Tag Archives: choice

Alpha1, Burano, cameras, FX3, Venice

Is this the age of the small camera? Part 1.

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As Sony’s new Burano camera starts to ship – a relatively small camera that  could comfortably be used to shoot a blockbuster movie we have to look at how over the last few years the size of the cameras used for film production has reduced.

Which was shot with an 8K Venice 2 and which was shot with a 4K FX3?

 

Only last year we saw the use of the Sony FX3 as the principle camera for the movie the Creator. What is particularly interesting about the Creator is that the FX3 was chosen by the director Gareth Edwards for a mix of both creative and financial reasons.

To save money or to add flexibility?

To save money, rather than building a lot of expensive sets Edwards chose to shoot on location using a wide and varied range of locations (80 different locations)  all over Asia. To make this possible he used a smaller than usual crew.  Part of the reasoning that was given was that it was cheaper to fly a small crew to all these different locations than to try to build a different set for each part of the film. The film cost $80 million to make and took $104 million in the box office, a pretty decent profit at a time when many movies take years to break even.

FX3 on gimbal during the filming of The Creator



The FX3 was typically mounted on a gimbal and this allowed them to shoot quickly and in a very fluid manner, making use of natural light where possible.  A 2x anamorphic lens was used and the final delivery aspect ratio was a very wide 2.76:1. The film was edited first and then when the edit was locked down the VFX elements were added to the film. Modern tracking and rotoscoping techniques make it much easier to add VFX into sequences without needing to use green or blue screen techniques and this is one of those areas where AI will become a very useful and powerful tool.

You don’t NEED a big camera, but you might want one.

So, what is clear is that you don’t NEED a big camera to make a feature film and The Creator demonstrates that an FX3 (recording to an Atomos Ninja) offers sufficient image quality to stand up to big screen presentation. I don’t think this is really anything new, but we have now reached the stage where the difference in image quality between a cheap $1500 camera like the FX30 and a high end “cinema” camera like the $70K  Venice 2  is genuinely so small that an audience probably won’t notice.

There may be reasons why you might prefer to have a bigger camera body – it does make mounting accessories easier and will often have much better monitoring and viewfinder options. And you may argue that a camera like Venice can offer greater image quality (as you will see in part 2 – it technically does have a higher quality image than the FX3), but would the audience actually be able to see the difference and even if they can would they actually care? And what about post production – surely a better quality image is a big help with post – again come back for part 2 where I explore this in more depth.

Which is the Arri LF and which is the Sony A1?


And small cameras will continue to improve. If what we have now is already good enough things can only get better.

8K Benefits??

Since the launch of Burano I’ve become more and more convinced of the benefits of an 8K sensor – even if you only ever intend to deliver in 4K, the extra chroma resolution from actually having 4K of R and B pixels makes a very real difference. Venice 2 really made me much more aware of this and Burano confirms it. Because of this I’ve been shooting a lot more with the Sony A1 (which possibly shares the same sensor as Burano). There is something I really like about the textural quality in the images from the A1, Burano and Venice 2 (having said that after spending hours looking at my side by side test samples from both 4K and 8K cameras while the difference is real, I’m not sure it will always be seen in the final deliverable). In addition when using a very compressed codec such as the XAVC-HS in the A1 recording at 8K leads to smaller artefacts which then tend to be less visible in a 4K deliverable. This allows you to grade the material harder than perhaps you can with similarly compressed 4K footage. The net result is the 10 bit 8K looks fantastic in a 4K production.

Sony A1 cropped and zoomed in 6x.


I have to wonder if The Creator wouldn’t have been better off being shot with an A1 rather than an FX3. You can’t get 8K raw out of an A1, but the extra resolution makes up for this and it may have been a better fit for the 2x anamorphic lens that they used.

So many choices….

And that’s the thing – we have lots of choices now. There are many really great small cameras, all capable of producing truly excellent images. A small camera allows you to be nimble. The grip and support equipment becomes smaller. This allows you to be more creative. A lot of small cameras are being used for the Formula 1 movie, small cameras are often mixed with larger cameras and these days the audience isn’t going to notice. 

