Zacuto's "The great camera shootout 2011"

[Tom.Wong]

The Great Camera Shootout will first come out on the Zacuto Website, streamed, I know it's not for everyone, but it's for some. I'm sure we are going to be scrambling to just get it done and out. Then within a few weeks we should be able, with your help to figure out this bittorrent jazz. I know we have never done it before but I'm willing.

Sounds great Steve! Happy shooting, can't wait to see the results. PM me whenever you wanna kick start sharing this thing as downloads. The industry has been needing this kind of public shootout for a long time

 

[Peter Moretti]

Good question Jim,
I don't really know. As I stated, I didn't perform the test, Bob and his crew did, but I will ask. My guess is that they didn't use that filter but I will check. To remove myself and Zacuto from the test I am just making a documentary on how the test was done, include the test results and experts reaction to the test for web use.

As far as where and how we will be presenting the tests besides the internet that is still undetermined. We are going to find a venue in LA where we can have people come in and see the results hopefully in 4K. I will definitely be creating a dark theater in my booth and trying to get a 4K projector but might only end up with a 2K, we are trying to work out these details right now.

Again, I think filmmakers need to understand that these tests are interesting and fun to watch, the differences are slight but content is always king. Hell, I used an EX3 to do my documentary GCS2011 because it had XLR inputs for my boom, was light and could get me into tight spaces fast. Another important feature since we were completely handheld was that the EX3 has the flip up eyepiece and that allows a director to quickly see framing on a shot and I like that because getting my eye in the viewfinder while we are running and gunning is difficult and annoying for the operator. In this particular job it was more important to get the moments and I was willing to sacrifice quality to do that. It was the right camera for this job.

One other point to someone else's comment about the results of the 2010 test. The comment was that it was heavy laden in DSLR experts. The cast was Bob Primes ASC, Gary Adcock, Ryan Emerson, Philip Bloom, Jens & myself, plus all of the viewers like Stephen Goldblatt ASC, Shane Hurlbut ASC and many more. But of that core group really only Shane and Phil were diehard DSLR fans. I had actually never really used one. We all said film obviously looked better then DSLR's (except in extreme lowlight) but if you don't have the budget for film, a DSLR is a good option. I actually said I would shoot my film on film as I have for most of my career.
Steve

Steve,

Ever since the release of the Sony F900, it's been possible, under certain circumstances and with the proper talent working as DP and in post, to pull keys from digital or make it look close to film. Heck, even a Canon HV-20 (which records HDV) shooting at f4.0 a deep focus, low contrast, well lit composition can look very good.

I enjoyed the shootout, but it left me with two very distinct impressions. 1) The Nikon D3s is the low light king (which I did not know). 2) Given the best people in post production, digital footage can be made to look very good (which I think we all already knew).

So I hope this latest shootout differentiates what is added in post from what actually comes out of the camera.

But thanks much for all your hard work.

 

[AnthonyFlores]

Anthony,

don't worry, I'm still alive and not banned.

If I would get Epic today then you'll be sure I will be daily posting about my experiments

but of course don't have it and in that case must find alternative "toys" to play with during that pretty long waiting time for much better toy like...

Hope you can understand me now better.

Also about G*2 you can follow me on Vimeo and dvxuser to read and see my latest experiments there...

Great Sanjin, I understand and I will follow you over on those other sites -- actually I think it's a cool little cam and my brother will be getting one soon. Also, I know you are just as excited about the Epic as anyone else here and can't wait for your many tests and experiments with it, especially using Leica lenses :emote_popcorn: Thanks and happy shooting my friend ....

 

[Jay Gannon]

The Great Camera Shootout will first come out on the Zacuto Website, streamed, I know it's not for everyone, but it's for some. I'm sure we are going to be scrambling to just get it done and out. Then within a few weeks we should be able, with your help to figure out this bittorrent jazz. I know we have never done it before but I'm willing.

I hope the streaming will be much better than last year, hundreds of people had issues with it last year Steve.

 

[David Lawlor]

I hope the streaming will be much better than last year, hundreds of people had issues with it last year Steve.

Hi Jay, I thought I would jump in at this point, I run the website/IT side of Zacuto and I am better prepared to answer these questions than Steve is.

