Shutter / Panny Genesis

[KyleProhaska]

Every once in a while a Hollywood film rolls around that (to me) has an issue with the shutter. They have it set too low so things look more like video. My wife and I watched Date Night last night and she asked when we were about 10 minutes in "why does it look so low budget?" I told her the shutter is what gave it that "look" and then she understood. Some parts of the film had a proper shutter and looked fine. Lots of films done with the Genesis have had this issue.

I can think of many reasons for them to use a lower shutter (scenes in 2012 had that look as well) but it looks so awful to me. Am I the only one who is yanked out of something I'm watching when the shutter is off by even a little bit? My wife isn't a technical person but she immediately thought something was off and attributed it to something of a lower budget...since it looked more like a video camera to her.

Was/is the Genesis just not that fantastic in low light? Is that why so many films that use it tend to drop the shutter? Just wondering who else has an opinion here. Low light doesn't make a lot of sense to me since these films I'm speaking of have more then enough in the budget for some extra wattage...why mess with the shutter?

 

[Ian-T]

Funny. I taught my daughter what to look for when craziness starts to show up like this. She was 10 (I think) when we watched "2012" and pointed those anomalies out to me. I already saw it myself but had no idea at the time it was filmed on digital. I saw it also in "Date Night" as well as that other movie with Steve Carell and Ann Hathaway (I think "Get Smart") during the night scenes in Russia. It does throw me off and tells my mind "something's wrong." Of course Michael Mann does this a lot in his films as well. I think I kind of expect it from him but like you I wonder why they think it's necessary.

I think I kinda ruined my daughter's viewing experience. She notices it from a mile away and keeps pointing it out to me now...lol.

 

[jax_rox]

I was a bit put off by it in Date Night, but I guess accepted it overall perhaps because the whole movie was shot like that. I found in Get Smart, the difference between film and video was quite jarring and very obvious.

I'm not sure why, and perhaps there's something specific to the Genesis that gives it a certain look - I certainly found in, say, Captain America I could barely pick the difference between 35mm and Alexa (though could pick the 5D shots - though perhaps it was me mistaking the Genesis for the 5D).

Then there's movies like Grown Ups in which I certainly didn't find it looked overly digital, or at least didn't have that Date Night, Get Smart type of look.

 

[Awesome Box]

It's one of those, once you see it you'll always see it type scenarios. It can be really annoying trying to suspend belief and enjoy a movie when you notice technical flaws like that. I try my hardest not to focus on it and instead pay attention to the story. Afterall, isn't that why we make films? For the story? As long as the story is good, you should be able to look past the technical issues that distract you from it. Just my opinion.

 

[CharlesPapert]

I operated on one of the early Genesis features ("Balls of Fury") and subsequently did a few more features and TV shows with that camera. There were a lot of growing pains--you don't even want to imagine how heavy it was with the SRW1 tape deck onboard--but it was more than capable of good looking footage. I don't recall us switching off the shutter at any point but I did see it in other films, like "Apocalypto", and not loving the resulting motion blur.

I just now remembered that we had the first solid-state onboard recording decks aka digital mags out of Panavision, on the feature "Fired Up!". It helped for me somewhat with Steadicam, although I was still saddled with a BNC cable off the rig for monitoring (pre-HD transmitters). The mags were downloaded on the camera truck by playing them in real time into an HDCAM recorder! And we only had a certain number of them, so there were days we'd get a little logjammed...yeah, it was a bit wild and wooly in those days.