Júlio Taubkin
05-07-2008, 12:34 AM
I'm sure people that are older and more experienced than myself can chime in with more insights, but today I just saw a sequence I graded last week that was captured in the Panasonic HVX200.
I have not been a film professional for a long time, plainly because I have not been a professional for a long time. But I have been a DVXUser (and Now Reduser) reader, and filmaker, ever since the DVX100 was a promise, so, in technology terms, a few generations. When I first got my DVX, we were seeing standard def 24p hit the movie theaters in a lot of documentaries and some fiction films. I was assistant cameraman of a recently released film shot mostly on the DVX100A. That was around 2 years ago, when the option would be to shoot on a Z1.
Anyway, today I looked at the HVX200 images and although they never blew my mind, even when the camera was introduced, they just felt incredibly lame. It wasn't the first time it happened. I still shoot a small segment for a television in Brazil with my DVX and I watched as the great 24p film-like image turned into a mud of grain and completely insane colors that don't match, people whose skin tones are reduced to a monochrome beige blemish (although I see more of that with the HVX200), and resolution that wouldn't fill my telephone screen. At first I thought it was me, getting more experienced, and my tolerances getting lower, the development of a critical eye. Sure, now I see even the technical limitations of 35mm film, when I shoot it, such as lens aberrations, grain, unstable registers (in camera and the much more frequent on the projectors), etc...
But I'm giving up on this theory. We're getting more demanding because of the content we have been facing. I get demo clips from Red over this site, or I just can download a trailer in HD and watch it on my LCD, and even though LCDs are also wicked in terms of color gamut and contrast, they certainly are sharp. So we get incredible video from the internet at qualities that are unmatched in most people's living room.
(I'm in the process of buying a new - small - LCD TV, and boy why every one of them is som crappy! Video looks horrible on them and even digital HDTV broadcasts "Scream" compression)
Anyway, I was very much underpaid in a lot of my first gigs because they were for web, in a time where internet video would look bad anyway, and we could be underequipped and underpaid. I'm surprised to say today, the best looking video feeds I've been getting is online.
And it's where I spend most of my free time. Online, staring at the LCD of my laptop, seeing great looking still images and sometimes crisp HD (or larger than DV) video with compression schemes that are incredibly efficient. (Guess what camera manufacturer understood this logic some 2-3 Years ago)
That makes me see the DVX's images as a blurb of low contrast grain, and the HVX's images as a blurb of high contrast slightly more rectangular grain. I once looked at a PD100 and was surprised it only cost what it did (don't remember, 3 thousand?). And now they are all bricks to be. Sure, Jim Jannard was unhappy with his F900, long ago, and most professional cinematographers were pretty sure (as we all are) that video images (read RGB video) sucked.
Will it ever stop? When we all have our scarlets to blog with and ultra high speed internet to deal with the files (like what, really, next year?!), will we keep playing catch with ourselves? Or by that time, Computer monitors will be so more potent we will be able to see more moire, mosquito noise, grain, unaliased edges, even on 5K images from Epic? When will we reach our own eye's limit? Are we getting close? Can we imagine always something incredibly better in terms of digital images or are we getting near a plateau?
Am I just depressed from just finishing grading a DV documentary I didn't shoot?
What is the meaning of life?
Cheers!
I have not been a film professional for a long time, plainly because I have not been a professional for a long time. But I have been a DVXUser (and Now Reduser) reader, and filmaker, ever since the DVX100 was a promise, so, in technology terms, a few generations. When I first got my DVX, we were seeing standard def 24p hit the movie theaters in a lot of documentaries and some fiction films. I was assistant cameraman of a recently released film shot mostly on the DVX100A. That was around 2 years ago, when the option would be to shoot on a Z1.
Anyway, today I looked at the HVX200 images and although they never blew my mind, even when the camera was introduced, they just felt incredibly lame. It wasn't the first time it happened. I still shoot a small segment for a television in Brazil with my DVX and I watched as the great 24p film-like image turned into a mud of grain and completely insane colors that don't match, people whose skin tones are reduced to a monochrome beige blemish (although I see more of that with the HVX200), and resolution that wouldn't fill my telephone screen. At first I thought it was me, getting more experienced, and my tolerances getting lower, the development of a critical eye. Sure, now I see even the technical limitations of 35mm film, when I shoot it, such as lens aberrations, grain, unstable registers (in camera and the much more frequent on the projectors), etc...
But I'm giving up on this theory. We're getting more demanding because of the content we have been facing. I get demo clips from Red over this site, or I just can download a trailer in HD and watch it on my LCD, and even though LCDs are also wicked in terms of color gamut and contrast, they certainly are sharp. So we get incredible video from the internet at qualities that are unmatched in most people's living room.
(I'm in the process of buying a new - small - LCD TV, and boy why every one of them is som crappy! Video looks horrible on them and even digital HDTV broadcasts "Scream" compression)
Anyway, I was very much underpaid in a lot of my first gigs because they were for web, in a time where internet video would look bad anyway, and we could be underequipped and underpaid. I'm surprised to say today, the best looking video feeds I've been getting is online.
And it's where I spend most of my free time. Online, staring at the LCD of my laptop, seeing great looking still images and sometimes crisp HD (or larger than DV) video with compression schemes that are incredibly efficient. (Guess what camera manufacturer understood this logic some 2-3 Years ago)
That makes me see the DVX's images as a blurb of low contrast grain, and the HVX's images as a blurb of high contrast slightly more rectangular grain. I once looked at a PD100 and was surprised it only cost what it did (don't remember, 3 thousand?). And now they are all bricks to be. Sure, Jim Jannard was unhappy with his F900, long ago, and most professional cinematographers were pretty sure (as we all are) that video images (read RGB video) sucked.
Will it ever stop? When we all have our scarlets to blog with and ultra high speed internet to deal with the files (like what, really, next year?!), will we keep playing catch with ourselves? Or by that time, Computer monitors will be so more potent we will be able to see more moire, mosquito noise, grain, unaliased edges, even on 5K images from Epic? When will we reach our own eye's limit? Are we getting close? Can we imagine always something incredibly better in terms of digital images or are we getting near a plateau?
Am I just depressed from just finishing grading a DV documentary I didn't shoot?
What is the meaning of life?
Cheers!