Last year I was taken by surprise the amount of people that hit the site on launch day and I was forced in a 3 hour span that day to move our already pretty high end for a web server to a cloud service that scaled to 12 CPUs and 48GB RAM. We were already using Edgecast CDN which has download locations in 16 cities worldwide so the issue with the site going down was the DB being nailed repeatedly by visitors just trying to view the show, once they got to the page the CDN took over and they were able to watch.

This year Ill have a cache solution in place for Wordpress for that page at least and scale the web server to the highest available. (I have thought about doing a farm but our normal loads do not justify it).

I know a big complaint was the flash version, I am currently testing a HTML5 compliant player that has fallback to flash which will allow us to use a better codec to stream and will also try to offer higher HD versions of the playback files for those that have the pipes to support them. This is difficult because the HTML5 is still not an adopted standard and even mainstream browsers lack support, but I am trying to achieve a good balance to accommodate visitors in the formats they prefer.

As someone else mentioned earlier about bit torrent, I am not against a torrent, but that would only be available when we release it to 3rd party sites which is usually 2 to 3 weeks after initial release.

So as you can see we took the problems we had last year very seriously and I am trying to make sure we do not experience the same when this series launches.

Dave

 

[Michael Brennan]

Thread drift

Thread drift

Steve,

Ever since the release of the Sony F900, it's been possible, under certain circumstances and with the proper talent working as DP and in post,

Even before the f900, the Danish in particular, were using digibeta to shoot movies for transfer to film.
In UK digibeta was used to mimic 16mm film by numerous techniques including removing one interlace frame to make a true progressive image. The UK TV series "Heatbeat" 1992 -2009 started the trend following the success of numerous doc series using the technique which at the time was called "film effect"
Motion judder and film like tonality were more valued than resolution.


RED's 14bit ad and 14 bit recording, thankfully makes this a history lesson


Mike Brennan

 

[AnthonyFlores]

Hi Jay, I thought I would jump in at this point, I run the website/IT side of Zacuto and I am better prepared to answer these questions than Steve is.

Last year I was taken by surprise the amount of people that hit the site on launch day and I was forced in a 3 hour span that day to move our already pretty high end for a web server to a cloud service that scaled to 12 CPUs and 48GB RAM. We were already using Edgecast CDN which has download locations in 16 cities worldwide so the issue with the site going down was the DB being nailed repeatedly by visitors just trying to view the show, once they got to the page the CDN took over and they were able to watch.

This year Ill have a cache solution in place for Wordpress for that page at least and scale the web server to the highest available. (I have thought about doing a farm but our normal loads do not justify it).

I know a big complaint was the flash version, I am currently testing a HTML5 compliant player that has fallback to flash which will allow us to use a better codec to stream and will also try to offer higher HD versions of the playback files for those that have the pipes to support them. This is difficult because the HTML5 is still not an adopted standard and even mainstream browsers lack support, but I am trying to achieve a good balance to accommodate visitors in the formats they prefer.

As someone else mentioned earlier about bit torrent, I am not against a torrent, but that would only be available when we release it to 3rd party sites which is usually 2 to 3 weeks after initial release.

So as you can see we took the problems we had last year very seriously and I am trying to make sure we do not experience the same when this series launches.

Dave

Thanks Dave. Great to have you here and hope you and Steve become regular posters here -- this community rocks and really appreciates people like you

 

[AnthonyFlores]

The Great Camera Shootout will first come out on the Zacuto Website, streamed, I know it's not for everyone, but it's for some. I'm sure we are going to be scrambling to just get it done and out. Then within a few weeks we should be able, with your help to figure out this bittorrent jazz. I know we have never done it before but I'm willing.

Awesome Steve. Thanks again for sharing with the film community, and now here with Red. Hope you'll continue to post here and also, would recommend you include a photo on your profile as a more people will probably recognize you that way

 

[Jay Gannon]

Thanks Dave. Great to have you here and hope you and Steve become regular posters here -- this community rocks and really appreciates people like you

Yup good to hear from both of you Steve and Dave.
Good luck with the project and the launch day!

 

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

Well... RED M-X 4.5K with RC2 and either RLF or RG2 is going to look amazing.

I'd love to see how HDRx compares to the Alexa for instance.

Why do we keep bringing up the GH2??? Why? I've been using one for a few weeks now and all I can say is, "meh...". Any further discussion belongs over at DVXUser...

What's the problem? If they're gonna test Canon DSLRs why not GH2s that are technically superior in some aspects?

 

[Tom.Wong]

As someone else mentioned earlier about bit torrent, I am not against a torrent, but that would only be available when we release it to 3rd party sites which is usually 2 to 3 weeks after initial release.

