Justify an F35 vs an FS7

RatLabProductions said:
The URSA is not a single user camera. Its designed as a crew camera and by the time you rig it up it will cost more than the FS7. Buying and EVF and media cost difference alone will make the URSA a more epensive camera to use. Not to mention its weight. Dollars and sense of ownership its hard to beat the FS7 price point.

The magic sauce for me is 422 10bit compreesed internal 4K & HD. That is all I need and my clients neend for the majority of what I do. Anything more and I'm adding $$ in media costs and storage with no appreciable quality gains for my clients. Being able to carry everything I need to get the camera up and go in a carryon bag is important to me.
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URSA is as much a single user camera as it is a studio camera. Coming from actual experience, not imagination. You're also pretty far off on rigging it. If you want to make a valid point about cost it comes from CFast2.0, none of the other things you've mentioned.

No point in comparing the two, they aren't made for the same mindsets. Clearly.
 
jo kami said:
They're both cinematic, take a look at some footage and see if you can feel a difference.
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Sorry but FS7 look like F35? Not even close.

Where is cinematic FS7? I saw 2 videos. One look like wedding video and other look like soft video in slow motion.
 
You're a true F35 die hard SJX :-)

The point I'm making is now that there are new cameras coming out every year (which all look great) ...it really doesn't matter anymore. It becomes a preference.

Honestly if you're trying to get that cinematic look, shoot on film. Then when everyone asks you "OMG what camera and lenses?", just reply ... film.
 
I've been thinking, and there's a similar comparison in my mind, which is that between a Varicam HPX2700 and Sony EX3 - I've shot extensively with the Varicam, and even though on paper, being only 720P, you might think it would be inferior to the EX3 on screen, it's the other way round - and it's not even close - the Varicam just looks so much richer, higher quality and beautiful compared to the sort of plasticky, shallow, so-so look of the EX3. It's hard to put your finger on but reassuring that for whatever reason the camera that costs 10x the price does like much nicer! And I think it's probably similar with something like F35 vs F55.
Just idle musings though :)

Steve
 
Steve

Having shot with the HDX-900 (basically a non-ramping Varicam) and the EX3, I'd agree with you on that.

The difference between the Sony 750 and the F900 was similar too, so much in the processing and the gamma controls.
 
Pretty much true.

People tend to care for resolution and DR on paper only these days. As if an image
doesn't need more to be fantastic...

I loved the BMCC for the RAW, because you can give it every look you want. But the workflow
is not meant for R+G where you need quick turnarounds. That's where the FS7 might shine.
Internal 10bit is huge for me and if the color is nice and you can tweak the PP to your
personal needs with a soft roll-off and slightly adjustments in color space and shadows.
That's nice for stuff that needs to be delivered out of the box.

If you like the most cinematic image and there's time to grade and tweak in post, the bigger
cameras just have their own "mojo" in the processing and hardware filtering.
The FS7 will look as most of the other Sony 4k cameras these days. I think it needs some
tweaking before we like it.

But it will never look like F35 images anyway...
 
One thing about Blackmagic that people fail to fully consider is that they're not a codec development company, at least not yet. Their implementation of RAW is huge. I don't know if it's uncompressed or mildly compressed, but the files are tremendous because they don't have the compression schemes Sony and RED have spent a great deal of time developing. The codecs Blackmagic does use are licensed from software companies that don't manufacture cameras. This sticking point will hold Blackmagic's RAW appeal back until media and storage goes down in price drastically, or they develop their own compression scheme.
 
Viddovation said:
One thing about Blackmagic that people fail to fully consider is that they're not a codec development company, at least not yet. Their implementation of RAW is huge. I don't know if it's uncompressed or mildly compressed, but the files are tremendous because they don't have the compression schemes Sony and RED have spent a great deal of time developing. The codecs Blackmagic does use are licensed from software companies that don't manufacture cameras. This sticking point will hold Blackmagic's RAW appeal back until media and storage goes down in price drastically, or they develop their own compression scheme.
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Pocket Camera has Lossless Compression.
2.5K is Uncompressed
4K camera has Lossless Compression.

All are pretty much uncompressed RAW, the Pocket and 4K are "zipped".

All are true linear (I think Paul Curtis refers to it as the closest to true linear of all RAW formats, but still doesn't think it's true linear, can't remember) 16-bit DNG files. Where-as people consider REDCODE only good for white balancing, a true linear RAW file's pretty much open season for almost anything granted that you've got enough info on either side before your choice of debayering.

The file sizes are massive indeed, when it comes to URSA Cfast2.0 will have to drop in cost.

While those other companies definitely put in a lot of time developing their proprietary codecs, I personally find the open standard far more flexible, and of course uncompressed true linear files to be far more enjoyable to work with than anything compressed. For me, REDCODE isn't much better than ProRes4444, again aside from having the ability to punch in numbers for metadata.

That's just my two.

(I shoot RAW on all of the BMD cameras for most material, including quick turn-around, run-and-gun, small personal jobs, etc. and tend to only shoot ProRes if I need long rolls or have to. My tower can handle the entire workflow just fine, though, as it was built for that.)
 
