F55: Marco Polo Trailer

From the title, I thought this was going to be about very large men mounted atop draft horse using sledge hammers to hit earth balls about a 60 acre playing field... but this is better in some ways.
 
...I'm still waiting to read the fine print somewhere saying "primary camera Alexa", "F55 for selected shots in tight places".

I'm still digging around.

On another note here are some related links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2189461/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
http://instagram.com/marcopolomp
https://www.facebook.com/SonySuper35mm

https://www.facebook.com/colorfront - says "Marco Polo (The Weinstein Company) was shot on Sony F55 and will premier on December 12 in UHD on Netflix. Dailies by Encore on Colorfront Express Dailies."
 
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Looks great, and interesting. It'll be all F55 I imagine. Netflix are 4K only for their shows, which until Alexa's recent UHD up scaling upgrade meant Red, Sony and C500 were the only options.

I'd say the bigger news is that finally a colourist on a large-scale show seems to have figured out how to work with Sony footage! :)
 
I bet that DP and crew could make a GoPro look out of this world. To me...in this example...its much more about what is behind the camera.
 
Grug said:
I'd say the bigger news is that finally a colourist on a large-scale show seems to have figured out how to work with Sony footage! :)
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Yes. +1

ReelWorksMedia said:
I bet that DP and crew could make a GoPro look out of this world. To me...in this example...its much more about what is behind the camera.
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[edit; Forgive, what follows is a rant. I don't love the "well, a great DP...". A lot of us here are here to get to the bottom of how to make the 5/55 look good, so I get riled up sometimes. Again, please forgive]

A GoPro would still look like a GoPro. Don't attribute divine skills to a decent DP. An A-list Dp will still overexpose parts of frame or other things that will test the qualities of a camera. The difference is a clipped GoPro will still look like s*%t, where a Alexa or F55 handled well in color will blow out gracefully and beautifully.

I myself can tell the difference between what the DP and a camera or colorist are bringing to the table. Frankly, it's my job to know.

I think it's taken a while for colorists, on the whole, to figure out what works and what doesn't for this camera. Take a a look at "Mahout" vs. this for example. Or MJFox show, or Blacklist.

There's a pile of ways Sony raw can be decoded (ACES, Rec709, and SLog3 with LUTs) and worked with, and all have their own look and giveaway artifacts. Sony gives you enough rope to make perfectly shot F65 look like crap if you don't watch it.
 
Nate Weaver said:
Yes. +1



A GoPro would still look like a GoPro. Don't attribute divine skills to a decent DP. An A-list Dp will still overexpose parts of frame or other things that will test the qualities of a camera. The difference is a clipped GoPro will still look like s*%t, where a Alexa or F55 handled well in color will blow out gracefully and beautifully.

I myself can tell the difference between what the DP and a camera or colorist are bringing to the table.

I think it's taken a while for colorists, on the whole, to figure out what works and what doesn't for this camera. Take a a look at "Mahout" vs. this for example. Or MJFox show, or Blacklist.

There's a pile of ways Sony raw can be decoded (ACES, Rec709, and SLog3 with LUTs) and worked with, and all have their own look and giveaway artifacts. Sony gives you enough rope to make perfectly shot F65 look like crap if you don't watch it.
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My friend...I was exaggerating. I am just giving props where its due.

My point clearly stated: The people behind the cameras are very skilled. They make the magic...along with a huge production budget...the camera assist in this but is most definitely not the deciding factor.

So I was not literally comparing an F-55 to a GoPro...of course.

EDIT: and by "behind the camera" in mean the whole production team...colorists included.
 
I was just about to go and delete my whole post for overreacting...but I'll leave it so I can be slightly embarrassed and also leave the convo intact.

I think you could have replaced DP with "colorist" and I would have been quiet.

But hopefully, if anything, I think the valuable conversation here would be WHY does this trailer look better than most? I could expound at length, but suffice to say it's in the grade and how the raw is handled in Resolve (or any other grading platform).

I knew your point, but I feel the whole "well a real DP can..." statement is not terribly useful. We all know what a good DP can do and does.

Plus, I've been around long enough to see some really good DPs totally **** up a new piece of tech. So I don't hold them up on pedestals :-)

Anyway, apologies, I just got rankled.
 
I do agree with everything Mark and Nate said, and when I read "DP" I also took it as "the DP should get all the credit here" even though perhaps it was not meant that way.

