The F35 at NIGHT

[JMtheDP]

So, it seems there are a lot of questions from both owners and potential owners about the F35's low-light capabilities.

As has been mentioned countless times, the F35 is designed as a film replacement camera - complete with all the issues and benefits that entails.

It has never been touted as an excellent low-light camera, but that doesn't mean it is useless. Far from it.

So here I invite everyone with the camera or experience of using it to talk about their experience of using the camera for night scenes, preferably exteriors, and if you have footage that'd be even better.

I want to get the ball rolling by saying I have shot a fair bit of F35 material at night, although I am not allowed to post much of it. In metropolitan scenes (in London) the street lighting that exists is usually adequate, especially in areas with lit shops, etc... I find one major benefit of a relatively low ISO to begin with is that point sources - eg. car headlamps, etc.... do not just burn out when they appear in scene.

Outdoors, depending on the area you need to light, I wouldn't want anything less than a 2.5K but if you're doing a smaller, more intimate scene, it is easily doable with some smaller LED lights.

 

[Kholi]

Go too low, the luminance noise eats up overall saturation that's potentially difficult to recover. Doesn't have to be an exterior night scene to get it, interior day too underexposed will see it as well.

However, the camera's quite decent when it comes to lowlight, and more importantly when you haven't gone too far under, color purity and fidelity's very good, unlike other "good" lowlight cameras? There's no point in capturing a lowlight scene, most of the time, if the color is washed and unfamiliar.

As mentioned, anything that does blowout always tends to go peacefully (pleasantly) so it's also a benefit of shooting with the camera in nearly any situation involving a bright light source.

Overall, plenty adequate for a lowlight shoot IMO.

 

[JMtheDP]

I do recall my mentor telling me when he began shooting ISO 50 was considered a "high speed" stock, and when 100 came out it was like witchcraft

 

[Jusgorilla]

I do recall my mentor telling me when he began shooting ISO 50 was considered a "high speed" stock, and when 100 came out it was like witchcraft

James you crack me up!

 

[Barrett Phillips]

Here's a Prores file shot with the Hyperdeck - The lighting setup was just one Joker 800 with the spottiest lens up on the balcony of the building off camera right (pretty far from the subject). Used the now-basically-irrelevant Sigma 20mm 1.8 fully wide open... definitely not as good as Sigma's current offerings to say the least

Finally going to be releasing the short film this March, will post up a link once it's public.

And here's the footage - (400ish MB)

Frame grab:

 

[mlysbakken]

That's a great example, Barrett! What gain setting did you use?

 

[SJX]

Great thread! :smile:


Thanks for starting it James. :thumbsup:


Thanks for posting your footage Barrett. Looking at some night shots from the Blackmagic 4K the F35 doesn't really look any worse in low light. Maybe the Blackmagic is slightly cleaner. Can Neatvideo clean it up?

I'm not surprised the BM4K is not good in low light with so many pixels. Probably part of the problem with the F35 too since it has a 4K sensor. The BM4K is also rated at ISO400 and it can go to ISO800, which I think the F35 can too. Obviously neither will look clean at this artificial ISO. But the difference is the F35 is 10 times the camera.

This is the perfect example of what I was talking about. To light that whole shot would be very expensive. But the key on the actor did the trick. Of course it would be nicer if the buildings were a little brighter and we could see more and there weren't huge areas of pitch black patches. But it's perfectly clear where we are and establishes the location just fine. If Neatvideo could clean the noise it's a very workable shot for sure. Did you try Neatvideo Barrett?

In the 80's and even 90's lots of night shots in movies pretty much looked like this. It's just currently that we are used to seeing night shots in movies which are brighter and more stylized.

Surprised how much you got out from that Joker Barrett and impressed with the level of detail the F35 is resolving on the palm tree leaves even in this low light.

 

[keithlango]

Neatvideo does a very good job cleaning up any noise. And if I don't like how that looks the Magic Bullet DeNoiser has a slightly different take on noise reduction, but can be effective as well.

 

[JMtheDP]

For what it is worth, I will only ever use the F35's higher ISO settings during daylight scenes, and I only use the base ISO (340 or 450) at night.

My reasoning is this:

Increasing the ISO increases the headroom you have for highlights and reduces the room for shadows. Shadows become much noisier, even if slightly better exposed.

I find the difference between ISO 450 and 800 is not really that vast (also the F35 is much better using its ISO 800 gamma than the gain) but the noise difference is quite pronounced. Given that most night scenes are mostly black or very dark in the image, I find the image noise to usually be a bit too much as it takes up too much of the picture.

Conversely, I have recently shot some stuff in the middle of the day using 6db because the director wanted a "grittier" feel and this just gives a bit more noise to the shadows. I quite like it and there isn't too much to be distracting.

Even at ISO 400, presuming you have a relatively fast lens (T2), you only need very small lights to key.

 

[JMtheDP]

Oh, I actually just remembered I did shoot something nearly all low-light with my F35. Very nearly forgot about it as it was the first thing I ever shot with the camera.

