F3: Why does Red Hook Summer look so bad?

Shoots56 said:
Do I need to see more than a trailer Duke? Sometimes, yes, but that is rare and if a filmmaker can't even bother make the trailer look interesting, much less not bother to hire a starving graphics artist for $400 to make a poster for them, then why would I waste my time watching the stuff they are trying to sell? I think people need to be more harsh in this field and stop coddling wishful filmmakers who obviously can't make it work... but that's just me. The whole package is the film, not just the idea or good intent. Does anyone recall that RED shot "Time Machine" movie? That's what I think some of those films on that list do for the F3.
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I bet you haven't watched 90% of the trailers either. LOL

But the real points, as I see them, are that the F3 was always advertised by Sony as a budget camera, and even the best operaters and directors need experience. Did you know that Alfred Hitchcock's first three movies were flops.

Still, those listed on the site were good enough that someone broadcast or showed them somewhere. The F3 may not be the 'best' digital cinema camera, but it's certainly a viable cinema camera. IMHO far better than a DSLR.

Are the movies and TV shows on the list going to convince someone to use an F3 on a 30 million dollar shoot. Not likely. An indie movie? Sure.
 
Duke M. said:
I bet you haven't watched 90% of the trailers either. LOL
Are the movies and TV shows on the list going to convince someone to use an F3 on a 30 million dollar shoot. Not likely. An indie movie? Sure.
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What are you talking about? Yeah, I did bother to watch them, did you? I guess you missed that I have an F3 when everyone else is selling theirs so that should tell you that Im trying to make it work.

And no, there is little listed on that site that would make anyone want to use an F3 on their film. What if they click on, for example, Awakened or The Down Home Alien thing first? That would be game over because they look like high school film class projects at best.

And I hope that you understand that just because some obscure media outlet chose to show a movie doesnt mean anything at all. If we go with that logic, lets include porn in there too because those are shown all over the place, and to much higher numbers btw.
 
Shoots56 said:
What are you talking about? Yeah, I did bother to watch them, did you? I guess you missed that I have an F3 when everyone else is selling theirs so that should tell you that Im trying to make it work.

And no, there is little listed on that site that would make anyone want to use an F3 on their film. What if they click on, for example, Awakened or The Down Home Alien thing first? That would be game over because they look like high school film class projects at best.

And I hope that you understand that just because some obscure media outlet chose to show a movie doesnt mean anything at all. If we go with that logic, lets include porn in there too because those are shown all over the place, and to much higher numbers btw.
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I researched my list and I believe Dennis started with my list then added material, so yes I did look at them.

I would hardly call the BBC, NBC, AMC, etc which some of those showed as obscure media outlets. Personally I go with Roger Corman's philosophy and that is "If it makes a decent profit it's successful."

Since you saw my name there you probably intended it as a studied insult, but let's take "The Down Home Alien Blues" as an example. It's intended as a campy romance suitable for familes in a sci-fi setting. The target audience is women, not you. It was nominated for best film at a couple film festivals (which proves only that someone liked it.)

It sold to a distributor who specializes in that for approximately three times the cost of production (and no one worked for free. We all made money.) That's my definition of a success! It did well enough that it enabled me to get the financing for my next, bigger budget and more mainstream movie because financiers are business people. I known lots or 'artists' who can't get anything made for the opposite reason. Choose your own poison.

The poster and trailer that are up are not the ones that sold the movie. The romance poster is the direction it ended up with because there is actually very little shoot'em up in it . I don't own the rights any longer to put up any trailers that I want.

RomanceP_1-5-416x619.jpg

You can express any opinions that you want and you can say they aren't "real" movies, but expressing such criticisms ignores reality and the desire to create experimental films for which there is an audience (even if it's not mainstream) which weakens your argument.
 
I don't want to offend any F3 owners, but the F3 is definitely a budget camera that was designed as an entry level to the CineAlta line. Back in 2010 when I bought one, I was going from shooting on 35mm ground glass adapters (which I had been using since 2002) to the F3 which seemed like a viable option - especially going from 60 ASA to 800 ISO.

But despite the fact there is some material out there shot on the F3 that looks great, for me it was always missing that mojo that myself and others feel and see in footage from the Alexa, F35, and RED cameras. That's not a knock to the F3, I thought for $16,000 I was getting the world, but after using the camera for a few years I realized really it was not that much an improvement over images I was seeing being shot with DSLR's (with exception to aliasing and moire).