Dave

i'm sure a few weeks after web release won't be an issue, the point of the matter is to get it out as high quality as possible in a reasonable manner for the community to look at. You guys do your best, and I know it's impossible to make everybody happy. The real way for us to all see this test is to come to where you guys are projecting it and see it with our own eyes. But a high resolution, lightly compressed quicktime will be a good alternative. And I'm first to offer up my bandwidth, and I'm sure a lot of people in this community will be willing to pitch in. Whenever you feel like it's ready, give me a PM, and we'll post for volunteers for bandwidth. Thanks Dave for all your consideration, and to everybody at Zacuto. These are the big guns of the industry and a lot of us want to view this as uncompromised as possible.

 

[David Lawlor]

i'm sure a few weeks after web release won't be an issue, the point of the matter is to get it out as high quality as possible in a reasonable manner for the community to look at. You guys do your best, and I know it's impossible to make everybody happy. The real way for us to all see this test is to come to where you guys are projecting it and see it with our own eyes. But a high resolution, lightly compressed quicktime will be a good alternative. And I'm first to offer up my bandwidth, and I'm sure a lot of people in this community will be willing to pitch in. Whenever you feel like it's ready, give me a PM, and we'll post for volunteers for bandwidth. Thanks Dave for all your consideration, and to everybody at Zacuto. These are the big guns of the industry and a lot of us want to view this as uncompromised as possible.

I was looking through my back analytics and I can tell you that first month of the shootout episode 1 we went through 34TB of data xfer on our CDN and that was with flash encoding. The next few months are even larger but I dont have them broken out for each episode. So for something like that light encoding bit torrent would probably be the best way, so I will definitely recruit some seeders when its time.

Thanks for listening to the IT geekout, sorry so off topic :aureola:
Dave

 

[Tom.Wong]

I was looking through my back analytics and I can tell you that first month of the shootout episode 1 we went through 34TB of data xfer on our CDN and that was with flash encoding. The next few months are even larger but I dont have them broken out for each episode. So for something like that light encoding bit torrent would probably be the best way, so I will definitely recruit some seeders when its time.

Thanks for listening to the IT geekout, sorry so off topic :aureola:
Dave

hehehe we can probably get that 34 tb down with pro res or cineform encoding, and than break it up into parts. Then we find volunteer bandwidth. It's gonna be fun

 

[Peter Moretti]

If someone doesn't have Cineform or ProRes codecs on their computers, can they still watch it?

 

[Tom.Wong]

cineform you just need to install the decoder, free on their website.

pro res you just need quicktime installed. newest version. just to watch

 

[Derek S.]

Just watched vimeo festival and Bloom said that next season of House will be shot on 5D only and Vincet said that 40% of commercials from top5 LA production houses are shot in 5D. So it's good to have these DSLR's on the shootout too since they are wildly used in the professional environment too.

 

[Rick Burnett]

Why do we keep bringing up the GH2??? Why? I've been using one for a few weeks now and all I can say is, "meh...". Any further discussion belongs over at DVXUser...

I can answer this question with this; what people over at DVXuser question is why the Canon 5D/1D and the Nikon D7000 are being included and not the GH2. There are a lot of people who are VERY curious about the quality of the image from the AF100 compared to the GH2. It really has nothing to do with the Red, Arri or Sony cameras because, at least to me, they are in a different category altogether.

I own an AF100, and I am curious to see if I picked up a GH2, if it would be a good B-camera to the AF100. I'd also like to see the GH2 and AF100 pitted against each other to see, other than aliasing/moire/rolling shutter, what signal processing and optical differences there are.

I actually don't even care to see the Red One MX results as much as I'd have loved to see the Epic results, and the Sony F3 results, but at some point, I am sure Zacuto had to just pick a point when the cameras would be available and go with it, or, we'd never have a test.

 

[Jay Gannon]

Just watched vimeo festival and Bloom said that next season of House will be shot on 5D only and Vincet said that 40% of commercials from top5 LA production houses are shot in 5D. So it's good to have these DSLR's on the shootout too since they are wildly used in the professional environment too.

Mr Bloom is a friend but he comes out with plain untrue statements sometimes, House is not being shot on 5D's and maybe 15% of ad campaigns are being shot on 5D's. But this is a RED forum not a DSLR forum so take it to DVXUser guys.