This was a really extreme low-light example. We had lots of limitations with the location meaning we couldn't run power to the lights. I also hadn't got a full set of batteries for the camera at that point so I kept stealing the lighting guy's battery...

Anyway, nearly the whole film is shot wide open (T1.3) with Zeiss super speeds (MK3s). All of the scenes of the woman walking along the marina are lit ONLY with TWO 1x1 litepanel type lights.

Hope this helps.

 

[SJX]

For what it is worth, I will only ever use the F35's higher ISO settings during daylight scenes, and I only use the base ISO (340 or 450) at night.

It has two native ISOs?

Even at ISO 400, presuming you have a relatively fast lens (T2), you only need very small lights to key.

Or is ISO400 the native?

 

[SJX]

Interesting clip. Thanks for posting. It's looking like the F35 is quite workable at night. I couldn't judge noise in the clip because the original version wasn't available and the uploaded version was heavily compressed. But exposure wise doesn't seem too bad.
What would be very useful would be a clip shot in downtown where people walk by store front windows and light posts to see how much of an effect these have. If it's just fill or if it's up to key level for example. This would be a great example to judge. Maybe something like this will turn up.

One thing I'm noticing in quite a few F35 clips though is what seems to be IR contamination. Some clips have that very typical Sony red-ish tinge that cameras like the EX1 and EX3 have and which you don't really see in Panasonics for example. Does the F35 suffer from IR contamination?

 

[mlysbakken]

IR contamination appears on the F35 when using NDs without adding an IR filter. Since it captures a wider color range than any other camera (bar the F65), you need higher quality filtration to balance the light hitting the sensor.
If you're referring to material shot without ND filtration, I think what you're reacting to might be a result of color grading. The F35s image is slightly warm from the get-go (like old Kodak stock), and when people try to balance towards blue they sometimes skew the skin tones a bit towards a redish magenta.
It's easy to avoid, but might partially be because the color gamut is interpreted/converted to a lesser gamut in our workflows. At the present, both the ACES IDT and sRGB are unavailable in Resolve (although I've actually experienced much richer color in Resolve now after the 10.1 update)

 

[SJX]

In James clip for example where I don't think he used NDs, I see red-ish blacks which look like IR contamination.

 

[mlysbakken]

Yup, I see what you mean! Interesting... Didn't think it was necessary with an IR filter normally, but maybe it is after all.

 

[Kholi]

The IR Pollution on the camera is insane...

It's not unrecoverable in a lot of circumstances, but I don't think I've seen that amount of pollution in any camera before. Blackmagics have IR Problems for sure, just not this bad, but I still wear an IR Cut at all times on those cameras.

 

[JMtheDP]

SJX

To clarify the ISO issue. Sony treat the F35 like a film camera, you can rate it how you like, they recommend between 400 and 600.

Officially, the base ISO of the F35 with 0db gain at 25p and 180 deg shutter is 340. However, extended dynamic range mode adds 3db of gain, bringing this to 450.

When I said 400, I was generalising.

I would warn anyone trying to judge the F35's colour ability from the short I posted, we were under street lights with some serious CRI issues!

 

[keithlango]

--- putting this here in this thread ---

The exposure test I did the other night with the F35 and a 2k Fresnel lens diffused. Wanted to see how much I could get with just one light.
password: nightF35

https://vimeo.com/89168648

Watch it on Vimeo- or better yet download the original file from there. Every time I embed a vimeo here it ends up looking quite a bit different than on Vimeo's site. Also the 1080 version is still being encoded as I write this, so hopefully it will be done soon. I know mlysbakken will be pleased.

The goal was to have a black background (to test noise), which took some doing because the wall over my shoulder on screen right was getting lit up by the diffuse frame bouncing light back. So I had to flag that off to get the pitch black over there. Wide open the Rokinon and F35 combo picked up a lot of light- too much, actually. My AC will be very happy to hear that.

I apologize for the ugly model. All the beautiful people in my house had gone to bed. Meanwhile I'm out in my drive way in the freezing cold doing camera tests.

 

[mlysbakken]

Very informative, Keith!
And nice 1080p, haha

 

[JMtheDP]

Okay, so I have uploaded a few full res clips from the short I posted on page one.

A couple of things to bear in mind.

1. As far as I am concerned, this was totally underlit. Several issues meant we only had a couple of 1x1 litepanels running off batteries, and some very dull street lights to help us.
2. This was my first time using the F35, I hadn't used it before and now I would be doing a few things differently that'd get the thing looking better.
3. I really hate open shutter, so I don't think any of these clips had the shutter fully open, it was 180 degrees with some gain I think for most of them.
4. We recorded at ProRes 422, so you lose some resolution over shooting 444 - which I now do exclusively.

There are three full res clips, available for download from www.tee2.tk/shared/
That's my private site, so don't go mad!

Here are three full size stills from the clips.