Perhaps I was naive to think the F3 would be a F35, RED camera or Alexa but in any case I think if any of those films on the shotonf3.com website were shot in RAW or the Alexa I feel like they would look 100 times better. Yes, yes, yes, of course there is "craft" when it comes to creating a high production value look and feel on a feature film, but just specifically focusing on the footage, even the ones that used "lighting" it just doesn't have that "look" in my opinion. Sorry if that does offend anyone. I speak of even my own work with the F3 included in that.


In this video below, a Sony product launch video on the F3, reference is made to the F23, SRW9000, HDWF900 (cameras in the $80k/$100k neighborhood) and the F3 is indeed described as an "entry level camera".

http://vimeo.com/video/16897383


F3 - $16k
HDWF900 = $80k
F23 = $100k
F35 = $250k
SRW9000 = $82k

So what I want to know or ask folks here, is what is it that gives that "mojo" to footage between all these cameras? I know grading is a big aspect of it, but head over to the F35 thread where people shoot run and gun in the streets and even that appears to have way more mojo than the F3, a camera that cost 15 times as much as the F3 when it was new.

EDIT: and I 100% agree with Duke that in the end what matters is finding the market for any film no matter what. The success of it is turning a profit, and shooting any feature film is a serious ton of work that in general can be hard on small or no budgets. Heck I can't even make it through some short film shoots, let alone a feature. I think I'd shoot myself by the end of a feature to be honest.
 
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To me who has worked so long editing with material originating from a vast amount of sources (since 1994) I see that when you reach the level of what the F3 can achieve it's more a matter of taste than how good a camera actually is. I can put footage from a Red Epic, Alexa and F3 side by side and although they all look a little bit different they all look great. Given the same crew and task I could pick any of these cameras and the result would look just as good.

No doubt is F3 a budget camera but it can come out just as great as the other ones.

The reason why it looks less than stellar has to do with the crew behind it. Lower budget gives you a lower result in image quality. Not just the technical quality but the whole production design. Do I make less than stellar footage with my F3? Yes I do due to limits in time, money and skill but that's mostly my fault and regardless of camera it wouldn't have looked better.

Sometimes people thinks that a great camera makes all the work. No, you have to make the hard work.
 
When it's the crew or DP, I agree its the crew or DP. But I'm talking about the camera alone when everything else is the same. I just find there are inherent and differences and the price of the cameras alone should give some indication that there are in fact differences.

I've strictly done lighting on some projects for RED camera owner/operators. Lighting the SAME as I would with my own F3 that I owned at the time and to me the RED Camera footage just looks better. More glossy, smoother highlights,.. like something from film or the look of still from a DSLR. (I also shoot professional studio stills with studio based lighting - I'm absolutely spoiled with the look of "film like" images.)

In the case of RED I'd say its because its REDcode - but what about the F35 or Alexa for example? Neither shoot in "RAW" yet have that mojo I'm talking about despite being "10-bit".

What is that mojo?
 
It's all about processing and gamma curves. RAW is nice but it does not equal nice images or smooth, natural images or good skin tones. Sony makes video cameras, and a lot of them use cinegamma curves. Cinegamma curves are great compared to standard gamma curves, but they can still be quite ugly since depending on implementation they often clip out dynamic range and still have ugly knees or are too tied to old low-DR video gamma curves which are made to have bright saturated colors and punchy contrast. All the old F3 gamma curves do really weird things to bright colors in overexposed/highlight conditions. One annoying thing about a lot of Sony cameras is that they just dont have a good out of the box gamma curve. Slog/slog2 is not a good look without heavy grading, and every other gamma curve often arbitrarily clips out dynamic range and wastes the best part of the sensor's range (the highlights). Most of the other gammas are also just too complicated, trying to match some old standard or fit the signal into some old specification that may be relevant for live broadcast but for narrative it just introduces artifacts and unnatural gamma curve complexity that is hard to get rid of or fix in post. Alexa even REC709 looks beautiful and uses the whole sensor range even in non-raw 1080p, RED is raw, but it's the gamma curves and color matrix that make things look pretty natural (except those pink highlights they never fixed), even DSLRs are able to achieve it to some extent while a lot of pro/semi-pro Sony cameras dont because DSLRs are not tied to old broadcast standards and specifications, they just come with gamma curves that look nice and try not to throw anything out.
 
