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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Apocalypto Look

Professional cinematographers, who are used to critically analyzing images, can't decide about whether a film looked "video-y" or not. They can't decide and argue on forums online and in person about whether the look of this digital film "worked" or "didn't work."

Just the fact that professionals are even arguing about that - are even considering digital images in the same context as 35mm - is an impressive statement of how far digital acquisition has come... and how far there is to go!

Lucas
 
Well Apocalypto was nominated by the ASC for best cinematography, so that is a huge landmark victory for HD in and of itself.

BTW, the running handheld stuff was shot with a super 16mm Ikonoskop A-cam

Can we assume that this camera has video-like depth of field?
 
Tom said:
Well Apocalypto was nominated by the ASC for best cinematography, so that is a huge landmark victory for HD...
Click to expand...

A few years ago, a film called Quattro Noza (now called Streets of Legend) was the first non film-based feature to win Best Cinematography at Sundance.

I remember thinking to myself that was the beginning of the "serious" cinematographic community recognizing that non-film acquisition could be beautiful and valid at the high-end of imagery and creativity.

Lucas
 
Tom said:
Well Apocalypto was nominated by the ASC for best cinematography, so that is a huge landmark victory for HD in and of itself.

BTW, the running handheld stuff was shot with a super 16mm Ikonoskop A-cam

Can we assume that this camera has video-like depth of field?
Click to expand...

Smaller gauge film formats always had greater depth of field.

Super 8 would have greather depth of field than anything else, and IMAX would have shallower depth of field than anything else.
 
Thomas Mathai said:
Smaller gauge film formats always had greater depth of field.

Super 8 would have greather depth of field than anything else, and IMAX would have shallower depth of field than anything else.
Click to expand...

do you think these super 16 running shots could have been mistaken for a "video-y" look?
 
The shots could look video-y if the film was sped up in post. The frame rate could have been overcranked, as soon as you start messing around with frame transfer rates, film will have a more video look. Example- If the original footage was shot at 24fps, and transfered normally, you will have the great film look, but if the footage was shot at 24fps but transfered at a higher rate to speed up the film, it will look like video.
 
Film often looks better because film people have more experience and understand their medium better. Film shooters understand their tools and how to bring out the subtleties.

Videographers must be prepared to learn the language that film shooters have built over the last 100 years.

It's a language made up of camera movements, filtering techniques, subtleties of focus, and depth of field. And it's a language coming into the video world through the gateway of high-definition television.

-HD pioneer Pierre de Lespinois
 
I mean interlaced = smooth
I didn't see odd and even lines of course, but motion was very smooth. Maybe it was really overcranked and then speed up.
It was like TV shots integrated into film. Very strange and disrupting.
 
My digest from cinematography.net:

The most obvious non-film artifact was the deliberate use of the longer
shutter speeds, even in the first scene, causing a lot of smearing in
fast motion. Sometimes this had a poetic, abstract effect during the
action scenes, other times it gave the motion a somewhat
"interlaced-scan" quality, in the sense that 60i at 1/60th has some of
that laggy but smooth quality. When combined with shots with gain
boosting at night, one shot with a lot of lagging / blurring / noise
almost felt like a compression artifact.

But overall, I was really impressed by the quality of the image.

David Mullen, ASC
Los Angeles



I thought the smearing/long shutter effect, in the chase sequences, was (aestethically motivated or not) one of the few things that stood out as "HD", as well.

My eyes must be acclimating to this stuff.

Chris Fernando
1AC
Los Angeles, CA



Film was shot 95% on HD with the Genesis. My footage was all 35mm but while on the set, I spoke a lot with Mr. Semler and all was being shot with the Genesis. They had 6 or 8 on the set.

The secuences shot in Costa Rica were practically all the vast extention shots such as: vistas of forests, mountains, sunrises, sunsets, waterfalls, clouds, volcanoes, etc. All of these shots were done with an Arri 435 with Panavision prime lenses.

Mario Cardona
Producer, DP
ZEN entertainment
 
I just saw this movie last night with a friend of mine. We both agreed that it was a very good movie in most respects. However after about an hour my friend (who is not into the whole film industry whatsoever) said to me: 'It's great, but sometimes the film just doesn't cut it. It doesn't feel like I'm a few centuries back in time...but more as if this was happening right now somewhere in the jungle...it feels as if I'm watching a good homevideo every now and then. Really strange.'
 
JTM its so true i also felt it and asked my wife during the film that some panning and running shots looked videoish. i had no idea it was shot on Genesis. Superman was perfect.
 
Someone said already on page 1 that the running shots were done with a 16mm A-Cam. This was confirmed in a very recent interview with Ikonoskop from IBC (for some mac video site).
 
There were a LOT of running shots in that movie! The movie is practically 80% shots of people running...

The 16mm A-cam shots were those odd wide-angle POV shots where the camera was held right in front of the face of the runner, or the reverse, some shaky crashing through leaves POV shots. There were not a lot of those shots in the movie.

The smeary video-ish running shots that most people here are talking about were the ones shot on the Genesis with the long shutter speeds. There are a LOT of those shots in the movie, starting from the very beginning with the pig chase.
 
jtm said:
I'm not sure of your definition of the video look Thomas, but I characterise it as temporal motion cadence (as in excessive motion blur due generally to field sampling), chip artifacts (as in pixel visibility on hi-contrast low-angle edges (stepping), occasional chroma crawl on high colour edges such as Reds etc, pixel strobing on hi contrast surfaces such as herringbone or window blinds, luminance/chroma noise due to (generally unusual) use of the gain function) and finally compressed contrast curve due to inherent characteristics of electronic sensors - none of which I saw in Superman Returns - but many of which I saw in Apocalypto.

Film neg also exhibits a greyness generally as there is no absolutely solid D-max available in a cinema as leakage through the neg from projection light is inevitable.

What video aspects of Superman Returns bothered you? Or by artificial are you simply referring to a heavily CG posted and theatrically art directed film?
Click to expand...

You missed the (in my opinion) most important feature of the video look:
too much detail/sharpening (Hardly any is too much for my taste).

DI's go through a sharpening step, unless you specifically ask them not to, which I believe almost no-one does.
 
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