Why isn't the F3 more popular?

If you speak to dealers it seems like they are moving or have moved a very significant number of F3 bodies. There is little doubt that the camera is selling. But you are right that the F3 lives a rather low key life.

On the other hand when RED cameras are used on big budget movies, they are using the EPIC, not the Scarlet. Just like The F35/F65 is used on big shows like TRON (F35) and not the F3. But there probably are hundreds of smaller films that were shot with either the Scarlet or F3. You just never hear about these. TV and cable episodical is owned by the Alexa at this point, so that would be difficult to break in to.

But I think we also need to keep things in perspective and that goes back to using the right tool for the job. As good as the F3 is, it's a $16k camera with a genius sensor packed in to a Handycam body. An Epic or Alexa costs anywhere from $50,000 to over $150,000 depending on which model you buy. And that's before adding any of the goodies to make it a working rig. But these cameras were designed to be on the cutting edge of performance, with the cost taking a second place. So, naturally they have capabilities that are far beyond what the F3 can do.

It's basically like trying to compare an Arri III to a 535. You can shoot a movie with either one of them, but you're going to have to jump through a lot more hoops with the Arri III to get there and beyond a certain budget no one wants to put up with those limitations.


One criticism I have heard from some people is that the output from the F3 is HD and that is it. There is no wiggle room, like you get with RED or an Alexa.
- Stabilization means a double resolution hit (blow up and sub pixel transformation). Same goes for adding camera shake in post.
- You can't reframe frame up or down, like you have been able to do even with film cameras for decades. I'm not a fan of cropping and reframing in post, but some people are and that freedom is gone with the F3.

The other big complaint I hear is the lack of high frame rate shooting.

But people like Fincher did manage to shoot some very nice looking and very big budgeted movies (Benjamin Buttons) with cameras that were strictly HD (Viper) and suffered from similar limitations.
So, where there is a will there is a way.
 
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CharlesPapert said:
I honestly haven't heard of any episodic shows using the F3 other than mine--I know it was used for "No Reservations". They may well be out there, but I would be surprised if was anywhere near a "ton"...!

Actually--I'm even stretching it to call Key & Peele "episodic"--it's more officially comedy/variety.
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It seems that episodic is owned lock, stock and barrel by Arri and the Alexa. I'm coming out of visual effects post and pretty much all the footage I see for TV is shot on Alexa.
From it's introduction the Alexa has had an ultra simple and efficient direct to edit workflow and with that they just took episodical by storm.
 
For what it's worth, Im currently DP'ing a seven episode series for HGTV and we're using the F3 out to a Samurai. They wanted more of a doc feel and shallower DOF then what they had been getting prior. The 5D came in to the conversation before I came on board and fortunately a smart producer crushed that idea. They also tested the C300 and were not thrilled with the skin tones or color. Again, this was before me so I have no idea how the C300 was set up. I convinced them to give the F3 a try for a few days and they were very happy with the skin, color and dynamic range. I've been using Cine 3 & 4 with a very neutral color profile from Allister Chapman. I showed the post supervisor some S-Log footage and he approved using it for select scene's as they wouldn't have the time to do the whole show in it.

To try and answer the original question, Im not sure of the answer. I own a F3 and knew what it was capable of and how to give the producers a look they wanted. They and their regular DP's come from the ENG camera world and Im not sure to many of them know these cameras well. I tried to educate them, explain the options, the pro's and con's and I think they made the right choice. Due to budget, the Alexa was never a option for them btw.
 
Richard Allen Crook said:
My choice to purchase the F3 was made for many reasons, mainly because of the 10bit and dynamic range. It's truly a cinema camera....and as a colorist as well, the dynamic range is a dream to grade, even more so than RED cam IMO. Of course this is all very subjective. But these two digital cameras aren't vastly different in quality in the end when you look at the big picture.

But every time I turn around, everyone is about Red. "looking for DP with Red package...etc" is what I read in ads. More mainstream films being shot on it. A local DP was hired over me (whose work is, sorry to say, much less advanced) because his mom bought him an Epic.

I like the Red, but my preference is dynamic range over resolution. Both of those cameras are pretty damn close as far as what you can get from them. Feature films can be shot on either.

Im not being hung up on Red...just using that as an example. There's a lot of Alexa out there recently too among other digital cameras.

My question is why aren't we seeing any F3 stuff popping up on the big screen? Why don't we see people looking for F3 owner/operators? Why do I have to explain to directors why the F3 is even in the same league as a red camera? Is it simply due to marketing?

