digitalinnovations
Well-known member
Thank you for the clarification on the Amira sensor; I don't think I caught that. I guess that makes more sense than the UHD>4K 
C700: How about that C700?
- Thread starter NorBro
- Start date
Hi Mitch, I thought the Amira used a 3.2K (3200x1800) area of the 3.4 Open Gate sensor to create its upscaled UHD ProRes footage.
Bern Caughey
Veteran
ARRI will be 100 years old in less than two weeks & there's speculation they may release something new. Whether that's a new sensor, or nothing at all, is anyone's guess.
http://www.arri.com/100_years/
http://www.arri.com/100_years/
jm.gardiner
Well-known member
I recently shot a short on the C700. I was actually quite impressed. I had planned on shooting the the film on my Mk2 out to my O7Q, but had the opportunity to try the 700. I found that the higher ISO's looked great. I shot a majority of the film at 1600 ISO with 2 stops of ND. Something about the way the shadows rolled off was really nice and very different than the way arri handles shadows. 3200 and 6400 were also really great. Likely due to the extra processors and/or cooling system. We shot 4k XFAVC.
The camera is big! Not heavy, but big. It's certainly designed for a proper crew and camera team. I was easier to mount all the wireless gack to it and I think it ended up being a touch lighter than my mk2 fully rigged with the same equipment, (less 3rd party metal).
Credit where credit is due, I had sounded off my dismay with some of the test films for the cameras as well, I think they play way to safe with the image and none of them even take a chance with the grade. A few of the reps at Canon had a 'put up or shut up' notion and let me take the camera for the weekend. Here are some sample grades I put together as options for the director. Short should be finished in a few weeks.
The camera is big! Not heavy, but big. It's certainly designed for a proper crew and camera team. I was easier to mount all the wireless gack to it and I think it ended up being a touch lighter than my mk2 fully rigged with the same equipment, (less 3rd party metal).
Credit where credit is due, I had sounded off my dismay with some of the test films for the cameras as well, I think they play way to safe with the image and none of them even take a chance with the grade. A few of the reps at Canon had a 'put up or shut up' notion and let me take the camera for the weekend. Here are some sample grades I put together as options for the director. Short should be finished in a few weeks.
Mitch Gross
Veteran
I believe you're correct. Sorry if the phrasing of my response indicated otherwise.
I am pretty sure that all of the Alexas except for the Alexa 65 use "open gate" whenever you shoot UHD ProRes. My understanding is that they don't use the full "open gate" 3.4 MP sensor area but leverage a smaller 3.2K (3200x1800) area. I have friend who owns an Alexa that I've rented from time to time so I try to stay up on the firmware updates. Of course this wouldn't apply when shooting HD or 2K.
https://www.abelcine.com/articles/b...i-adds-prores-ultra-hd-recording-to-the-amira
http://www.arri.com/camera/amira/camera_details/amira/subsection/technical_data/
But most TV drama DP's, the last time I read about it, don't shoot the (upscaled) UHD. 2.8 has just enough pixels to debayer into a 4:2:2 1080 (4.2M pixels). Most cable TV is in 720p and satellite is in 1080p anyway.
PS. And I am saying this as someone who thinks that the studios may live to regret it.
On the other hand, most studios heads realize that the 2.8 footage can be upscaled into a faux 4K off a well kept archive AND only a few evergreens (i.e., highly popular programs) will be viewed by a large number of people on their big screen TV's, while most will be followed on tablets and smartphones where resolution won't matter as much. And that makes the cost containment a higher ranked preference. Had it been otherwise, studios would have quickly dumped Alexa's in favor of Red Epic and Helium, F55/65, Varicam, C500 and C700 but that ain't happening now.
From what I have heard the productions is shooting UHD is high. I have a friend in LA who has owned an Alexa Mini since 2015 who recently told me that 90% of what she shoots is UHD Prores. On the network side FX's "Legion" and Hulu's "A Handmaid's Tale" are also shot on Alexa UHD ProRes and I would imagine there are others series as well. It would be interesting to find out if ARRI has a recent survey of shooting codecs.
