GYRO ATTACK!
Pro drones get a vet competitor
KODAK V2.0
Film giant reignites UK processing
THE INBETWEENERS
DITs evolve their job description
LOG FILES
Our definitive guide
THE FUTURE OF VIDEO PRODUCTION TODAY
November 2016
definitionmagazine.com £4.99
NEW LOOK
COOKE ZOOM
Monster glass could be only lens you'll ever need
BILLY LYNN Is the high frame rate experiment about to end?
THE NEW
DIGITAL BRIDGET ... and the secrets of shooting romcoms
GAME CHANGER URSA MINI V4 SOFTWARE BOOST SEE PAGE 52
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CONTRIBUTORS Ben Turley, Jonathan Jones, Adam Garstone SENIOR SUB EDITOR Lisa Clatworthy SUB EDITORS Catherine Brodie & Siobhan Godwood
ADVERTISING KEY ACCOUNTS Nicki Mills
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BRIDGET JONES: How to shoot digital romcoms
SALES MANAGER Krishan Parmar
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Welcome
Ang Lee’s new movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk has been a long obsession of ours at Definition. It’s a techie’s dream with a new way to shoot – in 120 frames-per-second. All the technology it has inspired, including shutter blending and designer motion blur, is great news for filmmakers. But you can theorise all you like until you have watched what all the fuss is about. Well, now we’ve done that! We were one of the lucky couple of hundred who shuffled into the large auditorium at IBC to witness the first showing of a 120 frame film outside the US (they got a showing at NAB). It was 12 minutes of the most intense cinema that we have ever seen, fingernails were pressed firmly into the seat and breathing was shallow. There are no words to describe what we saw on that day, immediate notes which turned in to tweets mentioned, ‘A new reality, like live theatre, you are there, like stepping into the scene’. But other thoughts later that day were ‘bad acting, extended depth-of-field, bad acting’. The unfortunate fact is that if this film isn’t successful then Sony Pictures might close down the HDR experiment. All the studios might see that director giants like Ang Lee and Peter Jackson tried but failed and if they can’t crack it, who can? Over here, we’re cheering for Billy.
JULIAN MITCHELL EDITOR NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
05
Inside this issue… NEWS 6 FILM RETURNS
Kodak has some major news.
14 22
SHOOT STORY 14 HIGH FRAME RATE WAR
The story behind the shoot of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
22 BRIDGET IS BACK
52
We speak to the creatives who love to work on digital romcoms.
FEATURES 26 SHADES OF GREY
If you are shooting log you will want to read our guide.
32 THE INBETWEENERS
The DIT world used to be the filling in the shoot/post sandwich.
36 DSLR RESURRECTION
Just when you thought DSLRs were finished with for video.
40
40 KODAK V2.0
Tax incentives and growing studio space heralds film’s return.
GEAR 46 GYRO ATTACK!
Gyro-tech invented nearly 100 years ago is back to battle UAVs.
48 LIGHTING
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The lights for a 120fps movie needed to be special.
58
AUDIO NETWORK’S MUSIC CATALOGUE MEETS PREMIERE PRO.
50 THE MUSIC BUTLER 52 URSA MINI V4.0
An existing camera with gamechanging new software.
58 CELERE PRIME LENSES Another manufacturer chases the ‘Cooke look’ market.
59 COOKE 35-140MM
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Monster lens that promises huge benefit if properly supported .