Plus we are seeing a change in attitudes. A few years ago most cinematographers wouldn’t have entertained the idea of using a DSLR or pocket sized camera as the primary camera for a feature. Now it is different, a far greater number of DP’s are looking at what a small camera might allow them to do, not just as a B camera but as the A camera. When the image quality stops being an issue, then small might allow you to do more.

This doesn’t mean big cameras like Venice will go away, there will always be a place for them. But I expect we will see more and more really great theatrical releases shot with cameras like the FX3 or A1 and that makes it a really interesting time to be a cinematographer. Again, look at The Creator – this was a relatively small budget for a science fiction film packed with CGI and other effects. And it looked great. Of course there is also that middle ground, a smaller camera but with the image quality of a big one – Burano perhaps?

In Part 2……

In part 2 I’m going to take some sample clips that I grabbed at a recent workshop from a Venice 2, Burano, A1 and FX3 and show you just how close the footage from these cameras is. I’ll also throw in some footage from an Arri LF and then I’ll “break” the footage in post production to give you an idea of where the differences are and whether they are actually significant enough to worry about.

 

cameras, Technology, Workflow

XAVC-I or XAVC-L which to choose?

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THE XAVC CODEC FAMILY

The XAVC family of codecs was introduced by Sony back in 2014.  Until recently all flavours of XAVC were based on H264 compression. More recently new XAVC-HS versions were introduced that use H265. The most commonly used versions of XAVC are the XAVC-I and XAVC-L codecs. These have both been around for a while now and are well tried and well tested.

XAVC-I

XAVC-I is a very good Intra frame codec where each frame is individually encoded. It’s being used for Netflix shows, it has been used for broadcast TV for many years and there are thousands and thousands of hours of great content that has been shot with XAVC-I without any issues. Most of the in flight shots in Top Gun Mavericks were shot using XAVC-I. It is unusual to find visible artefacts in XAVC-I unless you make a lot of effort to find them. But it is a high compression codec so it will never be entirely artefact free. The video below compares XAVC-I with ProResHQ and as you can see there is very little difference between the two, even after several encoding passes.


 

XAVC-L

XAVC-L is a long GOP version of XAVC-I. Long GoP (Group of Pictures) codecs fully encode a start frame and then for the next group of frames (typically 12 or more frames) only store any differences between this start frame and then the next full frame at the start of the next group. They record the changes between frames using things motion prediction and motion vectors that rather than recording new pixels, moves existing pixels from the first fully encoded frame through the subsequent frames if there is movement in the shot. Do note that on the F5/F55, the FS5, FS7, FX6 and FX9 that in UHD or 4K XAVC-L is 8 bit (while XAVC-I is 10 bit).

Performance and Efficiency.

Long GoP codecs can be very efficient when there is little motion in the footage. It is generally considered that H264 long GoP is around 2.5x more efficient than the I frame version. And this is why the bit rate of XAVC-I is around 2.5x higher than XAVC-L, so that for most types of  shots both will perform similarly. If there is very little motion and the bulk of the scene being shot is largely static, then there will be situations where XAVC-L can perform better than XAVC-I.

Motion Artefacts.

BUT as soon as you add a lot of motion or a lot of extra noise (which looks like motion to a long GoP codec) Long GoP codecs struggle as they don’t typically have sufficiently high bit rates to deal with complex motion without some loss of image quality. Let’s face it, the primary reason behind the use of Long GoP encoding is to save space. And that’s done by decreasing the bit rate. So generally long GoP codecs have much lower bit rates so that they will actually provide those space savings. But that introduces challenges for the codec. Shots such as cars moving to the left while the camera pans right are difficult for a long GoP codec to process as almost everything is different from frame to frame including entirely new background information hidden behind the cars in one frame that becomes visible in the next. Wobbly handheld footage, crowds of moving people, fields of crops blowing in the wind, rippling water, flocks of birds are all very challenging and will often exhibit visible artefacts in a lower bit rate long GoP codec that you won’t ever get in the higher bit rate I frame version.
Concatenation.
 