In my original post I was going to say something about the fact someone cracked the color science of the Sony F55 but I feel as if that's all I ever say on these boards so I left that part out. But truth is yeah, whomever worked on this really did unravel the color science of the F55 and that's aside from the obvious great work of the DP, art director, set designers, carpenters, actors, makup and special artists, and probably more...

Anyone who's actually worked with the Sony's from the F3 all the way up to the F55 knows exactly how difficult it can be, has been, or still is to get something that looks this fantastic.

As Nate put it, perhaps the conversation is just "why does this trailer look better than all others".
 
Haha! Thats what I get for posting and trying to eat dinner at the same time. Kinda feels like I walked in the room and got a bunch of "who the f%^k invited that guy." I mean that all in good humor. I just did not clearly label.

Next time I'll watch to not throw around set titles to carelessly :) I was a bit distracted by my wife's good cook'n.

Goes to show me: Don't text and drive. Don't post and eat.
 
Ah no sweat, you didn't mean any harm.

In a couple of pages from now someone else will come along anyway and say it's because of the DP anyways :cool:
 
It's a tricky beast. There comes a point where a DP & Production Designer can't really do anything more to help an image. The composition and the exposure will be what they are (i.e. what the DP has chosen), and the colours on set will be what they are.

But outside of things like using more light to balance an interior room with a bright daytime exterior (to place a scene within the dynamic range of a particular camera). No one is really going to frame or light a picture differently because of the camera they're using. I certainly don't light any differently for my F5 than I do for Alexa or Red shoots (beyond having to protect highlights more with Sony and Red).

At which point, it's down to the colourist to take the digital negative they're being given, and whip it into shape. Colour and contrast are obviously the main tools a colourist has to do this with, so the initial colour transform from the raw or log footage into an attractive space is vital. And I feel this is where so many people using the Cinealtas have come unstuck.

Between Filmconvert, the Impulz LUTs, Juan Melara's LUTs and the Rec709A LUT I feel like there's little reason to have to blame the cameras now - we have the tools to create an attractive colour transform to Sony footage. What matters now is spreading that knowledge out into the community so that people have a chance to approach these cameras the way they need to be approached - with a colour transform from the outset of the grading process.
 
Do you really think they are using filmconvert, or LUTs, etc.. ? I'd be a bit surprised to hear that to be honest, but I am very curious to find out more. Not even the studio pictures put out by Sony look this good.

It would be funny to find out they are just using LC709-A. lol
 
I have no idea, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if they have - it'd be really damn tricky to reach that kind of a look from scratch without some very elaborate contrast curves and colour adjustments. Pre-made LUTs aren't used solely by amateur colourists like us.
 
Over in liftgammagain.com where I've been spending lots of time mentioning of the word LUT is likely to get you flamed to a crisp.

Egos so big that no one would ever dare use a LUT to grade Sony footage....
 
Haha, well there's the answer to why we keep seeing such unimpressive results from the Cinealtas! The colour information's all there, but without a transform...
 
starcentral said:
Over in liftgammagain.com where I've been spending lots of time mentioning of the word LUT is likely to get you flamed to a crisp.

Egos so big that no one would ever dare use a LUT to grade Sony footage....
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Yeah, I've noticed that about colorists that spend a lot of time online. Huge crabby egos. I used to read the Cow Resolve forum a lot. Not anymore.

There are plenty of colorists that use LUTs. I think it's just a weird armchair/online colorist thing.

Grug said:
Haha, well there's the answer to why we keep seeing such unimpressive results from the Cinealtas! The colour information's all there, but without a transform...
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I think the part that drives me nuts about it is that, at least in the case of Sony, half of the color science is wrapped up in the LUT. The camera is throwing a huge, out of Rec709 gamut, and 14 stop range that does NOT have a nice highlight rolloff built in like the Alexa...it plops all this into a log encoding and these guys act like it's a 30 second operation to straighten it out and make a pleasing image out of it. It's not, not even close.

Or put another way, somebody spent a fair amount of time, with a huge pile of sample footage and charts, to even copy Arri's Rec709 LUT convincingly and call it LC709. You'd have to be a masochist to want to do that by hand every shot. And, by the tone of their internet postings, I think some of these guys do think it's "macho" and "the only way" to do this for every shot.

I think making the unrefined SLog2 and 3/SGamut output of our cameras took a fair amount of work to get an Alexa/world class image out of. Seriously, cheers to the colorist at the DMPC and Art Adams who made this happen, it saved that camera.
 
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