60 4K CAMERA LISTING
All the details, all in one place. NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
6
NEWS THE FILM BUSINESS
FILM RETURNS
Kodak has been down but not out, recently a mixture of UK tax incentives and discount film packages has encouraged them to open new processing labs
In the busy halls of IBC last month there were murmurs of a ‘film resurgence’ whispered by people in the know but really all you had to do was to ask Kodak what they thought. As it turns out Kodak is having a great year, following a wonderful 2015, and is looking forward to another next year. There are a number of reasons for this, but the kernel of this linear rise is down to the shuffling off of their Chapter 11 hangover. But more specifically people are shooting more film and the UK is holding its own with some encouraging tax incentives to make your films here. Los Angeles has no tax incentives. Kodak feels the weight of being the guardian of the film business, or more correctly the shooting film business as print distribution has gone. It is with this guardian status that Kodak’s Antonio Rasura told us that it is opening not one but two new processing labs in major cities. New York is first to have a Kodakowned lab which will give the East Coast filmmakers the relief of not having to send camera negatives across the country to LA. The lab DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
will do all formats of film except 65mm, because Kodak don’t want to compete with FotoKem on the West Coast – in fact Kodak doesn’t want any problems with competition. With this thought in mind consider the second new lab processing announcement. Already announced was the buyout of i dailies, one of the few boutique film labs in the UK, Cinelab is the other. Now i dailies is no more, welcome to Kodak London which is looking for new premises probably at a major film studio near London. The really interesting part of this story is to do with the aforementioned 65mm format. There is a major movie wanting to shoot
PEOPLE ARE SHOOTING MORE FILM AND THE UK IS HOLDING ITS OWN
65mm and also wanting not to send negative across to LA. The film studio wanted assurance that the UK or Europe could deal with processing or potentially the production could have moved to the US. Kodak then continued its announcements with news of a UK-based 65mm processing line in London, not at freshly bought i dailies but at their only rival Cinelab! From guardians to philanthropists! Cinelab managing director Adrian Bull said, “This new partnership with Kodak is great news and we are open for business. We hope to be a magnet for all big screen filmmakers across Europe.”
ABOVE Volume processing of film archives with scanners like the Cintel will keep Kodak in business for years to come.
VFX NEWS
7
IKEGAMI GETS ALTERED
MPC’s team completed more than 200 shots for Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, (see before and after shot) working with production VFX supervisor Frazer Churchill. A variety of effects were created including some of the children’s strange abilities, digital set extensions and FX work. One of the largest sequences takes place in a circus arena, where the children confront the hollowgasts. For this scene MPC’s environment team created set extensions for the circus arena and abilities for Fiona, Claire, Millard, the twins and Miss Edwards.
Ikegami has announced a new key partnership that sees their range of camera and monitor equipment added to Altered Images’ range of products. Altered Images, an established UK reseller for 20 years, provides services to the television and corporate industries, offering consultation, system design, sales, installation service and technology advice to its customers.
PRESTEIGNE BUYOUT
ARRI has announced that the development of the ALEXA SXT cameras (Super Xtended Technology) is completed. ARRI will now make good on its promise to provide upgrades to all ALEXA XT EV, ALEXA XT Plus and ALEXA XT Studio cameras shipped in 2015 and 2016. In addition to the
originally promised upgrade program of a free-of-charge upgrade to SXT in Munich, ARRI has equipped its service stations in London, Los Angeles, New York, Beijing, Hong Kong and Mumbai to perform the upgrade. For those who received their XT camera before 2015, a paid-for upgrade option to a full SXT is also available.
Presteigne Broadcast Hire, a dry hire and total multilocation production solution provider, has announced the completion of a management buyout (MBO) that positions the company for accelerated growth as it embraces rapid advances in RF, IP and 4K acquisition, management, and delivery. Presteigne CEO Mike Ransome, “Broadcast, or what used to be called broadcast, is changing – and moving – fast. This buyout puts us in total control of how we plan for it.”
NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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SHOOT STORY BILLY LYNN
HIGH FRAME RATE WAR
In our last look at the most technically awaited movie of the year we talk to director Ang Lee’s right-hand man and fellow pioneer in high frame rate cinematography, Ben Gervais WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL So we saw it. 12 minutes of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in glorious 4K, 120fps 3D. The feeling was amazingly intense especially for the battle scenes. Seeing everything doesn’t explain what 120 frames gives you, but one scene brought it home to me. An American soldier is firing his heavy machine gun at the enemy, while he is shooting the vibration going through his body gives him an aura of dust surrounding his body shape. That is a new reality for me. You definitely felt like you could reach out and enter the scene, just walk right in there. What were other people’s feelings? 3D expert and filmmaker Phil Streather said it was, “Very visceral, I felt tense. Good 3D. Was it better than Saving Private Ryan? Not sure. Sadly there was some crap acting in key roles; the sergeant, floor manager and assistant floor manager at show. I don’t think the acting issues were “revealed” by the 120fps, however, they were there at any frame rate. “The best bit about the clip was the brightness for the 3D. That was due to laser projection rather than HFR. I would hazard that 24fps at 12ft lamberts would help the 3D more than 60/120fps at 5ft lamberts.” For those of you who don’t know, we are talking about shooting in high frame rate, more specifically 120fps not the 48 of The Hobbit or the 60 of director James Cameron’s test. Ben Gervais was the film’s tech supervisor and he was as surprised as anyone when Ang Lee moved past 60 frames and then decided to double it DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
without even knowing what it would look like. “Ang gave me this mandate of shooting in 120fps, but how do we give people an experience in most of the theatres that aren’t going to show it in 120, in the 60 frame and 24 frame theatres. So he said ‘Give me 60 plus, give me 24 plus. Make it as good as you possibly can as we’ve got all this data from the 120 shoot.’ “We tested it with Ang in an emotional way, not just technical. So to have someone who doesn’t care about the technology is quite refreshing because he doesn’t care how we got there. If he was satisfied with 60 we would be at 60, fundamentally we would push until Ang was satisfied. The team’s original thesis was just for 60 frames but there were some technical challenges just for 60. For instance how do you derive a 24-frame version of the movie from 60? “There have been tests done, Ang did a test. But one of the issues is if you interpolate down to 24 then you are going to have to ‘fix’ the 3D and touch up with VFX which means every shot in the movie becomes a visual effect and that’s obviously not cheap. This is not a huge-budget movie, only $40m, in Hollywood that’s pretty small. “So one of the reasons for 120 was because we could drive the 60 and the 24. Then the questions started coming up like ‘What do we think 120 looks like’? James Cameron did his test at 24, 48 and 60, pretty much everyone’s done their test at those frame rates, nobody had done a
BILLY LYNN SHOOT STORY
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NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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SHOOT STORY BILLY LYNN
WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE UNTIL A WEEK BEFORE WE STARTED SHOOTING test at 120. Doug Trumbull had done his thing but it’s a different kind of 120 than actually doing it pure both eyes shooting 120fps. Doug is a total inspiration for us though; he’s got a pragmatic approach and he wants to make it work for every theatre. We wanted to explore the frontier. Doug is just trying to make 120 work for everybody.” SHOOTING BLIND Just to illustrate how much of a risk Ang and Ben were taking with a HFR approach to the film. A week away from principal shooting they still hadn’t seen a test. “We didn’t know what it looked like until a week before we started shooting because we couldn’t get the projectors and we couldn’t get the servers. We’d shot a whole bunch of tests but could only watch them at 60. So we convinced Christie who were very kind and
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
super supportive and they brought us two laser projectors. We shoehorned them into our tiny little projection booth that we had built in Atlanta for our movie – we only thought we’d have one projector in there! Then there’s a whole laser bank that has to be attached to them. We got a loan of some servers then had to figure out how to conform a movie at 120. Our very first version of the conform was actually in Excel. “The problem with shooting at 120, with Sony F65s, is that they don’t start on the same frame when you push record, they don’t stop on the same frame when you push stop; they don’t have the same timecode and it’s usually about three frames off but sometimes it’s more, sometimes less. There’s no reliable way to know and it’s running 24-frame code but at five times the speed, so it’s the ‘Wild West’ really. I had to have my
PREVIOUS SPREAD Ben Gervais and Demetri Portelli on set. IMAGES The 4K,
3d 120fps and high brightness look completely changes the look and feel of the movie.
lab technicians record the matching first frame in 3D and then build a database of every single take of every shot. Editorial wanted to run at high frame rate because we wanted to get as close to what Ang was trying to do as possible when we were in the editorial process. The fastest that the AVID will go is 60! So we delivered every shot as if it was a VFX temp so they all start at Zero frames. “We built this database and did a proof of concept in Excel then migrated it to Google. So we take out the 60 frame EDL from editorial, we had to go all the way back to old CMX EDLs that they had to use in the seventies. We’d upload that into the cloud and I had to write code that goes through and finds the matching eyes, knows what the 60 code is, translates that into 120 frame code and then calculates the offset because both cameras didn’t start at the same time. Then the code generates two EDLs, one for the left eye and one for the right that allowed us to do the conform. “So we figured out how to do that, then we compiled some footage; we had to render it at that point into a special format for the servers, they wouldn’t take DPX files, now they do.