Kholi,

I actually just bought an URSA EF on Thursday, and have been shooting it over the weekend. I previously owned the Pocket. I have my concerns about Blackmagic, but I'm by no means a hater. Here's the difficulty - 4k RAW on the URSA is 20GB a minute. A 120GB card costing $1,300 gets you 6 minutes of footage. In many cases, that's a single take, or less. So it's quite a hassle compared to other systems.

The caveat is, the CFast cards are likely to drop drastically in price over time. And computers capable of smoothly handling the 4k RAW and ProRes files are getting cheaper every day. For the moment I'm mostly shooting 1080, and within the next month cheaper media for CFast is likely available. So I'm okay with all of this. But shooting 4k RAW on the URSA takes some planning and DIT work for the time being.
 
Viddovation said:
Kholi,

I actually just bought an URSA EF on Thursday, and have been shooting it over the weekend. I previously owned the Pocket. I have my concerns about Blackmagic, but I'm by no means a hater. Here's the difficulty - 4k RAW on the URSA is 20GB a minute. A 120GB card costing $1,300 gets you 6 minutes of footage. In many cases, that's a single take, or less. So it's quite a hassle compared to other systems.

The caveat is, the CFast cards are likely to drop drastically in price over time. And computers capable of smoothly handling the 4k RAW and ProRes files are getting cheaper every day. For the moment I'm mostly shooting 1080, and within the next month cheaper media for CFast is likely available. So I'm okay with all of this. But shooting 4k RAW on the URSA takes some planning and DIT work for the time being.
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CFast2.0 definitely needs to come down.

We agree on five minutes per 120GB card not being enough when it comes to actual takes, we'll see the cards come down swiftly as Atomos bumps up their Cfast size within the next month at a drastically reduced price, and other companies follow suit.

I was able to one man band a shoot (no DIT etc) with URSA EF shooting with three (3) 120GB CFast2.0 cards, RAW. There was some 1080/604KHQ mixed into it. Offloading the Cfast cards to SSDs (USB3.0 to USB3.0/Thunderbolt = six to eight minutes respectively) made it pretty easy, but that's also because I've already got about eight to ten 240GB SSDs. This workflow's likely not to work for everyone, so lets hurry up with larger and more cost effective solutions with CF2.0.

I'm actually considering getting slower 1TB SSDs as field offloading solutions (no power needed for SSDs, transfer times are still fast with USB3.0 Superspeed or Thunderbolt connections) and then offloading those via TB/USB3.0SS at the office to do redundancy.

Blah blah blah (Sorry, babbling over)
 
We had a long feature shot with two BMCC in last autumn.
2x 20TB just for backup of the files (all thunderbolt).

Until now, there are 4x 20TB RAIDs for backup and work.
You really need to cover the cost for storage when you want to
work with RAW in longer projects.

Nevertheless I like the files very much but unloading footage after
each day + backup was a massive time problem. We used huge
RAID arrays with thunderbolt which were not exactly cheap compared
to the camera itself...
 
Tell me again why we stopped using tape? HDCam SR is ancient and does 880mb/s so surely something newer and more advanced could be made that would cope with either RAW or at least mildly compressed 4k? Your URSA data rates of 20GB a minute = 330MB/s, so a 3:1 compression would bring that down to SR rate! Then you could take the tape out and digitise them when you're ready to edit! You could record proxies onto an SD card or something.
Steve
 
This thought has not been processed, and can be discussed or dismissed:

I don't see the point in shooting RAW if it's non-linear or compressed.

Save even more space and shoot a straight-to-edit codec like ProResHQ or 4444.

We'e seen that the F35 does an amazing job with just an external recorder out to PR422HQ, still better than most options out there.

Again, though, that's just an off-the-cuff thought/statement and maybe I'm not thinking one hundred this morning.

Oh, Steven, I think the longterm costs of Tape as an acquisition medium are more expensive when adding in a deck, etc. right? Not sure, but I think so?
 
Kholi said:
Oh, Steven, I think the longterm costs of Tape as an acquisition medium are more expensive when adding in a deck, etc. right? Not sure, but I think so?
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Probably...but it's not a hassle during shooting when you're up against it - take the tape out, keep it safe, forget about it and carry on shooting. Then deal with it when you're ready to edit!

Steve
 
steve phillipps said:
Probably...but it's not a hassle during shooting when you're up against it - take the tape out, keep it safe, forget about it and carry on shooting. Then deal with it when you're ready to edit!

Steve
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I'm guessing ingesting/capture time becomes the burden afterward. Always a trade-off somewhere.

Right now we're just up against the initial costs of CFast2.0, the more cameras that take advantage of it the sooner the costs fall. I think Amira's going to help bring that down. Apparently right after release there was a shortage of the 120GB Sandisk cards and they're just now up to speed.
 