And PLEASE I'm not wanting to stir up ANOTHER this camera vs. that camera debate here. I'm not saying the F3 is the best cam out there, I'm just wondering why it isn't as popular as many others out there since its a more-than-capable camera.
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Having said that are DP job criteria more about technical than art? If owning camera-X can get you job-X then that really is about technical know-how (i.e. how well you know how to operate the camera to get ouput-y for a given input-y...etc).

Interesting. So according to this anecdote, if we owned EVERY camera then we could get EVERY job.
 
Coming from the lower end (FS100) here is why the F3 has not lit my candle..

-no BBC ticket of 50mbs onboard (unlike C300)
-no 60.. 240p unlike (FS700)
-no raw unlike Scarlet/BMD

-should it cost around EX1 money ? - or 25% more ? - the engine seems about as powerful (35MBs onboard) , and the build is similar you just get a bigger chip - for EX1 money Id eat it up

-unused viewfinder gets in the way
-ergonomics as poor as all other sub $20k large sensor cams

My feeling was to buy the FS100 and wait for 'something good'

The reality that F3 and Slog and onboard ND would be a far more usable camera than my FS100, but the C300 gives that too, with the BBC ticket

I think the camera has a window for the high turnover corporate who needs a fast workflow, prefers SDi connectors and needs a bit more DR than the FS100, and doesnt need the BBC ticket

That is a really important market sector, but not a sexy one that you hear too much about

S
 
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I remember the BBC codec acquisition standard years ago as a benchmark of what you need from a camera and then I realized that engineers should not be dictating standards to live and die by. Cinematographers should dictate the look.

And the great irony is that once something goes onto cable or satelight it's compressed to something like 12 mbps mpeg-2 and looks so, so bad. It's like the old days of tv - you would work so hard to get a perfect image and in the end, most people are watching it fuzzy on a 8in black and white tv.

I saw the Avengers recently in the theatre with digital projection and they couldn't even get that to look good. And they recored Arriraw 2.5k to Codex recorders that make the BBC standards look like an absolute joke. They were recording gigabtyes a minute. And the end result - on the screen I watched it on - it looked absolutely terrible. Over sharpened. No contrast - flat. If you can't get that film to look good, then in the end we are all kind of in trouble. Watching stuff on my macbook pro looked better.


So I use the F3 even if the BBC doesn't approve it. And I shoot to 220 mbps pro res hq and if i light it poorly it still looks terrible. And the BBC can approve a shot and it looks bad and that's it and I don't sweat over it.

It's time to kill the BBC acquisition standard as a holy grail of what you need from a camera and start using your eyes and your guts to go with a camera that you want - that you like the image out of and you think it will be the best for your job.

No offense to engineers, I know many who are amazing. And it's great to have standards.
 
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My opinion of the 'BBC Ticket' is what it is - that it is technically worthless - but if one is owning a certain cam one needs to tick the boxes of your client and at the price point one would hope to be able to tick that box.. just sayin

S
 
morgan_moore said:
..one would hope to be able to tick that box.. just sayin

S
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Agreed. Why the F3 didnt come with internal 10 bit 50mbps (at a minimum) is beyond me. It would meet this 'standard' but still leave room for higher bit rate recorders to handle S-Log and VFX, etc. If the C300 had come out first I'd venture to guess Sony might have done this. With that, I cant imagine their next iteration of the F3 to not meet this minimum.

My experience with Producers has been more along the lines of what look the camera gives rather then it's codec or minimum recording rate. When I pitched using the F3 for the show Im DP'ing they didnt even think of recording externally until I suggested it and showed them how easy and cheap(Samurai) it was. Like I said in my previous post, many producers/directors know nothing about these cameras and their capabilities and only know buzz words/brands and not what they really mean. Chalk that up to marketing I guess.
 
F3 with a PIX240 is still a killer combo. Easy to use when you've got it rigged right and BBC engineers are happy. Best of all, you've got an onboard backup for when the edit monkey's lose your HD's! All that great quality for a third of the price of an Alexa, what's the problem?
 
ectobuilder said:
Having said that are DP job criteria more about technical than art? If owning camera-X can get you job-X then that really is about technical know-how (i.e. how well you know how to operate the camera to get ouput-y for a given input-y...etc).

Interesting. So according to this anecdote, if we owned EVERY camera then we could get EVERY job.
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If you are reading into my post as saying "it's more about technical and the camera over the DP and art ability" then you are mistaken. If you've never been asked what camera package you own (as part of the decision to hire you) or never seen ads asking for particular DPs who have particular camera packages, then congrats to you. I get it all the time, but most producers and directors that I work with and talk to know that it isn't about the camera, and the DP should select the best camera for the job. There are many clients that I have worked with that have heard particular buzz surrounding a camera and brings it up, but it isn't hard to explain the pros and cons of cameras and recommend a better camera for their project and have them understand why. Some just don't care and prefer to remain oblivious to facts and just feed of the buzz and hype.