Red raw, Alexa prores 444 or F3 422. When the final grade is done and by the time you hand over the footage to the station they all look as good as the next one. Often I will have my fingers at each step of the process all the way to the final coding for delivery. So I can't see how the F3 is a lesser camera image wise. Not if you look at the final output.
 
nyvz said:
It's all about processing and gamma curves. RAW is nice but it does not equal nice images or smooth, natural images or good skin tones. (and so on)...
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+1 to entire post

There is a lot of "taste" that goes into tuning an image. Some manufacturers are better at it than others.

I have one client where the 55 is a tough sell compared to an Alexa just based on look, never mind XAVC or SR vs. ProRes in post (take a guess which they prefer).
 
Yes it definitely does seem like it's all about processing and gamma curves. Sony just seems to have a poor starting point, as has been mentioned.

If anyone here has seen the monitor out on an Alexa, you'd agree it looks way way nicer than the stock output on the Sony's.

EDIT: this is before you've even started recording or grading....
 
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I really did not know you shot that as I didn't bother to read names, I just picked two. Ok... but, and maybe you didn't know this, but 99% of indie films that even make it Sundance don't break even, much less make money, so I guess you are in the rarest position you can be in. I don't believe it's a property worth even $100 total, personally, but whatever you say. If you made it for $2000 and found someone to pay $3000 for it, then great, but whoever that guy is will lose money. If it makes it into the public market that I am aware of (the ones the general public has heard of and use) then I'll swallow my words.

Riding on the fact that a movie was in some tiny film festival is not good for your own sake of learning what is wrong. There are almost 1000 "film fests" in the US alone, mostly run by borderline scammers who make money off of wishful filmmakers who will never make it to the (only 4) festivals that matter... and even those don't REALLY matter. There are roughly over 5000 unwatchable movies made a year in the US alone, in case anyone is wondering. Sundance sales are almost non-existent so even making it that far means you still have basically no chance of making money, much less breaking even. And those that do, the general public still likely won't see it because marketing costs millions even on the low-end.

We will never hear about it here but I know lots of others think the same thing about most of the "films" on that list. The problem is that in film, everyone likes to kiss ass because they are only worried about getting hired again and they all want to be seen as a neutral or positive party, no matter what. I don't see how this helps anything because those who need the feedback don't ever hear it. I learned the hard way and jumped into no-budget features years ago. They are all completely ridiculous but I didn't know just how bad they were until a few years went by and I started seeing my work. I will never look at those things again but it's made me so much more careful about what I do now and what I bother taking on.

In today's market, you have to put out high-end work all the time and get names because there are suddenly 10,000 directors and DP's in EVERY town and many of those kid's parents have no problem buying them Red's to make their "dreams" come true. They also have lots of time and help and $10,000 more to put into festival's pockets. All those 1000's of noodles being thrown at walls will likely produce one that sticks every rare once and while. I question why people still bother to compete with all of this anymore. Features have become something no one cares about anyway, generally speaking. This isn't the 90's when indie film was cool. This is the age of content busting out of the seams and pouring on the floor. Making an indie work now is about as naive an attempt as trying to be the next mega-movie-star.
 
Yes Star, I agree 100% about the F3 (and F55) and so on. They are not great narrative feature cameras for the $100K+ budgets. Sony does have some kind of problem when it comes to matching film's look. I don't agree at all that it's all about tastes and post work because if that were so, I'd see some F55 raw tests or final work that I feel something for, but I still have not had that happen. I saw those initial shorts on big screens that Sony put out for the F55 and was really shocked at how typical looking they were. Cleaner looking DSLR is what it is in my eyes. "Electronic" comes to mind every time. The F35 and 65 are on another level but for the rest of us, doc and actual paid work serve these smaller cameras best.

In the end, we still have no perfect camera. Sony's looks electronic, Panasonic died out years ago int his market, Red has major workarounds when it comes to being a good overall, paying-gig camera, the F35 is kind of in the same boat plus no one will ever ask for it, the 65 costs as much as a house and the Arri Amira isn't here yet, plus costs too much Im sure, plus is 1080 (which the market won't be into by next year). This is what I'll be going for next though as a used camera... F3 in the mean time.

