Sony VENICE: Impressive Skin Tones

Looks really good. Much better than anything I've seen from the F65. Although the F35 still has more mojo. But Sony might have a real winner with Venice. Even more if the dual ISO works well and if they add more frame rates.
 
Looks great. If they can get the full sensor to run up to 48/50fps, I think they'll have a real winner on their hands.
 
bill totolo said:
That's very sharp, very saturated.
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And it still looks great, right? Super-detailed & super-saturated is hard to do. And with super shallow DOF- quite an amazing look!

With high detail there's typically aliasing/artifacts which tends toward a digital look. With weak color science, it's hard to super-saturate skin. Sony's doing super detail, super saturation, and super shallow DOF all at the same time and it works.

Here's deep DOF with saturated colors along with amazing dynamic range. This footage (shot for IMAX) viewed on a 4K desktop monitor is the first footage that has me thinking a large 4K display in the living room is finally going to be worth it. Finally a "Nyquist Limit" 4K camera is here: look at the bricks and high detail shots- super clean and no aliasing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKx-Kkw_fRI

More Venice 4K and some BTS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EWyDHgcpTI

Haven't seen F65, Alexa 65, or Red footage with this much clean detail along with no artifacts on YouTube in 4K: all should be capable of "Nyquist Limit" 4K with no significant aliasing (Alexa LF's 4.4K is looking pretty good in 4K- haven't seen any artifacts yet). For those not into super saturation or real detail: it's not over-sharpened, it's real detail, and that's a big difference since there's no pixel crawling/aliasing present as with over-sharpened content. If content calls for a softer look, a Gaussian filter in post can work, or shooting with softer lenses / using diffusion filters can work. Sony's "The Dig" short for the VENICE looked a lot softer in most shots.

For IMAX type presentations, this reminds of seeing 60Hz films years ago (Showscan). Folks in front of me were crying as the imagery was so powerfully realistic (flying over snow covered mountains). This kind of detailed footage in IMAX at 60fps will be pretty awesome.
 
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Leica Thalia lenses might be another reason these VENICE demos are looking so amazing: http://cw-sonderoptic.com/leica-thalia-new-lenses-big-picture-cinematography/

Red Monstro VV 8K footage isn't as detailed as the 6K VENICE, color(?) guess that's an artistic grade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xLaHg63yK0

Not clear what lenses (and/or OLPFs) are being used, the Red Dragon 8K VV isn't resolving as much detail as the 6K VENICE (not about sharpness: actual, real detail, "Nyquist Limit" or True 4K):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rVyIvickwI

As a game developer, image / video processing developer, and filmmaker, this is quite an amazing time to finally see cameras produce True 4K "Nyquist Limit" footage that is so clean and aliasing/artifact free!
 
I've seen 3 films shot on Venice - 2 on Venice and 1 on the FS5 Mark II (with Venice PP) and all three films look amazing. Best Sony color science yet, that can hang or best any camera.
 
gene_can_sing said:
I've seen 3 films shot on Venice - 2 on Venice and 1 on the FS5 Mark II (with Venice PP) and all three films look amazing. Best Sony color science yet, that can hang or best any camera.
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Hey Gene- still have your FS7? Not clear if VENICE color science will be available for the FS7? Would love to see VENICE go side by side with Alexa LF and perhaps C700 FF.

It was clear Sony could do great color with the F65 and Oblivion & Lucy- nice to see they are finally bringing it to lower end cameras (possibly even better than F65?).
 
jcs said:
Hey Gene- still have your FS7? Not clear if VENICE color science will be available for the FS7? Would love to see VENICE go side by side with Alexa LF and perhaps C700 FF.

It was clear Sony could do great color with the F65 and Oblivion & Lucy- nice to see they are finally bringing it to lower end cameras (possibly even better than F65?).
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Coming out soon. FS7 MKiii. The same as FS7 MKii but
with Venice color science....😉
 
What about HFR!? did they mention anything about that! is it something that come later with some fw update! if so, why no word about that? really impressive colors and skintone though
 
There is an article that accompanies this shoot by DP Jeff Berlin.

It was DP'd a short film on the Sony VENICE for the big C-LED screen at the Sony booth at NAB. Clips from the film ran on that screen in 8K HDR. This is a short article about his experience with the camera. Lenses were Servicevision Scorpio full frame anamorphics.

https://alphauniverse.com/videos/full-frame-sony-venice-gets-a-real-world-test/


I also asked Jeff a bit more about the grading and how it was done. More specifically I asked if any secondary color correction was done but I was told there were not. It was graded using Sony's new Venice LUT and done at Technicolor. If you guys have any specific questions about the grading let me know and I'll send Jeff some questions.

Also Vimeo tends to look a bit better then youTube
https://vimeo.com/265485072
 
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For a while, I felt youtube looked better than vimeo. Has that changed?
 
