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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 :)

ARRI 4K Super 35 Camera Will be Launched Next Month

Brian Boyer said:
I dunno. But, as I explained to Phil, whatever gets a camera to be able to capture brake and neon lights with the same color saturation that can be achieved with film, as opposed to a white blob with a colored halo, I'm all for it.
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In RWG you got a lot more detail in your color saturation than you think. The job is to bring them back in the color session. Red car lights are per se not clipped, but you have to dig in the color.


Dual AD is allways problematic on the crossover point. Solvable with sound, but more difficult to acchieve with pictures.
 
Brian,

I think that since Arri with the new Alexa 35 and the AWG4 has mapped it's Color Profile within the ACES APO Color Range that this should greatly reduce the Red and Blue Neon and Brake light oversaturation issues. If they use ACES, There is a new "ACES GAMUT COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS" in ACES 1.3 that will also help reduce "OUT OF GAMUT" colors even further.

With RED HELIUM RAW file

Out Of Gamut Colors in ACES 1.3
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Out Of Gamut Colors in ACES 1.3 with manual correction to the ACES TRANSFORM OFX with the new GAMUT COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS


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Here it is in a RED IPP2 workflow with a Medium/Soft OUTPUT TRANSFORM with the same grade applied without the GAMUT COMPRESSION ALGORITHM applied. The colors aren't initially as badly OUT OF GAMUT as in the ACES Workflow, only the REDs are mostly OUT OF GAMUT. But the image still looks like shit.

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I Just watched "THE SWING", one of the ARRI ALEXA 35 " ENCOUNTER" videos, and it looked like most of the images were still in LOG. This could be because they were going for a "DREAMY" fairytale look or they just preferred a low-contrast look for this. The 5 screengrabs from the video below are how I would maybe like to have seen the video graded. However, my opinion is just my opinion.



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Low contrast seems to be in vogue these days, whenever you try and do anything with a bit of contrast people attack you for "crushing the blacks". I did like the look of Swing though, I think they were trying to show off the dynamic range of the camera with that one.
 
Craig W. Bickerstaff said:
Low contrast seems to be in vogue these days, whenever you try and do anything with a bit of contrast people attack you for "crushing the blacks". I did like the look of Swing though, I think they were trying to show off the dynamic range of the camera with that one.
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Craig,

Yeah, I don't think that any of the ENCOUNTER Cinematographers wanted to do anything but present that this camera has a very wide Dynamic Range with their grades. Any Highlights that even remotely looked as if they were going to CLIP or any Shadows that even remotely looked as if they were going to be Crushed wouldn't really adhere to the 17- Stops of Dynamic Range narrative.
 
I see some value in demonstrating how many a color nuances and levels of "crushed" you can get even in this narrow range. I don't get excited with that look though.
 
Alex Zeder said:
I see some value in demonstrating how many a color nuances and levels of "crushed" you can get even in this narrow range. I don't get excited with that look though.
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Alex,

I mean who am I to tell Erik Messerschmidt ASC, the Cinematographer behind " THE SWING",t hat he doesn't know his shit, I've done nothing in comparison to what he has done as a Cinematographer. And who am I also to tell anybody that their grading decisions were something that I maybe might not have agreed with. But sometimes it just makes you wonder why some very seasoned and talented Cinematographers chose to go with some of the decisions they made sometimes.
 
I too wouldn't criticize any of this, or "tell" these guys that they should have done anything differently IMHO.
It only starts me thinking what the intention behind such looks might have been, if it's not already very obvious anyway. I mean, I'd possibly choose a low contrast myself if the story plays in suburban tristesse. If I can't find a connection between the grading and the story, it just makes me wonder whether I just "don't get it" or what other reasons could have led them to their decision, always assuming it wasn't just a mistake of someone in the pipeline that everyone later admires as an artistic inspiration :)
Discussing the potential intentions for such looks is a good opportunity to learn from them, and if five other people would have come up with twenty different approaches, it's no wonder. In the end you have to pick one even though it's clear that it will not be to everybody's taste.
 
Maybe, like Craig and I also believe, it was simply to tell his story while displaying the widest dynamic range for the came completely devoid of his own grading preferences. Maybe it was a grade in direct opposition to what he fells are Films that are too contrast for his own tastes.As you stated, we probably will never know why he chose to tell this story the way that he did. I'm sure a lot of time and effort went into the decision to chose this specific look for this story. So, again as you stated, I think the grade that both told the best story that Erik Messerschmidt wanted to tell and the 17- Stops of Dynamic Range story that ARRI wanted to tell got choosen.
 