BILLY LYNN SHOOT STORY
WHAT WE SAW ON THE SCREEN WAS SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT They made some changes for us. We took that footage, we loaded it onto the servers and put it on a screen. “So we finally got it on a screen and even before we were able to calibrate the projectors Ang was very excited and wanted to see it. So he came in and none of the colours were correct as lasers take a little while to calibrate. But we threw an image up and hit play and all of us just stood there in stunned silence for a second. We all had theories of what it would look like but no one had ever seen it before on the planet. The guys at Christie, who are the only people that make these projectors and only show CGI-based 120 stuff, were there and we all looked at something that was totally different. We had theorised before that the bump from 24 to 48 is pretty significant and the bump from 48 to 60 is significant but not as much as the one from 24. So maybe 120 would be just a little bit better than 60. You are getting up to where the optical scientists call the critical flicker fusion frequency where you can’t tell the difference between
something that’s solid and something that’s flickering. “But what we saw on the screen was something totally different. I could talk about it for ages but it’s not until you see it that you know it’s so different. We then tried to take things away and first thing was the brightness. At that point the lasers still weren’t calibrated, the red lasers were running at 100% and it was a really bright image. Ang went away after we watched it and we set the primaries correctly and brought the brightness down to 14-foot lamberts which is the 2D standard. Ang came in the next day and we sat down and watched it and he said, ‘what happened?’ We said that we’d calibrated it and it was now in spec. He said that he didn’t care about the spec and to show him what it was like yesterday with the colours fixed. It turned out that we were probably around 28-foot lamberts to the eye and not 14 when we had got it calibrated and stable the day before. We pushed it back up to 28 and straightaway there was something there. We experimented to and from 4K to 2K and again it sort of lost the life that it had. So it seems to be a combination of things. “Once you get 4K, 3D, 120fps and high brightness you’re seeing something in a different way. Ang feels that this is what digital cinema is. Up until this point digital cinema has just been mimicking film cinema.
ABOVE At 120fps, the movie is so intimate that it’s possible to see into an actor’s their eyes and what they are truly feeling.
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We’ve been using those tricks we’ve learned and been rolling them in different ways but it’s the same parts that we’ve been rearranging. “But this is something different, we have to go back to the drawing board for everything we do. Every department has to step up and we have to learn again. But that’s great as you’ve got no one to call because no one has done it before. You begin to realise how tight the tolerances now are; you can’t do the stuff you used to do.” PREDICTING THE 120 EFFECT The team only had the Christie projectors for a week so in that time they decided to look at scenes in 60 as well as 120 and hoped to learn what something in 60 would mean in 120 when they were on set shooting. “The dailies viewing was only 60, we couldn’t get the projectors for the filming. What it did mean for all the crew is that details matter, you can see that much more shooting 120.” Ben had seen all the HFR tests over the last few years which of course included Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films. There was a feeling that the 48fps of these films looked too much like television but Ben felt that the blame lay elsewhere. “Peter Jackson is a groundbreaking director and he tried something shooting The Hobbit in HFR, but I think it was the wrong material to start with. The first NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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SHOOT STORY BRIDGET JONES
Bridget is back! After 12 years she is still clowning around but this time in digital. We talked with the DoP, colourist and VFX team about how they created the ‘new’ Bridget Jones WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
BRIDGET JONES SHOOT STORY
DoP Andrew Dunn has a reputation for shooting romantic comedies like Crazy, Stupid, Love; Endless Love; The Lady In The Van – one of the reasons he got the job of shooting Bridget Jones’s Baby. However, one of the main remits from producer Eric Fellner was to show off London for the tourist trade. That started from the first day of the shoot. “We had to do some recce’ing in places like the very top of St Paul’s cathedral,” says Andrew. “Part of the plan of the start of the movie, which isn’t in the finished movie, was to go around the top of St Paul’s, go through things, over things and end up down on Southwark Bridge where we first see our lovely Bridget. We also planned to come up the Thames with a drone which also didn’t happen. But the main feeling was to keep it ‘up’. It’s been 12 years since the last film so we wanted to make it special. It is colourful but I like using colours in my lighting, I always use the camera as another audience member so when the audience sees it they become a participant in the story. “One of my other roles was to make Bridget as lovely as ever. I’ve worked with Renée before on Miss Potter and I adore her. I always use diffusion on my movies and didn’t use it any more on Bridget than anywhere else. The people who make the cameras and lenses are wonderful technicians who want to make everything as perfect as it can be but what you have to do is to give it a human aspect, the way we see things. The human eye is fallible; diffusion is part of what we see in real life. Some filtering can become a barrier between the audience and the subjects and it becomes self-conscious, which is bad. I’m there to serve the story, actors and director. It’s like bad wig syndrome: once the audience see a bad wig they’re taken out of the story; you have to be careful with these things.