Edit: I'm curious, if the Amira is at all affordable, will everyone here be switching to it? I don't think you could ask for a better camera, besides it not having that 4K stamp on it, which won't matter in terms of imagry of course but just when it comes to an ignorant producer asking for the latest thing. Anyway I read the specs of it again and it seems to have finally solved every issue I have with all digital cameras.
 
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Osslund said:
Red raw, Alexa prores 444 or F3 422. When the final grade is done and by the time you hand over the footage to the station they all look as good as the next one. Often I will have my fingers at each step of the process all the way to the final coding for delivery. So I can't see how the F3 is a lesser camera image wise. Not if you look at the final output.
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Not even without Slog? Without Slog, the F3 cinegammas can look a bit ugly at times and have under 12stops of dynamic range, compared to Alexa's 15+. I look at the final output, I havent seen any non-SLOG F3 material I was very impressed by or might really even have mistaken for Alexa.

Yes it depends on scene content, but it can definitely be tough not to over-expose and lose highlights in cinegammas especially since most of them only have ~4-stops of overexposure range, compared to 7 for Alexa ISO800 and 5-6 for most cinema cameras (F3 SLOG, RED, F5/55, C300, FS700)

This is one of the reasons the Convergent Design 7Q is exciting to me. Most of Sony's gamma curves need work, but at least they have raw and SLOG2 options. The $2k (plus extras) 7Q is promising for example to take the 4K RAW out of a $7k FS700 (which from what I've seen is quite nice with around 14stops of DR and lots of sensitivity and avoids Sony's whole gamma problem, though its still not quite a match for an Alexa) and allow custom LUTs for recording and monitoring. That means you can get the mojo you want in camera with a custom LUT (potentially matching any number of other cameras) and record it directly to 4K/2K/1080p Prores. Frankly that's all I want, I like cameras with some mojo built in, but it's great to be able to just be able to just get the camera companys ok-but-not-quite-what-I-want gamma curves out of the way and build your own look in camera from a good neutral base.
 
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Right, right. I was just talking about non-Slog F3 since this thread mostly seems to be about projects that were not shot with SLOG. Frankly I'm surprised anyone would have chosen the F3 without SLOG for a feature film, but I guess it makes sense that it may have been the right camera at the right time for the right price for a little while on certain projects, despite lacking SLOG.
 
The F3 was the first sub 20 thousand dollar S35 camera on the market with proper sound capabilities and didn't require a crew to run it... amongst other things. This is why most of us here jumped on the F3 as early adopters. Slog of course made it that much better.

Would be nice if Sony rolled Slog-2 into the 1.5 firmware update whenever they get around to it.

Can't help but think throughout this discussion and others of late, if people would learn to embrace some of the difussion filters that are routinely used by DPs on feature films, people wouldn't be complaining so much about the clinical Sony look.
 
Andrew Stone said:
if people would learn to embrace some of the difussion filters that are routinely used by DPs on feature films, people wouldn't be complaining so much about the clinical Sony look.
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I know lots of A-list DPs who do not use diffusion. It's a lot more than that. A 1/2 BPM is not gonna fix Red Hook Summer.

The Sony look can be a lot of things:

1-Old-school standard and hypergammas.

2-Artificially retaining/synthesizing chroma info in clipped and/or compressed highlights, another effect of above gamma curves. Art Adams has written some about this. Alexa/Red/Canon roll off chroma levels so highlights don't draw attention to themselves as they go into clip. Alexa in particular does this extremely well. S-Log/Slog2 does it too, but not to the level of Arri.

3-Not turning off detail/aperture circuits.

4-Traditional Sony colorimetry/tuning. Not just talking about the green channel that's a tiny bit hot per Sony late 80's and 90s, I'm talking about factory matrix settings that emphasize foliage and red/orange. It's not something easy to tune out. Also, XDCAM-era cameras had issues with white highlights going yellow.
 
The only problem I ever saw on the Sony F3 is the Sony brand. I sold mine not because of the image. I sold it because I felt like I would lose all of my $14k investment if I kept it. Besides there is a new Sony coming out so often that owning is not an option for me right now.
 
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