But don't be mistaken...I am not one of those who feeds off hype nor believes its about what camera we own. Sorry if you read that somewhere in there.
 
I think a lot of it has to do with the companies behind the cameras. Canon has recently been making more of a deal about their camera releases. RED has always been a little out there in how they deal with the public and their openness about their development process. Sony has been much more reserved. I can't remember anything special about the F3 announcement. (although I might have missed something) I think this trickles down to the attitude of ownership of the cameras and how excited people are about sharing their experiences with their purchases.

I like a lot of cameras. At the end of they day they are a means to an end. The F3 for instance, I respect it hugely. I respect the technology and what it can do - but I just don't love it. I love the RED, I'm passionate about it and because of that I am happy when I shoot with it and I want to spread about the work I do with it. That's something I haven't seen with the F3, a love, a passion. And this will be different for every person of course but these are my two cents.
 
William_Robinette said:
The F3 for instance, I respect it hugely. I respect the technology and what it can do - but I just don't love it. I love the RED, I'm passionate about it and because of that I am happy when I shoot with it and I want to spread about the work I do with it. That's something I haven't seen with the F3, a love, a passion.
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Thanks William, great response, I think you hit the nail on the head here of what I'm saying. There's a lot of passion about the RED (and DSLRs and c300 and Alexa and fs700, etc etc), happiness when shooting with them and desire to share the work....which for some reason is lacking with the F3. So why dont you have that passion and happiness with the F3? Why doesn't the industry as a whole have that passion and love? That's the heart of what I was asking in my first post.
 
For one thing Sony has kept our minds busy with S-Log updates at $4k then a $3k price drop on S-Log, rebate on thing no one needs, new lenses, Free S-Log and free 444 S-Log on new camera purchases. Who cares to brag about a camera that you purchased at a premium and see the price drop.
I personally have no problem with it, but those are the complaints that I have been hearing since I decided to buy one.
 
Grug said:
Richard, I think when it comes to marketing yourself (and your camera, if you only use the one), the best thing to do is to let your demo reel do the talking. When that doesn't work, and when you bump up against things like the Red 4K marketing hyperbole, your best bet is to simply quote out in full the additional post-production costs of handling, processing and storing RAW footage.

It's the reason I'm yet to actually shoot a project in RedcodeRAW, on each of the 4 projects I've shot with Red cameras (Red One and Epic) we've ended up recording to ProRes on external recorders because the client hasn't wanted to pay for the additional costs in post (after I've explained them in detail).

As for the F3's popularity, I gather it's actually very popular (with external recorders) for TV production (if not feature films). It's just been Sony's loss that they crippled the camera (in most broadcast people's eyes) by putting a 35Mbs codec in it, rather than the broadcast approved 50Mbs codec found in their shoulder-mounted XDCAM range. It's for that reason the C300 is going like the clackers for broadcast production at the moment.
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I don't think you did you clients any favors with your "advice" about Red workflow. Using an external recorder with Red is astoundingly foolish.

It is shockingly easy now to use Red Raw files- just drag and drop files into Premiere or Vegas or even Avid (latest release) - no transcoding necessary it all plays in real time. You only transcode at the end. If you have a reasonable computer newer than 4 years old you will be able to final render at about 1/4 real time. So if your show is 1 hour long, it takes 4 hours once, at the very end. How hard is that?

ANd those who think an Epic has less dynamic range than an F3 - I have many charts to prove you wrong - it's not opinion or taste - it's simply fact. Many people have tested this.

On top of that, you can't use a window to create a different white balance in just one part of the frame using anything but raw. You can't do a lot of things.

I'd say those who don't like Red never learned how to use Red properly. WHat colorspace were you using? What gamma? You have to understand these things or hire someone who does.

The F3 is fine too, but I have a problem with technical misinformation and FUD.
 
Just sell yourself not the camera!

This is all just going to get worse, cameras are all getting cheaper and better every year. And the producers get much, much more for less each year... But they won't say it...
Don't worry we will all be shooting 10k 101010 and renting it for $200.00 just to keep up with everyone else can afford all the cool new cameras that do 10k 101010 for 10k and under. All fighting for the same pool of jobs.

It will all end up on you, in the end, and what you can do, not your camera. Just wait.