IMAGES One of the DoP’s roles in the Bridget Jones movie was to show off London locations for the tourist trade.
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BRIDGETJONES IS A ROMCOM, SO IT NEEDS TO BE BRIGHT, CHEERFUL, COLOURFUL AND POLISHED “One of the things about digital is it does what it’s told. It’s been told it’s got to shoot into the darkest corners and give you information about things that you didn’t realise were even there. You almost have to deny the things it wants to do so you work with lighting and lenses like the anamorphic Panavision C Series and E Series mostly. I think if you’re careful these digital cameras can achieve great results. Digital never looks like film, it’s its own medium. Daytime exteriors are the worst thing on digital because no one is going to wait for you to cut a 80ft long, 20ft high black thing behind the camera just to get negative, you just to have to shoot and I think we managed pretty well. We got a deep depth, rich and creamy and not too far off the film look of Crazy, Stupid, Love.” BRIGHT AND COLOURFUL For Company 3’s Greg Fisher, the Bridget movie was initially a straightforward ARRI ALEXA romcom. “There’s a little bit of 35mm, but it’s an archive from the earlier Bridget Jones films,” he says. “It’s a romcom so needs to be bright and
cheerful, colourful and relatively polished, which is fairly normal for a romcom. It’s got a slightly soft look in some ways, but Andrew Dunn the DoP shot it with a diffusion filter which I think helped so as we wind the contrast up, it doesn’t get too harsh because it has this inherent softness, which is quite nice. He used Panavision anamorphic lenses, which also gave the image a bit more character.” Greg could have obviously added diffusers in the grade but thought that Andrew adding it does look a little different but needed to be added to the VFX as well. “I don’t know if they were aware of it or not,” says Greg, but their work didn’t have any diffusion on it at the start so we had to find a sweet spot for them to dial it in so it would sit well with the rest of the photography. Usually I have the plates so I’ll have green in the background. It gets difficult on some films where you’ve got lots of different elements and it’s not really clear what the main element of the comp will be. That’s more difficult.” Most of the work on this film was a green screen in the background NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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SHOOTING LOG
SHADES OF GREY
Most digital cameras now allow you to shoot in Log mode. You may do this already or have been asked to do it but how much do you know about your camera’s log mode and why it’s now so popular? WORDS BEN TURLEY
Highlight compression – uncompressed, knee, log 110 100 90 80 70 60
%IRE
troll through a trade show or flick through this magazine and it seems as though every new camera coming out boasts the ability to shoot log. Not just video cameras, but DSLRs such as the Sony A7S, Canon EOS 5DS and the Panasonic GH4. Once an exclusive tool of high-end grading, most filmmakers have heard about log, with many pushing it as the only way to shoot, even if they don’t know why. Figure 1 is a plot of the response curve for the system that kick-started log. Cineon was a system that was developed by Kodak in the early nineties taking motion film scanning into the digital domain. The Cineon log curve was modelled after the basic response of film stock, in particular the idea of evenly spreading the distribution of information from stop to stop, allowing the system to model the huge dynamic range of film within the limited digital range of 10-bit encoding.