A further issue is concatenation. The artefacts that occur in long GoP codecs often move in the opposite direction to the object that’s actually moving in the shot. So, when you have to re-encode the footage at the end of an edit or for distribution the complexity of the motion in the footage increases and each successive encode will be progressively worse than the one before. This is a very big concern for broadcasters or anyone where there may be multiple compression passes using long GoP codecs such as H264 or H265.

Quality depends on the motion.
So, when things are just right and the scene suits XAVC-L it will perform well and it might show marginally fewer artefacts than XAVC-I, but those artefacts that do exists in XAVC-I are going to be pretty much invisible in the majority of normal situations. But when there is complex motion XAVC-L can produce visible artefacts. And it is this uncertainty that is a big issue for many as you cannot easily predict when XAVC-L might struggle. Meanwhile XAVC-I will always be consistently good. Use XAVC-I and you never need to worry about motion or motion artefacts, your footage will be consistently good no matter what you shoot. 

Broadcasters and organisations such as Netflix spend a lot of time and money testing codecs to make sure they meet the standards they need. XAVC-I is almost universally accepted as a main acquisition codec while XAVC-L is much less widely accepted. You can use XAVC-L if you wish, it can be beneficial if you do need to save card or disk space. But be aware of its limitations and avoid it if you are shooting handheld, shooting anything with lots of motion, especially water, blowing leaves, crowds etc. Also be aware that on the F5/F55, the FS5, FS7, FX6 and FX9 that in UHD or 4K XAVC-L is 8 bit while XAVC-I is 10 bit. That alone would be a good reason NOT to choose XAVC-L.

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Lens Tests at F3 Dubai Workshop.

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Off to the airport to fly home in a minute, but I thought I would jot down some notes about the various lenses we were able to look at during the F3 workshop I ran here in Dubai. We had a set of the Sony PL primes, a Zeiss CP2, some Zeiss ZF.2 stills lenses, a Nikon 50mm and a Tokina 28-70mm ATX pro zoom. The stills lenses were all attached to the F3 using an MTF to Nikon adapter.

It was hard to see any difference between the Sony primes and the CP2, this was kind of expected. When comapring the PL’s to the Tokina zoom, the zoom was a little soft wide open at f2.6. Stopped down half a stop and it looked much better, but it needed to go down to f4 before it came close to matching the PL’s. Even then the PL’s had the edge, but then this is comparing a zoom to a prime. I would certainly have no hesitation over using the Tokina at f4 or more closed. The Nikon 50mm pancake, f1.8 was surprisingly good. Even wide open it produced a respectable image, stopped down to f2.8 it was a very close match to the PL’s. The Zeiss ZF.2’s were the budget stars of the show as even wide open these produced sharp, clean images with very similar bokeh and flare performance to the primes, very impressive performance.

Of course ergonomically the PL’s were better. Bigger focus rings, bigger iris rings and better focus scales. The CP2 impressed with it’s near 360 degrees rotation of the focus ring with very clear and accurate witness marks and wide distance spacing even approaching infinity. If I could afford a set of CP2’s that’s what I would buy, but I can’t. The Sony PL’s are good lenses, they don’t quite have the build quality of the CP2’s but they do represent excellent value for the money. If your budget won’t stretch to PL glass then the Zeiss ZF.2’s are about as close as you’ll get to a PL lens, but do watch out for the amount of telescoping when you focus the longer focal length ones. That can make using a matte box very tricky. I know my Nikon 50mm and Tokina 28mm primes work well. The Tokina 28-70 while not as sharp as the primes will still make a good all-round lens. All I need now is to get a nice 85mm and 135mm and I’ll be happy. Maybe a couple of ZF’s.

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Lens Choices for the PMW-F3

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The PMW-F3 has two lens mounts out of the box. The PL mount (via a supplied adapter) and the new F mount. PL mount lenses were developed by Arriflex for use with movie cameras, so PL mount lenses are an obvious choice. You used to be able to pick up older PL mount lenses quite cheaply, but when RED came along most of these got snapped up, so now PL mount lenses tend to be expensive. Sony will be producing a low cost three lens kit comprising of 35mm, 50mm and 85mm lightweight PL mount lenses. If you want top quality then Zeiss or Cooke lenses are the obvious choice. If your budget won’t stretch that far there are a number of 35mm SLR lenses that have been converted to PL mount.