Craig W. Bickerstaff said:
Low contrast seems to be in vogue these days, whenever you try and do anything with a bit of contrast people attack you for "crushing the blacks". I did like the look of Swing though, I think they were trying to show off the dynamic range of the camera with that one.
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Crushing the black is another thing than not having any blacks.
But the problem with this camera is that you will have to trash 7 or more stops to get an image wich is watchable.
 
Here's what Harald Brendel, Head of the Center of Competence Image Science in the Camera and R&D, had to say about the dynamic range of the Alexa 35:

"I think cinematographers will appreciate this additional headroom, especially in HDR. When you look at an SDR image from the new ALEXA 35 without modifying it, sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate those additional stops of dynamic range. Because the tonal curve is already so flat and you want to have this gentle roll off towards the highlights, if the sensor captures two and a half more stops, you won’t see much of it in an SDR image unless you start to bring it down, or stop down the lens, increase the contrast in the highlights or make them lower. And clipping in HDR really looks ugly.

In HDR, you expect to see in the highlights but then if it suddenly stops, it looks quite wrong. In SDR, if your camera clips, you don’t see it sometimes because you already have this flat part of the curve. So for example, if the sun is shining through a cloud and it’s clipping, it doesn’t matter because the cloud is already white. The sun is clipped within this cloud. But in HDR, you see all the differences and then you suddenly have a clipped area that is much more of a problem. That is why I think, especially in HDR, people will appreciate this additional headroom."
 
Jon Pais said:
Here's what Harald Brendel, Head of the Center of Competence Image Science in the Camera and R&D, had to say about the dynamic range of the Alexa 35:

"I think cinematographers will appreciate this additional headroom, especially in HDR. When you look at an SDR image from the new ALEXA 35 without modifying it, sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate those additional stops of dynamic range. Because the tonal curve is already so flat and you want to have this gentle roll off towards the highlights, if the sensor captures two and a half more stops, you won’t see much of it in an SDR image unless you start to bring it down, or stop down the lens, increase the contrast in the highlights or make them lower. And clipping in HDR really looks ugly.

In HDR, you expect to see in the highlights but then if it suddenly stops, it looks quite wrong. In SDR, if your camera clips, you don’t see it sometimes because you already have this flat part of the curve. So for example, if the sun is shining through a cloud and it’s clipping, it doesn’t matter because the cloud is already white. The sun is clipped within this cloud. But in HDR, you see all the differences and then you suddenly have a clipped area that is much more of a problem. That is why I think, especially in HDR, people will appreciate this additional headroom."
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Jon,

I think that FDTIMES Report tells you everything you probably would want to know from ARRI about the ALEXA 35 and the workflow around it.
 
The Encounters videos bored me to tears. Much more interesting were the shots made by Mark Toia, back in 2013, with the then new Dragon sensor where, in the space of just two days (!) he managed to shoot a variety of subjects, many in harsh, contrasty natural light (surfing, dog racing, car races, the glare off the hood of an automobile, etc.) as well as in the dead of night, trying out various compression ratios, frame rates, underexposure, really pushing the camera to its limits, all the while providing information about ISO and where the highlights and shadows stood in each of the shots. No masking, no power windows, no keying, no noise reduction. By the time the tenth scene including windows rolled around in one of the Encounters videos, I was ready to tear my hair out.
 
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Jon Pais said:
The Encounters videos bored me to tears. Much more interesting were the shots made by Mark Toia, back in 2013, with the then new Dragon sensor where, in the space of just two days (!) he managed to shoot a variety of subjects, many in harsh, contrasty natural light (surfing, car races, the glare off the hood of an automobile, etc.) as well as in the dead of night, trying out various compression ratios, frame rates, underexposure, really pushing the camera to its limits, all the while providing information about ISO and where the highlights and shadows stood in each of the shots. By the time the tenth scene including windows rolled around in one of thr Encounters videos I was ready to tear my hair out.
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Jon,

But have you ever seen any introductory videos from a new camera launch that did justice to the actual capabilities of that camera. I think you're referring to " The Swing" Encounters video. I felt like they were trying to stress the 17- Stops of Dynamic range between the interior shadows and exterior sunlight scenery showing through the windows a little too much. But that is the story that ARRI is trying to tell with this camera.
 
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rand thompson said:
I Just watched "THE SWING", one of the ARRI ALEXA 35 " ENCOUNTER" videos, and it looked like most of the images were still in LOG. This could be because they were going for a "DREAMY" fairytale look or they just preferred a low-contrast look for this. The 5 screengrabs from the video below are how I would maybe like to have seen the video graded. However, my opinion is just my opinion.

Not sure how you are capturing your screen grabs but they don't represent the graded image I am seeing on my Apple imac. The image has way more contrast than you represented in this case.
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