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The characteristic feature of log is on the right; both Cineon and ARRI’s modern LogC appear to become straight lines. Figure 2 demonstrates how this differs from conventional video responses. The green line represents basic Rec.709, where the slope gets steeper
Cineon – the grandfather of modern log 1024
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FIGURE 1 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
Cineon
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and steeper with each brighter stop. It runs out of legal range around 2.3 stops over 18% grey. In order to extend the range to something more usable, conventional video cameras implement a knee. Rec.709 (800%) is an example of this which Sony includes as a LUT in its F range when shooting CineEI. It makes use of extended range, but the shape is typical. From shadows to mid tones it’s close to Rec.709 – slope increasing with stop – but towards the highlights the slope decreases, feathering towards a flat line at clip (109% IRE in this case). The knee avoids harsh white clipping and provides some information and interest in the highlights well beyond the basic Rec.709, but at the expense of worse fidelity as levels brighten. This is destructive highlight compression. S-Log3 is Sony’s favoured version of log. The shadows are brighter and lower contrast than Rec.709, and with increasing brightness the slope rapidly approaches that straight line, denoted by the dotted red line. It does not continue to increase as with pure Rec.709 or the sensor’s linear response, so technically the highlights are being compressed, but equally
SHOOTING LOG
LOG FOR THE MASSES When Canon released the C300 it became an extremely popular camera. The super 35mm sensor provided cinematic visuals when the 5D had popularised shallow focus video, the controls and tools were more amenable to video work than DSLRs and the MPEG 2 codec was acceptable for broadcast use but at 8-bit and 50Mbps could be edited near universally. The price was very attractive from a broadcast background and when moving up from DSLRs. Best of all, the C300 promised a mechanism for capturing the entire dynamic range of the camera that had previously been the preserve of high-end cinema cameras. C-Log on the C300 was arguably the feature which brought log widespread attention and created a buzzword. Shoots could get away with uncontrollable highlights and it was easy to get attractive grading results. The thing is, it was a pretty poor way to capture a wide dynamic range.
8-‐bit code values C-‐Log vs Rec.709 256
THE BIGGEST TRADE-OFF IS THAT BELOW MID GREY THE INFORMATION GETS THIN QUICKLY
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the spread of data does not diminish as with the knee. Each highlight stop is given as much priority as its neighbour. Each stop right up to white clip can be utilised without worrying about compression.
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digital recording – fewer than 256 for 8-bit and 1024 for 10-bit. In practical terms a balance needs to be struck between the number of available values considered sufficient to portray a stop, the point in the darkness at which it becomes less useful to manipulate a stop and the total available range, or bit depth. Most of what we view on television, in streaming videos and in digital images is 8-bit; a maximum range of 256 values. However, the nature of digital video is that the legal range of Rec.709 – the colour space of current television – is a subset: 16-235, or 219 values. Figure 3 shows the basic response of Rec.709, against stops, alongside C-Log. The C-Log line goes all the way up, beyond the legal white clip of Rec.709. The line stretches much further horizontally – getting on for three stops more and as a log it tends
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WHY LOG? In simple terms, the idea of log encoding is that for every stop you want to make critical use of, each one should be considered as important as the next. However, there is a limited range of values available within a
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towards the dotted line. The sacrifice is that the slope is shallower than Rec.709 across the range. That means lower contrast and in the available pool of 8-bit values fewer shades of grey per stop. Figure 4 highlights this. Considering that grading means mapping the picture information captured within the blue lines to look its best on a display designed around the red line, the data spread seems inadequate. Yet it works. Thousands of hours of broadcast, corporate, streaming and features demonstrate that. Taking Rec.709 mid grey as a basis then about 35 shades should be enough and 8-bit C-Log tends towards that. Mid grey is nearer about 23 shades, but the boffins at Canon determined that was sufficient to cover things when contrast is reintroduced in the grade. The biggest trade-off is that below mid grey the information gets thin quickly. The C300’s target market was to be as broad as possible and C-Log’s shadows