Yes but now that most people do in-house edits (or even at home - don't they?) the ingest is relatively easy - just press Play, go off and do something else and come back in an hour and put next tape in!
And of course costs are coming down and I think that's all people focus on - but to me it's the hassle and potential for mishaps that i can't stand the thought of. It was bad enough when it was 35mb/s codecs but now the data rates are truly scary!

Steve
 
For a "Sony camera" nothing looks as great and filmic as the F35 in my opinion.

Not the F5/55/65. The FS7 won't look better either.

Not to say that maybe some master colorist somewhere can create that mojo in post but if so, I haven't seen it...
 
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starcentral said:
For a "Sony camera" nothing looks as great and filmic as the F35 in my opinion.

Not the F5/55/65. The FS7 won't look better either.

Not to say that maybe some master colorist somewhere can create that mojo in post but if so, I haven't seen it...
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I've been struggling about whether this is true or not, is there something special about the F35 image compared to say an FS7? Or is it just the dps work and if they have worked with the FS7 it would look identical?

It's a big investment and I need to convince myself before making the purchase, so, can you (or anyone else) technically quantify what are these charcteristcs of the F35 that makes it look more "filmic/special/mojo" than other cameras.

I mean it's very very easy to evaluate image quality vs other cameras, it's made of:
1-Resolution
2-shaprness
3-Dynamic range (total amount and over and under exposure roll off)
4-colour (accuracy, amount of shades, bit depth, pleasing skin, accurate skies etc)
5-Noise performance at all ISOs
6-The pattern, look and texture/movement of the noise.
7-Artefects (aliasing, moire, and rolling shutter)
8-Image ability to shifting of exposure and colours in post production.
9-Image size (dof aesthetic)
10-Image speed (ability to create beautiful slowmotion and timelapse)

I think that's it. Only 10 aspects of image quality. How many of these does the F35 have vs an FS7/F5/F55 doesnt? They must be why the image is special if it is, and if the FS7 is better at these criteria then it has a better image quality, it's very simple.

What makes you shoot with that heavy, old technology system whilst there are more convenient ons af lower prices, there must be something about a few of these 10 points that other cameras do not have.
 
Ebrahim Saadawi said:
I've been struggling about whether this is true or not, is there something special about the F35 image compared to say an FS7? Or is it just the dps work and if they have worked with the FS7 it would look identical?

It's a big investment and I need to convince myself before making the purchase, so, can you (or anyone else) technically quantify what are these charcteristcs of the F35 that makes it look more "filmic/special/mojo" than other cameras.

I mean it's very very easy to evaluate image quality vs other cameras, it's made of:
1-Resolution
2-shaprness
3-Dynamic range (total amount and over and under exposure roll off)
4-colour (accuracy, amount of shades, bit depth, pleasing skin, accurate skies etc)
5-Noise performance at all ISOs
6-The pattern, look and texture/movement of the noise.
7-Artefects (aliasing, moire, and rolling shutter)
8-Image ability to shifting of exposure and colours in post production.
9-Image size (dof aesthetic)
10-Image speed (ability to create beautiful slowmotion and timelapse)

I think that's it. Only 10 aspects of image quality. How many of these does the F35 have vs an FS7/F5/F55 doesnt? They must be why the image is special if it is, and if the FS7 is better at these criteria then it has a better image quality, it's very simple.

What makes you shoot with that heavy, old technology system whilst there are more convenient ons af lower prices, there must be something about a few of these 10 points that other cameras do not have.
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There are, in my opinion, several fallacies here, the most glaring being the the necessity to quantify why one camera is better than another in sheer technical computation. To me, this is the same as a young man or woman attempting to break down in exacting detail the precise elements that make one desirable highly suitor ultimately preferable to a different highly desirable suitor. Because love is ultimately subjective, and at a certain point, so is the preference in camera and image. Which isn't to say that for a particular application or niche of business we cannot breakdown which camera is more fit for the task, or will reap better financial dividends, just as a it is easier to quantify the material comforts of marriage than to quantify the more intangible emotional elements.

But all of that aside...

The F35 is based around one of the most exceptional and expensive CCD imagers ever made. I daresay, if there are larger or more expensive CCD imagers, they are likely the sorts of speciality equipment developed for NASA. The dyes used to filter light make a difference in the resulting image, and the F35 uses the very best and most expensive of these dyes.

The CCD of the F35 will give you a global shutter - the FS7, F5, RED One/Scarlet/Epic MX/Dragon all have rolling shutters, as do many of the Alexa variants and most other CMOS cameras.

High frame rates are lovely, but most of the time we're shooting regular speed work. Certain niches exist, but when you really want high frame rates, you rent a Phantom or other true highspeed camera.

And so on.

Why not test drive both cameras for yourself before buying?
 
The only cameras I would consider comparing with the F35, personally, would be the ALEXA or the F65.

Surely there's gotta be an issue with some of the maths up there as F65 RAW-SQ is 17GB a minute but that is 2gbps or thereabouts I think?

Worth noting also that with the ALEXA, there is no gain whatsoever to be made in DR from going RAW, which is how it should be IMHO. The only reason would be if you desperately needed the extra resolution or bit-rate offered.
 
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