James0b57 said:
For a while, I felt youtube looked better than vimeo. Has that changed?
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It flips back and forth. Testing with a 240Mbps network:

Mobile: Vimeo (iPhone X): much better than YouTube
1080p: Vimeo for some content appears to have the edge
4K: YouTube appears to have a slight edge in image quality. Hard to tell as Vimeo won't buffer / play back 4K content smoothly. Appears to be a buffer algorithm design issue / bug. Content blasts in (progress bar shoots right fast), then stops and video plays a few seconds, then video completely stops, then content blasts in fast, starts playing again etc. Sometimes video stops and never starts again.
 
jcs said:
It flips back and forth. Testing with a 240Mbps network:

Mobile: Vimeo (iPhone X): much better than YouTube
1080p: Vimeo for some content appears to have the edge
4K: YouTube appears to have a slight edge in image quality. Hard to tell as Vimeo won't buffer / play back 4K content smoothly. Appears to be a buffer algorithm design issue / bug. Content blasts in (progress bar shoots right fast), then stops and video plays a few seconds, then video completely stops, then content blasts in fast, starts playing again etc. Sometimes video stops and never starts again.
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I felt when selecting 1080p on Youtube, not allowing it to run with "auto 1080", it was generally closer to the original footage than vimeo. But it has been a while since I did a real AB.

As for the cellphone footage, I try not to use the vimeo app, since it is buggy and the search bar is hopeless.

Also, not really the same issue, but slightly on topic, I found that when exporting from premiere using the default Vimeo vs. Youtube presets, that the Youtube ones produced better results as well.

Vimeo just has always had a cleaner and more presentable interface, so despite some of the issues along the way, like the days when you could skip ahead on the timeline, it has remained a great tool for displaying work.

There is probably a thread about this somewhere we should revive.
 
jcs said:
4K: YouTube appears to have a slight edge in image quality. Hard to tell as Vimeo won't buffer / play back 4K content smoothly. Appears to be a buffer algorithm design issue / bug. Content blasts in (progress bar shoots right fast), then stops and video plays a few seconds, then video completely stops, then content blasts in fast, starts playing again etc. Sometimes video stops and never starts again.
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You have to wait until the entire video buffers because it's impossible to get through anything in 4K as the playback always catches up with the buffer.

What I do is choose 4K before a video has started and then press play and then pause it immediately, and come back 10 minutes later and it's mostly done and will play in 4K. It's definitely a design quirk or bug and sometimes when the playback catches up to the buffer the quality may drop down to 1080p. I usually double check by clicking 'd' on the video for its specs.
 
James0b57 said:
As for the cellphone footage, I try not to use the vimeo app, since it is buggy and the search bar is hopeless.
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When I want the best possible quality with 1080p material, I upscale to 4K, sharpen, then render as high bitrate MP4 or MXF. Then while playing back in 4K (YouTube), it looks very close to the original 1080p viewed locally. Vimeo's buffering system is broken- as a developer I can't believe they've left it in that state for so long, so I don't bother with Vimeo anymore (even had Vimeo Pro when selling videos online).

NorBro- in my office I've got a 240Mbps connection- no need to wait for anything. In fact you can see a burst of progress, then it just hangs. Clearly a bug. Sometimes it never recovers. Vimeo doesn't have google's deep pockets, thus it appears they don't have a big budget for CDNs, and thus they are being miserly with bandwidth. That said, I'd be cool to wait a bit if it would buffer completely and then just hit play when done. Unfortunately, it just hangs and never fully buffers. The bug might be related to having a fast connection and their timer code doesn't properly handle that case. I've written a lot of real-time network code, and it can be tricky. However Vimeo's had this bug for a long time. When I worked for MySpace, this kind of bug would require working weekends / overnight until it was fixed (we used Akamai for the CDN- sometimes they would also have to make changes to fix issues).

Today a video almost played OK, hiccuped a few times, dropped frames. YouTube is smooth, no issues (looks like Vimeo is using Akamai and MPEG-Dash (for variable bitate streaming)- bug could be in Dash or how they are using it when selecting a fixed 4K stream):

Delivery:dash, cdn: akfire_interconnect_quic
Playing:3840×2160@24 20,680 Kbps
Embed size:960×540 @1.25x
Separate AV:true
Dropped frames:25 / 4563 - 0.55%
Bandwidth:109,499 Kbps
(5,949 Kbps204,629 Kbps)

It looks like just increasing the buffer size by about 10-15% would fix this bug. If I hit pause, everything stops (no buffering). They're saving bandwidth to save costs.
 
Hmm, not sure...every video I've ever played and paused always buffered to the end.

If I just hit play, I get those bursts like you (though probably not as fast) and the video does eventually stop and hang.

If I play/pause, it always works. But it's definitely been a problem since day 1 with 4K. (1080p was never an issue for me.)
 
starcentral said:
There is an article that accompanies this shoot by DP Jeff Berlin.

It was DP'd a short film on the Sony VENICE for the big C-LED screen at the Sony booth at NAB. Clips from the film ran on that screen in 8K HDR. This is a short article about his experience with the camera. Lenses were Servicevision Scorpio full frame anamorphics.

https://alphauniverse.com/videos/full-frame-sony-venice-gets-a-real-world-test/


I also asked Jeff a bit more about the grading and how it was done. More specifically I asked if any secondary color correction was done but I was told there were not. It was graded using Sony's new Venice LUT and done at Technicolor. If you guys have any specific questions about the grading let me know and I'll send Jeff some questions.
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Hey Dennis- thanks for the info, had not heard about the Servicevision Scorpio anamorphic FF lens before, awesome look and detail! It would be cool to find out what was necessary for skin tone grading- any global WB tweaks needed or something more complex. For example, I played with ARRIRAW footage (Alexa 65 & LF) in Resolve, and just doing a basic gamma curve and minor tweaks to global WB and got good looking skin tones.

NorBro- no issues with Vimeo 1080p here either, and again, on mobile Vimeo looks much better than YouTube.
 
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