are not a million miles away from Rec.709, certainly in comparison to ‘conventional’ logs like Cineon. It is a lot less aggressive in approaching the dotted line. Provided you don’t want to pull much out of the shadows they shouldn’t need much work to look ‘ready’ and there is some scope to manipulate about 5.3 stops from mid tones to highlights. Sony took a similar approach with S-Log and S-Log2 (effectively S-Log underexposed half a stop) and before that Panalog was essentially Rec.709 in the shadows and log from mid grey. What if you want to use all the dynamic range your sensor is capable of, to get playful rather than tweak, and to develop cameras and displays with wider dynamic range? You’re going to need a bigger boat. NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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CONVERGENCE DSLR RESURRECTION
DSLR resurrection Or the rise, fall and possible rise again of DSLRs. New cameras, newer ways to post-produce their footage and the onset of HDR might give DSLRs a new lease of life for pro video WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL If we didn’t know it already the announcement of the iPhone 7 with its fantastic twin-lens camera confirmed it – the consumer camera is dead. The CIPA (Camera and Imaging Products Association) has tracked the sales curve of these cameras and all was good until the original iPhone materialised. Then the upwards curve turned turtle and headed south. We’re talking about cameras of the point-and-shoot variety here, interestingly more hobbyist models with separate lenses and manual exposure tools more or less held their own with only a slight deviation downwards. These cameras also picked up sales when someone at Canon decided to put video on their DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
SMALL SIZE, BIG SENSORS, PORTABILITY, SHALLOW DEPTH-OFFIELD – MIGHT BE RETURNING TO SOME MODELS
Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera. The rest is history, with every largesensor DSLR or mirrorless camera manufacturer then chasing the videography market. Professional shooters played with them, seduced by the big-sensor look, broadcasters promised not to use them although ultimately wilted under the weight of footage being generated by their commissioned producers. But ultimately a mixture of the limitations of the form factor – one that was never meant for video – the limitations of the codecs, pixel binning, line skipping and sensor skew were too much for most people, and the arrival of lower priced super 35 sized digital camcorders that were meant for the job, were the final nails in the coffin. That, of course, is a severe potted history of the years from 2009 until maybe 2015 when DoPs were known to be either buying a Sony A7 variant or giving up on DSLRs for good. But technology marches on as ever and now there are signs that the great things about the DSLRs – small size, big sensors, portability, shallow depth-of-field – might be returning to some models.
FUJIFILM X-T2 AND OTHERS When someone at Canon put video in the EOS 5D Mark II it was seen as a finger in the air idea, not much was expected – little did they know. Fujifilm has now released their X-T2 with a lot more video nous. The company has obviously seen the impact that Sony’s A7R series of cameras have made on the pro and semi-pro market. These cameras are expensive, the Sony A7R II is around £2999, but come with an impressive spec that doesn’t include line skipping or pixel binning. In fact, the Sony A7S and A7S Mark II (and now the A99 Mark II) are the only cameras in the world that shoot 4K using the full width of the full-frame sensor with no binning or line skipping (Canon does the latter on many of its cameras). Also the super 35 crop from A7R Mark II is 15 megapixels, which allows for oversampling to 4K. Talking about the new £1299 Fujifilm X-T2 and supersampling, the X-T2 offers this too. This is an APS-C sensor camera with the usual 8-bit H.264 codec but the fact that they have incorporated supersampling in it bodes well for Fujifilm’s video future. The X-T2’s 4K is of the 3840x2160
DSLR RESURRECTION CONVERGENCE
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THAT ENABLES INTERNAL 4K WITH FULL SENSOR READOUT WITHOUT PIXEL BINNING variety at 29.97, 25, 24 and 23.98fps but only at 100Mbps. We’ll test the camera itself next month. The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV has also just been launched but still with a de-tuned performance for the pro video world. You can understand this as Canon has a camcorder market to protect. The Mark IV’s 4K is a full DCI at 29.97p, 25p, 24p and 23.98p but with a data rate of 500Mbps. Fresh from Photokina however comes news of the long-awaited Panasonic GH5. This wasn’t so much a launch but a technology showing, so fine details were hard to find but a 10-bit performance is the headliner. 10-bit at 4:2:2 4k/60p – now we just need to know about the compression and the noise performance. We subsequently found out that the 10-bit 4:2:2 4K 60p will only be available as an HDMI output option.
