I just saw "che" from SS... some thoughts..

[Esteban Sosnitsky]

Hi all...
I saw "che" about a month ago in Argentina and wanted to share some thoughts in the forum to get some reduser feedback. I was really nice to see
some red material on the big screen

It was also nice to see how the camera behaved in the state that it was, I think it was shot on a couple prototypes, with anamorphic lenses using 2.4K of the sensor. It also showed most of the limitations that one could have with the camera, a set of limitations that I have had to deal with in the past months as I get to use the camera more and more.

Some thoughts to share:

*The depth of field is amazing. It looks like no other NOT film camera I have seen. It doesnt imprint that look that "video" gives to a film. It was impressive, once you decide whether you like or not Soderbergh's style, to see how he gave the film a decided look; from a creative point of view it is quite different. Thus makes a standing point in the story. Even in the wide angle shots, at plain sun, you had that film look in which the characters are in focus but the leafs in front of the camera are not. I really enjoyed that.

*Sharpness versus focus. On the other hand...the shallow depth of field in some shots made the out of focus something you just cant avoid looking at. There is this shot where "che" walks in an alley or street along with "Aleida" in low light, and their walk thru is almost completely out of focus. Again, my intention is NOT to criticize in any way SS's work, I just want to point issues that I saw and that some of us may encounter while working with this camera. Situations in which we may have to decide what to do. Pulling focus on the R1 is pretty hard, even on a high production level like this one, even with a wireless FF, even for the pros. (Please avoid the: he made the movie on a prototype, he didnt have the proper monitor, the focus puller is a really experienced one, etc comments.. I am not talking about the movie itself, I am talking about situations experiences that I saw on a tech level and learn from there and share)
Even though I think it looked awkward I sincerely enjoy that in a movie rather than to see everything sharp and in focus all the time.

*Noise. The film was almost entirely shot on RED. Although I read that he used the Aaton 16mm for some shots. I guess the ones that happen in the UN speech, my guess.. Dont know for sure but the mix looked very nice. For me, noise is an issue I like to avoid. I find it sometimes very distracting in the theater and it looks weird to me. I have seen other work from Soderbergh and I know he likes it. For most of the film I think it was superb. But then again, when the situation was extreme the noise came up and honestly for me it was a little too much. I saw how they tried to work around the lo light situations rising from the "correct exposure" a couple of stops sacrificing noise level over information I need to tell the story. He shot some scenes that had to look like sunrise and I thought they looked kind of dirty. Too much noise for my taste. Look for the cyan house in one of the sunrise shots and tell me what you think. On the other hand I think that the fact that the movie was finished in 35mm that imprints another texture that looks rather interesting with the RED noise. Conclusion, RED looks awesome on film no matter how much noise you have. It looks damn good.

*Exposure difference. The so called indoor-outdoor dilemma. The overexposure is an issue with the camera. As seen in previous posts like the ones from Mc Gregor, the cam has 3 stops over and 8 under (with B16 imagine what they should have struggled with!). They had a lot of this issues when they had dialogues in the huts and then walked around the jungle. Also you could see that they made choices like rise the camera level over the normal height so that the less sky you had the better, in order to expose for the people in the green background instead of having a washed up highlight. On my own experience, I even had a film out test to see how this processed in film and I have to say I was greatly impressed. We did two corrections for the same scene, in which we had a black area and a white area set naturally in a urban environment. One correction was more edgy over contrasting a bit the image. The result was no noise and a white hole in the screen. Kind of ugly. And another correction less contrasty, more conservative, where the whites had enough printing detail and the shadows where crushed. It looked awesome. I just wish we had more headroom in the highlights so that whenever you run into this kind of situations you dont have to lit everything to match the outdoors.

In general terms I enjoyed the movie. I hope you do too, while looking not only for what interests you in terms of what the cam can do, but as what the whole film was about.

I hope my words wont be misinterpreted, as I think I have an objective opinion on the matter and all I want is to know what others think on the same matter and learn from there.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

 

[Kyle Presley]

What was your opinion of the script/execution?

 

[Esteban Sosnitsky]

That would be a whole new thread!
It didnt kill me, I liked Fidel a lot more than Che. Benicio lacked in charisma. But that is so subjective...

 

[Tom Lowe]

I was not impressed at all by the trailer's image quality - I see a lot of low-light noise and blown-out skies. I will reserve judgment, though, until I see the movie in a theater.

 

[Joseph Ward]

This was so far the best I have ever seen, visually, from a 2d movie!

 

[Nova Invicta]

same issue

same issue

The Wallander thread I tried to make the same point that highlights especially looked over exposed with the sea & sky shots whilst foreground was properly exposed meaning the cam could not hold the lattitude.

 

[Deanan]

I was not impressed at all by the trailer's image quality - I see a lot of low-light noise and blown-out skies. I will reserve judgment, though, until I see the movie in a theater.

The trailer is massively compressed compared to the final footage I've seen.

 

[Daniel S Williams]

You weren't impressed? Must take alot to impress you.

 

[Alexander Nikishin]

I finally got to see Che (1 & 2) in a double header at the Nuart in LA. This was the same theater that showed the first RED 4k screening some 3 years ago where they had an SXRD 4k projector so i'm assuming that Che was presented the same way (Aside from the Argentine (Part 1 of Che) which was 2k due to the anamorphic lensing choice that SS made.