Until then, all producers and shows should only shoot F-3:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
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Robert Ruffo said:
ANd those who think an Epic has less dynamic range than an F3 - I have many charts to prove you wrong - it's not opinion or taste - it's simply fact. Many people have tested this.
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I would like to see your test. I have never seen one where the Epic delivered more than about 11-12 stops without having to resort to HDRx to get beyond that. The tests I am referring to were done on CML, the last Zacuto shootout and on several other sites on the web. I have seen tests where the Epic delivered more than 11-12 stops using HDRx, but obviously there are some restrictions. One test in particular using HDRx was extremely impressive and appeared to deliver as much as 18 stops.

Robert Ruffo said:
On top of that, you can't use a window to create a different white balance in just one part of the frame using anything but raw. You can't do a lot of things.
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Of course you can. Given you have the proper grading software you should be able to do that to any footage, regardless of the content being RAW or not. Of course the less data you have or the less flexible the 'container' is holding it, the less optimal the output will be. But being able to set multiple white balance through what is essentially a mask is a function of the software, not necessarily the source material. Obviously it works best if the data container has a RAW structure, but there is nothing stopping you from even doing this on an 8bit image (although it may look like hell).

Also, if you really want to get technical about this, REDCODE really isn't RAW. It's more like Cineform. A very sophisticated, visually lossless compressed format (3:1 - 18:1) with many of the characteristics of true uncompressed RAW. A while back I seem to remember Jim J. himself saying that they will never produce a camera that outputs true, fully uncompressed RAW, because he believes it is pointless and you can't tell the difference. Personally I think a lot of people on the 2D end of visual effects will politely disagree with him.

From what I understand the Alexa is maybe the only camera out there that truly outputs RAW, as in a virgin dump off the sensor, in the form of ArriRAW. Not sure about the F65.

Quote start
REDCODE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

REDCODE

All current Red cameras record only in the REDCODE RAW codec. The codec offers a constant-bitrate Wavelet compression with a compression ratio from 18:1 to 3:1. When it was introduced by Red the codec was the first to allow high bit depth bayer sensor video data to be recorded to CompactFlash, mechanical hard disk or SSD media instead of a big external storage system. Being a lossy codec, decompression does not fully restore the original image data recorded by the sensor. Red claims the codec is "visually lossless", suggesting that the information loss is not visible to the naked eye when images are viewed. Since Redcode is a wavelet based codec, it is possible to extract lower resolutions from the video stream to get real time playback on lower end machines.
Having a video stream that offers the same advantages of a raw image, it is possible to apply all kinds of image processing like white balancing, sharpening, gamma or exposure correction in a non-destructive manner like photographers do with their Raw images.
Quote end


Robert Ruffo said:
I'd say those who don't like Red never learned how to use Red properly. WHat colorspace were you using? What gamma? You have to understand these things or hire someone who does.

The F3 is fine too, but I have a problem with technical misinformation and FUD.
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I think we all agree on this point.
 
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Robert Ruffo said:
I don't think you did you clients any favors with your "advice" about Red workflow. Using an external recorder with Red is astoundingly foolish.
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Really? I could have sworn we saved our last client the cost of an additional 4 days in post by shooting ProRes rather than trying to deal with RedCode on a 5 year old Mac Pro, and 3 year old Macbook Pro with a FCP7 workflow.

I guess that goes to show what I know.

Foolish me.
 
Grug, please excuse Robert's harsh posting - these internet forums allow people to type quickly.

I think he means that the advantage of Red is captured in the RAW recording. By giving your client a pro res file - you are losing the advantages of shooting raw. Perhaps what you still retain (though I don't officially know) - is still the nice resolution of the 4k to 1080p downconversion.

But you lose the color space and the ability to switch a white balance and ISO level.

Why not also keep the RAW files and allow the client to access them for the final conform while still giving them a 1080p pro res file for their edit.
 
Grug said:
Really? I could have sworn we saved our last client the cost of an additional 4 days in post by shooting ProRes rather than trying to deal with RedCode on a 5 year old Mac Pro, and 3 year old Macbook Pro with a FCP7 workflow.

I guess that goes to show what I know.

Foolish me.
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Not foolish, but going the wrong way about it.

This notion of post dictating what a DP can use is ludicrous. I understand why it happens but it is insane. If your post workflow is 5 years old you need to find a new post pipeline. FCP7 is dead. Sucks, but deal with it. Post needs to stay up as much as production does. What if we were shooting on HVX200s? That came out 5 years ago.. Great camera but times have moved on.
 
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