This is still major news for pros shooting with DSLRs as the now old GH4 is used quite frequently in the pro circles (read The Grand Tour article next monthto see how the camera is used for in-car footage). Also new from Photokina was the Sony A99 Mark II that enables internal 4K with full sensor readout without pixel binning in the XAVC S format at 100Mbps. But more than this, frame rates from one frame-persecond to 120fps can be selected in eight steps for up to 60x quick motion and 5x slow-motion recording, how usable this is we don’t know. There are also picture profiles, time code and an HDMI clear output. Also gamma assist for real time S-Log monitoring and a zebra mode for exposure adjustment. S-Log3 and S-Log2 gamma are also now included (see our Log Shooting article on page 26 to see
why this is important). The A99 Mark II is priced at £2999 body only. Also launched was the Fujifilm GFX digital medium-format camera with a sensor size of 43.8x32.9mm. But the camera has no indication of offering video on the dials. More interesting perhaps are the six new G Series lenses including a 63mm f/2.8 to go with it, maybe for use with the new RED VistaVision camera or ALEXA 65? Fujifilm’s 43.8x32.9mm sensor has a 26.7mm back flange distance; RED VistaVision is 40.96x21.6mm, but the PL back flange is 52mm so these lenses won’t work on PL mounts.
ABOVE Fujifilm’s X-T2
has incorporated supersampling which bodes well for the company’s video future.
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CAMERA SOFTWARE REVIEW
URSA MINI SOFTWARE V4 It looks like a video camera and you don’t have to be a weightlifter to carry it, but with its new software, can the URSA Mini beat the rest of the field? WORDS ADAM GARSTONE
he ‘big’ URSA is big – astonishingly big. It’s probably one of the heaviest non-film cameras I’ve ever come across. It’s also weird – in a good way. It’s designed for a two- or three-person camera crew, and the thought of putting it on your shoulder would terrify Geoff Capes (remember him?). The URSA Mini has been around – kinda – for some time now, and Blackmagic advertises it as the lightest S35 camera in the world. The greatest thing about the URSA Mini has always been its conventionality. Whereas the rest of Blackmagic’s cameras are quirky, the Mini looks like a video camera. With DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
some options fitted, it sits on your shoulder, has an eye-level viewfinder, a handle on the top and a battery on the back. The original software, however, was its main quirk. To address this, and some of the usability issues that had been levelled at the camera, Blackmagic has released version 4 – still in public beta at the time of writing. It’s a major redesign – and a very welcome one. From the moment you power the camera up, it looks… well… conventional, with a few great features that some other manufacturers could take notice of, and a few infuriating ones too.
CAMERA SOFTWARE REVIEW
Hitting the Menu button brings up several pages of great looking, new menus on the large, responsive touchscreen. The new look, with large grey and blue buttons and skeuomorphic switches is fantastically clear, though there are arrows at the edge of the screen to flip from page to page, and they are a little fiddly to hit accurately unless you file your fingers down to a point. Along the top of the screen are six tabs, for Record, Monitor, Audio, Setup, Presets and LUTs. The Record tab sets CODEC and resolution. There are lossless, 3:1 and 4:1 Raw options, all the ProRes options from XQ to Proxy, and a
tempting DNxHR button, which you can’t select yet. The resolution list is also broad – from 4.6K (4608x2592) to boring old 1920x1080. These pages also let you set the project frame rate and the off-speed rate – though you can do this from the HUD too – more on that later. Other Blackmagic cameras rely on using Resolve to ‘print’ the camera ‘negative’, but that’s not always possible with a more ENG/ documentary style of shooting and post-production. It’s good to see some in-camera processing going on here, then, with the possibility to set the detail sharpening level.The Monitor tab controls the three video
BLACKMAGIC ADVERTISES THE URSA MINI AS THE LIGHTEST S35 IN THE WORLD
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ABOVE The CFast card menu has a much
simpler look as well as the re-designed record tab page below.
NOVEMBER 2016 DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
NEXT MONTH
WELCOME TO THE GRAND TOUR The new look, the new cameras, the 4K data and the tech tent
WILDSCREEN
New behaviours and new ways of shooting them. Hot from Wildscreen wildlife festival.
VICTORIA
Now planning for its second series we talk to the creatives and look back and forward.
RED RAVEN
RED’s entry-level camera brings REDucation to indie and convergent markets
SHOOTING IMAX With an increase in resolution and sensor size, your camera may be ready for IMAX
ON SALE 10 NOVEMBER ALSO AVAILABLE ON THE APP STORE
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER 2016
ALSO…
All the latest news and features from the pro side of UAVs, audio and lighting