I personally though that The Argentine looked a bit too soft for my taste. The anamorphic cut in resolution left me seeing the film in what looked to be a constant state of classic soft diffusion. It also didn't help that SS chose to shoot The Argentine portion of the film in seemingly all available light.

I felt as though Benicio's performance was truly left in the dark because you hardly got to see his facial expressions in the first half of the film.

The second half of Che (Guerilla) was shot in full 4k with spherical lenses. As soon as Guerilla popped on the screen after the intermission concluding The Argentine, I was in awe with the beauty of what RED can do once more. The images were crisp, clean, the overly contrasty phase of the film was finished, SS brought in some light finally and it was a beauty!

The camera handled all situations well with an abundance of breath taking shots including many sweeping landscapes, lush green jungles, beautiful old towns, and great action packed gun battles.

Overall, the film has left me loving 4k and it's crisp, smooth, clean look. This camera is a champ and a half.

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

The trailer is massively compressed compared to the final footage I've seen.

And poorly compressed, I think that even I can do better. :detective2:

 

[Bill Totolo]

I just wanted to introduce myself and acknowledge this as my first post here on the Reduser forum. I wanted to wait until a full length feature shot on the Red was released before I sounded off.

From the sounds of it, it looks like we saw, pretty much, the same film.

Part one was a little soft for my taste, while I found part two incredibly crisp.

I was impressed at RED's abilities to dig into the shadows. The highlights burned out in a way that reminds me of shooting with a DSLR. I wanted to grab the "recovery" slider and dial in some detail. But that's to be expected.

For a movie shot in a digital format I think the RED performed very well.

BTW, did anyone notice how often SS embraced having some dirt on his lens? Being a consummate filmmaker I have to believe this was a conscious decision or maybe just a happy accident. Either way, I like the texture it added to the film. NOTE-this is not a knock on the a.c. Just acknowledging creativity.

Cheers,

 

[Julio Quintana]

I also really disliked the softness of 2k in the first film. 4k looked fantastic, but it definitely confirmed my devotion to the zebra stripes. I much prefer noise in the shadows over electronic white spots in the sky.

 

[András Puiz]

I was looking forward to seeing a film shot on RED. So finally I got to see the first Che movie. (The second part isn't playing yet in my area.) After all the hype I'd heard ("as good as or better than film"), I must say I was disappointed.

There was a really unacceptable amount of purple fringing, and somehow the image looked oversharpened. It had a very "digital video" look to it, reminding me of my decade-old Digital-8 footage at times.

In low-light conditions, however, the image was superb. I would say that it was close to film quality. But overall, I don't think it could be mistaken for film. I'm a bit puzzled by how everyone heaps praise on the technology. I saw The Argentine and Benjamin Button a few days apart, and the latter just looked so much better.

Is it Soderbergh's weird cinematography techniques? Is it issues with the early firmware version and the prototype camera?

I mean, I know RED is the future... But is it the future as in, say, 2014, or as in 2009?

Is this thing ready, or still just a promise?

 

[Julio Quintana]

This is like watching "Traffic" and feeling disappointed in film. The look of Che was clearly a stylistic choice.

 

[Esteban Sosnitsky]

Is it Soderbergh's weird cinematography techniques? Is it issues with the early firmware version and the prototype camera?

I mean, I know RED is the future... But is it the future as in, say, 2014, or as in 2009?

Is this thing ready, or still just a promise?

I believe it was the prototype they used on those movies what makes the look plus the innovative style SS puts to his films. For me the future is now, we wrapped a feature a couple of months ago and I took it all the way to projection on a film theater. It looked awesome. Just like film. I wouldnt say better or worse, I just got the feeling that I was seeing something really nice. Che movie was shot almost a couple of years ago, I would say that when they shot it they said, RED is the future. And today a couple of years later it is. The RED one can do almost everything at the palm of a trained hand. I am more impressed everyday with its results. Maybe take a look at the shot on red section of this forum and you will see that most of it looks damn nice. No matter you see it on a tiny monitor screen, I got into the task of analizing the spectrum of possibiliies of that going to film and the advantage is gigantic.
Its just an awesome camera. Above all SS told the story of CHE the best he could and he succeeded...

 

[Emiliano Ranzani]

I am a lil' late to talk about CHE, but the movie (the 1st part) was released here in Italy only on the 1st of April and I got the chance to see it only today (the 2nd half will hit the spaghetti screens on April the 30th). I went there with a colleague of mine, both curious to see how the Red would've performed on full feature film-out (actually, this was the first time I ever saw it in action on the big screen).

The image was a tad too noisy at times, especially when it came to wide exterior shots (mostly jungles stuff - even though you could clearly spot high level of noise in some shots of the last act, during the urban guerrilla) and there were some blown out windows that eventually bothered me a little.

But I have to say, on the whole, the Red performed very well - almost excellently I must say. When I saw APOCALYPTO, I didn't even know it was digitally-lensed, but I immediatly got it in the very first seconds because of some skin-tones - CHE didn't feel like a digital picture, despite some minor defects: the images were very film-like. And, considering it was shot with pre-production cameras and software, it is a promise of good things to come.