UHD ProRes 4444 XQ seems like a great choice when working with an Alexa Mini or Amira. It's an all around winner. It uses most of the "open gate" pixels for higher resolution than ARRIRAW, takes up less space, grades amazingly well, allows for easy reframing, and at exactly 4X the resolution it has a very easy down-convert to HD. As an added perk it can be edited on very modest hardware. I wouldn't recommend it but I recently helped a friend of mine who was edited a 30 minute UHD ProRes 4444 XQ narrative Alexa shot project on a Macbook Air a few months ago. I was surprised at how well the Macbook Pro performed.
The Alexa Classic and Alexa XT can't shoot in UHD ProRes and Amira only got the capability in 2015. Maybe that's skewing some of the reports if the data was based on series shot when UHD wasn't an option.
UHD ProRes 4444 XQ seems like a great choice when working with an Alexa Mini or Amira. It's an all around winner. It uses most of the "open gate" pixels for higher resolution than ARRIRAW, takes up less space, grades amazingly well, allows for easy reframing, and at exactly 4X the resolution it has a very easy down-convert to HD. As an added perk it can be edited on very modest hardware. I wouldn't recommend it but I recently helped a friend of mine who was edited a 30 minute UHD ProRes 4444 XQ narrative Alexa shot project on a Macbook Air a few months ago. I was surprised at how well the Macbook Pro performed.
The Alexa Classic and Alexa XT can't shoot in UHD ProRes and Amira only got the capability in 2015. Maybe that's skewing some of the reports if the data was based on series shot when UHD wasn't an option.
Eric Coughlin
Veteran
I didn't realize that. The Alexa XT can shoot 3.2k in ProRes, same as the Mini and Amira. 3.8K (UHD) on the Amira and Mini is just uprezzing in-camera. My question is, what exactly are the benefits of uprezzing in-camera vs in post? Generally I hear to leave things like that, such as sharpening, etc., for post as the post computers and software are better equipped to handle it than the camera's processor. Is it simply to avoid an extra step of uprezzing in post (which is pretty simple), or is the in-camera uprezzing somehow better than post uprezzing?
The downside of shooting UHD in-camera is it takes up more memory, so the measly 128 or 256 GB Cfast cards (Alexa XT is up to a nicer 512 GB card, though an Arri rep told me on the phone a few days ago that Lexar should be coming out with a 512 GB Cfast in a couple months for use with Arri), and more footage to store. So if you aren't getting any benefits to image quality, and can save time on set by not needing to change memory cards as often, it seems shooting at 3.2K may make more sense in some cases depending on the situation.
Interestingly, SanDisk's newer 256 GB cards are not officially approved for Arri yet, while their 128 GB cards are. Lexar's 128 GB and 256 GB 3600x cards are both approved for Arri. Lexar has different models (3500x and 3600x) to use with Canon vs Arri, while SanDisk works with both, and I assume work with the C700 as well. For those shooting with Canon and Arri, having cards that work with both cameras is certainly convenient. I imagine Arri hasn't approved the Sandisk 256 GB cards simply because they are newer and haven't been tested yet, and not because there are known issues with them.
The real advantages of the C700 are lost when you're not shooting with it as part of an actual camera department on a big show. The big body, with better cooling and way more SDI outputs, is way easier to use than the C300 II, once you build it up and cover it with accessories. Whether or not Canon can succeed in this market, or if the camera was a good idea, I don't know. But it's target market isn't people who are on a budget, and for whom the C300 II ticks all boxes. It's definitely not catered to being an owner-operator camera. It would be nice if Canon LT'd the 700, but they're in a strange position where most people would rather see them continue the 300 series with the body it has now.
Spartacus
Veteran
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...memory-card-flash-storage-sd-shut-down-micron
When discussing CFast options for the C200 the demise of Lexar came up.
