Martin Scanlan's "Dig"

Lenses were mainly Cooke S4is. We used the Alura zooms for a couple of shots and we had a couple of macros too.

How about the new Sony Primes... did Sony offer those to you to do the film? If so, how come you didn't end up using them? Have you any knowledge of the quality of the new primes?
 
The primes weren't available when we shot the film (3 weeks ago). They've got a set here in Poland, but I haven't had the chance to check them out yet. Steve is a big fan of the Cookes so probably would have pushed to shoot on them anyhow.
 
The production is awesome and here it comes, but it is hard to tell the difference between the F3 and the Fs in a 1080 format.
The S Log 2 advantages are even harder to tell without a side by side sample. Before I got Slog for my F3 I couldn't tell if the footage that I was looking was 3-7 or 12 f-stops DR. Thats what S log does so you can't see it on a graded video.
 
The production is awesome and here it comes, but it is hard to tell the difference between the F3 and the Fs in a 1080 format.
The S Log 2 advantages are even harder to tell without a side by side sample. Before I got Slog for my F3 I couldn't tell if the footage that I was looking was 3-7 or 12 f-stops DR. Thats what S log does so you can't see it on a graded video.

Are you saying you can't see a difference between the F55 and the F3? If so you just blew my mind.
 
Are you saying you can't see a difference between the F55 and the F3? If so you just blew my mind.

Are you sold based on what we've seen so far, that the images from the f5/f55 would be much different from the f3 under a great DP and colorist like these guys? I for one would need to shoot with the f55 and pull it into the davinci with f3 slog footage to make that determination...I'm thinking they both could produce similar results when shot well and the end master is 1080p. Unless the two are side by side I reject that anyone can tell the difference from what we've seen so far.

In my opinion, the f55 wouldn't necessarily make the image better out of the gate, but would rather provide more information to play with and maybe a little more room for mistakes while shooting. These cameras are getting to where the cams themselves provide such a great digital negative to the colorist to manipulate that the only really comaprison is not the cameras but rather the DP, story, colorist, etc.
 
Are you sold based on what we've seen so far, that the images from the f5/f55 would be much different from the f3 under a great DP and colorist like these guys? I for one would need to shoot with the f55 and pull it into the davinci with f3 slog footage to make that determination...I'm thinking they both could produce similar results when shot well and the end master is 1080p. Unless the two are side by side I reject that anyone can tell the difference from what we've seen so far.

In my opinion, the f55 wouldn't necessarily make the image better out of the gate, but would rather provide more information to play with and maybe a little more room for mistakes while shooting. These cameras are getting to where the cams themselves provide such a great digital negative to the colorist to manipulate that the only really comaprison is not the cameras but rather the DP, story, colorist, etc.

There are always very core traits that an image has, no matter what camera it comes from. I guess I'm a hyper pixel peeper, but I see a different image here, and I do not like anything coming out of the F3.

I was not sold on the elephant footage, this footage? Yeah, pretty much.
 
I guess that's a great question for Martin. Would be great to know in his experience if he sees a massive difference between the F3 and I 55 in terms of image quality. If this was shot with an F3 slog with an external recorder, would there be a huge difference?
 
I laugh when people tell me they see these things within compressed to hell footage, then recompressed to vimeo... Yes you can see some things, but other things you just can't. There no way to tell how good a 4K image looks when you're bouncing it down 3-4 generations to 1080p.

I do sometimes see the difference with RED 4K and 5K stuff bounced down, because it holds so much detail, but this stuff doesn't seem to have that "4K to 1080" feel to it as much. I just can see that its very sharp (which I dont know if I like or not).

I'll wait to comment once I get my hands on some RAW or at least original 4K footage. Thats something I extremely love with RED, I can just export out a raw clip to anyone and they see everything right there. No compression on vimeo stuff.

Only thing I see on vimeo so far is its, A) sharp, almost too sharp b) global shutter c) sharp.

I can't tell a thing about dynamic range because its already been corrected. To me judging from Vimeo, it looks like the F3 stuff I saw when they had it running through the SR-R1 recorder thing. And yes I'm a pixel peeper too, but trying to judge from 3+ generation of compression is just silly.

The highlights are handled nicely, but then again so are the F3's highlights.
 
You laugh because you don't see something that other people (people being plural) do?

Okay then.

I'm out.
 
We actually shot the behind the scenes with an F3 in SLog and external recorder. It's by no means a fair comparison as obviously it wasn't lit for it and in the low light interiors the BTS guy was having to dial in gain and take out shutter to get any kind of exposure on the crew, but yeah there's a huge difference IMHO. And the 4K is something else entirely. There's a very big screen at Camerimage, its pretty impressive although I saw some F5 stuff on the same screen and that wasn't too shabby either.
 
can you comment on the color of the beach scenes? Were you correcting something there or just experimenting?
To me it was almost a vintage coloration and feel. It didn't feel like part of the film and really took me out of it.
Good job on the piece as a whole btw
 
I think we experimented a lot with the grade, the piece allowed that and it was good to see how the camera worked with different looks. The low con beach is much more my kind of taste than Steve's to be honest, I like all those vintage looks. We wanted to play with it a bit. For me, I think it fits in the film perfectly fine, but I appreciate everyone's tastes are different when it comes to grading.

As for the Alexa comparisons, at this level cameras are almost becoming like film stocks, you use the one you like the look of. I think it's up there technically, but the choice is going to come down to the piece and the filmmakers. Some will prefer F55/F65, some Alexa and all those guys on another forum will keep with their Epics thank you very much.
 
Probably no one knows the answer just yet, but I would really love to know if the CFA of the F55 contributes to any of the overall look of this film or is it mostly in the grade.

For example could this "look" / grade been done from the REC709 based CFA of the F5 vs the IFEG (insane-film-exceeding-gamut) CFA of the F55?
 
To prove my point watch this and compare side by side... https://vimeo.com/16898584

Thats shot with the F3 in 10bit 4:2:2

I'd be hard pressed to see anything different between these two in terms of quality from the Vimeo 1080p files.


I think sometimes people see what they want to see. Someone tells you "hey this looks great, it was 4K bounced to 1080" and you think... oh it must be good. Then someone says, "hey this looks ok for 1080 but not what 4K would be" and then you think... hmm maybe it could be better.

I put those to shorts side by side on vimeo and played them back. I see no difference in image quality in a 1080p situation. Will their be a big difference in 4K? most likely, but if you're finishing to 1080, and especially to TV only situations, I'm pretty sure the F3 has got much more bang for the buck right now.

If you wanna do feature work, big screen work/big screen ads "movie theater ads" and such then The F55 in 4K might be the better option. Dont let your eyes fool you. I'm a super pixel peeper and I'm watching both of these back and finding a hard time to tell the difference in the QUALITY of the image over one another. Vimeo is still Vimeo, until you get some raw files to check out, there's just no real telling.
 
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