe that. They shot some overcrank on 35mm as well. I love crank, the only image issue I have with it is they over sharpened it.
 
morgan_moore said:
Whats the problem shooting 709? Basically then one was delivering 709 anyway.
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Hmm, I would say it would be okay to shoot 709 if (1) delivering in 709 and (2) the camera lets you grade it how you like. For most cameras, #2 is false. For example, the way film rolls off the highlights is a severe grade away from a silicon sensor's default. But camera companies, being large corporations, are bureaucratic, run by committee, and therefore conservative and mediocre. Therefore the in-camera choices don't let you take it far enough. That's why I'm like, "Just let me record raw or log, and I'll do it my way in post."

as grading degrades the images somewhat.
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Grading doesn't degrade the image as long as you starting with at least 10-bit log.
 
That's surprising, and I guess I would say that what also matters is the degree of compression. 10-bit 4:2:2 with 3:1 compression is going to be more gradeable than with 100:1. For high compression, even if there are no visible compression artifacts like blockiness, the camera has usually first processed the raw footage with strong noise reduction, and that oversmoothness and loss of detail may be what some people might object to when they push the levels around to a great degree. If you have any screenshots, before and after, to help me see what you're seeing, feel free to share them.
 
combatentropy said:
Hmm, I would say it would be okay to shoot 709 if (1) delivering in 709 and (2) the camera lets you grade it how you like. For most cameras, #2 is false. For example, the way film rolls off the highlights is a severe grade away from a silicon sensor's default. But camera companies, being large corporations, are bureaucratic, run by committee, and therefore conservative and mediocre. Therefore the in-camera choices don't let you take it far enough. That's why I'm like, "Just let me record raw or log, and I'll do it my way in post."



Grading doesn't degrade the image as long as you starting with at least 10-bit log.
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Sorry I opened a can of worms there! And dont really agree that all grading degrades. If you have to deliver 254 levels and have recorded 1023 then you should be able to do a contrast increase of 4:1 and stills have enough colours to deliver 254 levels without having missing colours (banding) - but it is not so simple as often log does not capture 1023 levels. 12 bit (4000+) levels should mostly be able to deliver 254 levels.

The important point is that control on set and you can keep inside 7 stops of 709.

I think such control was fairly common in hollywood (or TV studios) back in the day so shooting 709 is not nuts.. just expensive.
 
10-bit log is actually more pushable than 12-bit linear.

The human eye can distinguish an average of 30 steps per f-stop [citation]. Most displays are 6 or 7 f-stops. So that would be about 200 steps, which is why 8-bit imagery looks fine as a distribution format.

10-bit has 1,024 steps. So if you're aiming for a 7-stop display or even a 10-stop movie screen, then you begin with 3-5 times as many steps as you need to end up with per zone. That allows a terrific amount of pushing and pulling the tones around while still winding up with no visible banding.

EDIT: morgan_moore posted while I was typing and said a lot of the same things. Jinx!
 
I can understand an indie film at this time shooting 709 as it was more of a ***** to grade S Log on a budget back then and Color Correction techniques were not as "consumer friendly" as they are now.. only the few of us even knew what a LUT was in 2008 lol... but a tentpole Universal Studios picture with Michael Mann at the helm... was he just being complacent with what he thought looked good in his F900 days? I honestly feel like Collaterial is his best looking digital shot film. Miami Vice, while a semi decent film, looked like total trash.. video noise up the butt. I remember when they were all in town filming Public as I lived min away from some of the locations. The scene when Depp is in the theater and hes freaking out thinking someone will notice him after they put his picture on the screen is the Paramount Theater in Aurora, Illinois which was ten min from my house in Naperville at the time. I remember seeing them film a scene in downtown chicago and I was more excited to see the F23 on the stedicam than I was Depp... funny, now I own one lol.
 
I saw Public Enemies at the cinema when it came out.
Enjoyed the story, hated beyond words the images, if only because of that horrible 360 degree shutter.
At the time I thought they were mad for making that creative choice for a 1930s gangster film and couldn't believe no one was talking about it.

In my experience when comparing the tonality of all the different gammas on the F23, Slog has the smoothest and cleanest image with the least amount of banding or weirdness.
I wouldn't dream of shooting in any other gamma on that camera, but that's just me.
 
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