Don't know what Arri knows about this, but bigger CFast cards would be appreciated by many.
puredrifting
Major Contributor
JM, I 've seen your stuff here, you are a talented DP. In your honest opinion, purely from an imaging POV, could you have made the same images with the C300 MKII or C200 shooting RAW? I know the C700 is an excellent crew served camera, just curious about your opinion, do you own the C300 MKII if I recall correctly?
Possibly (or my information is out of date). Off a year old IFA (or was it IBC?) interview, I recall the ARRI rep stating that SXT has a totally different motherboard that was developed for Alexa65. I believe the upgrade from XT was around $28,000.
Micron is moving their operations to a proprietary technology that they had co-developed with Intel (X-point) because that's where the money will be. CFast and CFExpress are open standards, which means there's a great competition from the Chinese and Korean foundries and correspondingly lower margins.
But ---- the foundries that produce Micron/Lexar merchandise should still be in business if under a different name (presuming that they were Micron's own to begin with and not outsourced).
PS. I keep confusing Micron with Macron.
I wasn't trying to highjack the thread but one advantage that comes to mind for Arri's technique is that they are probably using the RAW sensor data as well as camera metadata for their scaling transform. It's just a guess but it seems like the ProRes to ProRes scaling technique would be inferior since the image has already been processed. Of course you could try a similar ARRIRAW pathway in post but it would require that you shoot full "open gate" ARRIRAW, crop, debayer, uprez, and then transcode to ProRes, probably not exactly in that order. That seems like it would be agonizing and I doubt it be worth the effort to anyone outside of the high end feature film world.
Arri knew what was at stake when they created their "faux" UHD so they would have been crazy not to have chosen the best possible processing available. The only complaint I have ever heard is that camera doesn't really have a 4K sensor. I haven't ever heard or read about anyone knocking the image so they must be doing something right.
jm.gardiner
Well-known member
Re Puredrifiting
I didn't have the time to sit down and do a side by side with my mk2 and the 700. But from the short tests I was able to run with the 700 seems reliably cleaner in the shadows and throughout the ISO range. That particular short film was intentionally sparse on production design and left a lot of white wall gradient, which had me a little worried after the mk2's noise reduction/banding debacle. No issues with the 700 and the shadow details/gradients/skin tones were all rendered really well. I also didn't hesitate to use log2 in a very shadowy scenario. On my mk2 I would have likely shot log3 internal to protect from shadow noise.
The reps at canon asked if I'd consider buying a 700. I said no. The image is there, but for the price and size it doesn't do a lot more better than the mk2 to my O7Q. And the size limits it for gimbal/drone work. I guess that's where the mk2 comes in. If they put this power into a new C500mk2 with some higher framerates and internal raw, I'd be on board.
I agree with most of the sentiment on this forum. The camera's wasn't designed for me. It's ready for a crew to throw everything on it. It's clearly an answer to the Netflix/Amazon need for 4k aquisition. And the DP's shooting those shows are likely coming from Arri. Kudos to Panasonic for that Varicam Pure setup, it's certainly a much more streamlined approach.
I didn't have the time to sit down and do a side by side with my mk2 and the 700. But from the short tests I was able to run with the 700 seems reliably cleaner in the shadows and throughout the ISO range. That particular short film was intentionally sparse on production design and left a lot of white wall gradient, which had me a little worried after the mk2's noise reduction/banding debacle. No issues with the 700 and the shadow details/gradients/skin tones were all rendered really well. I also didn't hesitate to use log2 in a very shadowy scenario. On my mk2 I would have likely shot log3 internal to protect from shadow noise.
The reps at canon asked if I'd consider buying a 700. I said no. The image is there, but for the price and size it doesn't do a lot more better than the mk2 to my O7Q. And the size limits it for gimbal/drone work. I guess that's where the mk2 comes in. If they put this power into a new C500mk2 with some higher framerates and internal raw, I'd be on board.
I agree with most of the sentiment on this forum. The camera's wasn't designed for me. It's ready for a crew to throw everything on it. It's clearly an answer to the Netflix/Amazon need for 4k aquisition. And the DP's shooting those shows are likely coming from Arri. Kudos to Panasonic for that Varicam Pure setup, it's certainly a much more streamlined approach.