PL  mount lenses often have witness marks for focus. This are factory engraved markings, individual to that lens for exact focus distances. They also often feature T stops instead of F stops for aperture. An F stop is the ratio of the iris opening to the focal length of the lens and gives the theoretical  amount of light that will pass through the lens if it was 100% efficient. A T stop on the other hand is the actual amount of light passing through the lens taking into account aperture size and transmission losses through the lens. A prime lens with an f1.4 aperture may only be a T2 lens after loss through the glass elements is taken into account. A multi element zoom lens will have higher losses, so a f2.8 lens may have a T stop of T4. However it is the iris size and thus the f stop that determines the Depth of Field.

But what about the F mount on the F3. What will that let you use? well right now there are no F mount lenses, but Sony are planning on a motorised zoom for next year. I am expecting a range of F mount to DSLR mount adapters to become available when the camera is released. These adapters will allow you to use DSLR lenses. The best mount IMHO is the Nikon mount. Why? Well most modern DSLR lenses don’t have iris controls. The iris is controlled by the camera. Nikon are the only manufacturer that has kept manual control of the iris on the lens body. When choosing a lens you want to look for fast lenses, f2.8 or faster  (f1.8, f1.4) to allow you to get shallow Depth of Field. You want a lens designed for a full frame 35mm sensor to avoid problems with vignetting or light loss in the corners of the image. You want a large manual focus ring to make focus control easy. Prime lenses (non zoom) with their simpler design with fewer lens elements normally produce the best results, but a zoom might be handy for it’s quick focal length changes. Do be aware however that zooms designed for stills photography normally don’t hold constant focus through the zoom range like a video lens so you may need to re-focus as you zoom. I have a nice Mk1 Tokina 28 to 70mm f2.6 Pro zoom. The optics in this lens are based on the Angineux 28 to 70mm and it’s a great all round lens. I also have a Nikkor 50mm f1.8, Pentax 58mm f1.4 and a few others. Of course you can also hire in lenses (DSLR and PL) as you need them.

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PDW-700 or PDW-F800 viewfinder choice.

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The PDW-700 and F800?s are sold body only, so you have to choose which viewfinder you want. there are 3 choices. A cheap HDVF 200 mono CRT finder that is 480+ lines resolution, the mid range (top of the CRT range) HDVF-20A which is 500+ lines resolution and then there is the expensive colour HDVF-C35W.?I got the HDVF-20A. The viewfinder is a critical part of the package and I wanted a good viewfinder. For the past year my main camera has been my trusty EX3 which I love. This has a really good colour viewfinder with an excellent colour peaking function and image magnification. When I use my EX3 it is rare for me to not get my pictures pin sharp and spot on in focus. Plus I can frame my image taking into account both black and white contrast range and colour contrast. With the EX3 judging exposure is easy, you can see when your overexposing as you can see colours washing out. If I don’t want (or can’t) take a colour monitor on location then I really can light an interview or check colour balance without just using the EX3?s finder.?Now with the PDW-700 I am struggling. Going back to a mono CRT has been a bit of a shock, to be honest I am struggling with it. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the HDVF-20A but I have become used to working with a colour VF. I’m not sure I can live with the CRT VF for very long. I guess I am going to have to start saving my pennies as I think going back to a mono CRT is a retrograde step. I just wish the C35W was a little cheaper. Perhaps Sony could bring out a VF for the 700/F800 based on the rather good EX3 finder.?If I was making the purchase again I would opt for the more expensive C35W. I no longer see a colour VF as a luxury but more of an essential item. When you work with cameras day in – day out you want the tools that make your life as easy as possible and a good colour VF is one of them. On it’s own the C35W may seem expensive at £5.5k compared to the £3.5k of the 20A, but in terms of the total packing it’s another 10% to the cost but in retrospect I think it would have been worth it.