Zacuto Great Camera Shootout - and free parking!

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Steve I find it curious that you attack Reduser members but praise Jim Jannard when it was Jim that posted the most absurd attack on your film of anyone:

This "test" was a crime... as expected.

Jim

Your film though proclaims to do one thing while doing another. If the goal was to see how different DPs light a scene then why did you include dumb 'rules' to make it into some sort of game-show challenge? Give the DPs a blank canvas and a repeatable scene if that's your goal. By forcing the DPs to keep certain lights in the scene we aren't seeing a "Creative" test, we're just seeing a badly administered empirical test--but with a cop-out excuse that it's not the real 'test'. It's close enough to being a test that it's camera test. But it's divergent enough that its results are meaningless.

Mostly I'm disappointed though that you've sunk to the same level of whininess as those you accuse of being whiners.

[Ash Worth]

Gavin, your post is just more evidence that you can't win against the RED army.
Thankfully 'winning' doesn't necessarily equate to beautiful imagery from todays cameras.

Take off the RED blinkers and you will see that the best part of Steve's doc was the interviews...
Shot with a 10 year old Varicam at 720P. WTF. If only they had shot Wexler at 5k. Idiots.

You just don't get it. And this thread mirrors somewhat the message of the film.
No one cares about your camera. What's left is you. And do you want to be like Steve and all the folks behind that film who all work together towards a common goal or do you want to be the guy standing on the sidelines muttering 'well this is just line skipping bulls**t'?

I know who I would rather work with.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Gavin, your post is just more evidence that you can't win against the RED army.
Thankfully 'winning' doesn't necessarily equate to beautiful imagery from todays cameras.

Take off the RED blinkers and you will see that the best part of Steve's doc was the interviews...
Shot with a 10 year old Varicam at 720P. WTF. If only they had shot Wexler at 5k. Idiots.

You just don't get it. And this thread mirrors somewhat the message of the film.
No one cares about your camera. What's left is you. And do you want to be like Steve and all the folks behind that film who all work together towards a common goal or do you want to be the guy standing on the sidelines muttering 'well this is just line skipping bulls**t'?

I know who I would rather work with.

Lol I'm not even defending Red, in fact I attack Red and you're attacking me for being a RED drone. Talk about blinders. It's possible that there can be people who think *both* RED is being overly defensive *and* the part 1 test is stupid. People don't have to necessarily be for one or the other.

[Rehan K]

Mostly I'm disappointed though that you've sunk to the same level of whininess as those you accuse of being whiners.

Steve posts have been balanced and rational, while red fans have been hostile, whiny, with tons of conspiracy theories thrown it. I do hope that in part 2 and part 3 we get to see some empirical tests with the same lighting for all cameras. That will just confirm that even cheaper cameras (like F3 and C300) can make just as good images as more expensive cameras (epic, F65 and Alexa). When red fans encounter this fact, they resort to "4K" party line, even though almost nothing is released in 4K and almost no one owns a 4K monitor and TV. In any case, the "4K" argument is going away soon anyway, as the market will be flooded with cheap 4K cameras within the next 2 years. As I said with faster memory cards and sensors, the only thing that the manufacturer would have to do is some software changes, and there the 20 MP still DSLRs now does "4K" videos too.

[Peter Moretti]

Steve,

You coming by here and standing in the "fire" shows a lot of class.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Steve posts have been balanced and rational, while red fans have been hostile, whiny, with tons of conspiracy theories thrown it.

No Steve has lumped in every single person in this forum under one umbrella. Which isn't warranted or appreciated. Yes there are some red trolls here. And yes they are giving him undue grief. But to imply that they represent the totality of REDuser or even the majority is wrong. Instead of elevating the discussion it's just ratcheted up the personal attacks.

[Scott Crawley]

Gavin, I think you may be confusing Steve with a couple of others, but it would be great if we could all back off of the rhetoric and personal confrontations.

[António Fagundes]

Martin Weiss, a moderator in this forum, has just made a ridiculous unfair and passive agressive comment regarding Steve's posts here. How's that for intelligence and welcoming manners?

Shame that with so many smart and polite people here, others keep deconstructing what could well be the finest cinematography forum on the web. When moderators themselves heat up to confrontations, well, it's hard you know, and it's sad.

[Rob Ruffo]

Gavin, your post is just more evidence that you can't win against the RED army.
Thankfully 'winning' doesn't necessarily equate to beautiful imagery from todays cameras.

Take off the RED blinkers and you will see that the best part of Steve's doc was the interviews...
Shot with a 10 year old Varicam at 720P. WTF. If only they had shot Wexler at 5k. Idiots.

You just don't get it. And this thread mirrors somewhat the message of the film.
No one cares about your camera. What's left is you. And do you want to be like Steve and all the folks behind that film who all work together towards a common goal or do you want to be the guy standing on the sidelines muttering 'well this is just line skipping bulls**t'?

I know who I would rather work with.

So do I. Someone who has mastered the art and craft, and ALSO makes intelligent tool choices that will not potentially jeopardize the project. This whole "it's all about the art" nonesense irritates me to no end - it's about the art, the tech, all of it, together. If you suck at one or the other, you may as well suck at both.

Cinematography is not some hippie spoken word contest.

Bad tech choices can waste time and money and throw a whole show under a bus.

Line skipping, skew, all that takes away form the visual impact of any given work. Maybe you think these things are not important - I disagree and so do audiences, if you actually look up market research about them.

And then there are simple practical considerations -Like maybe you think the weight of a camera is not important - well as someone who uses Steadicam ops a lot, I disagree with that too. A heavy camera can mean you don't get that third take that would have had the best acting. Maybe you think Raw is not important - again, there are times when having to futz with gammas and so on will make you miss a shot. How is missing a shot not important, even if you are the mythical master craftman who does not need good technology to create beautiful work, who can create something better looking than Avatar with just a pair of VHS cameras, that you allude to.

Besides... THIS IS A TECH FORUM FOR LEARNING ABOUT TECH. That's why we talk about tech here. Should it never be discussed, anywhere?

[Rob Ruffo]

Not being able to tell which camera is stupid. I hear this all the time in vfx.

"You can't tell what's rendered in Maya or Max so why does it matter!?"

Because it ignores how easy it was to achieve that result--and what creative choices were limited by the tool selected. You could get RED and Film to look quite a bit a like. But it's going to take a LOT more work to get Red to look like film than to just film. Conversely if you want to review dailies, it's going to be a LOT more difficult to get the film processed and telecined by the end of the day. Process is as important as output since a good process can limit the time you have to spend on output. With enough time someone could build a house with a spoon but having saws, nails and such let you work fast enough to take on more ambitious projects. Similarly I get really bad green screen footage all the time but I bust my ass and make it look good--that doesn't mean it was shot well, that's a testament to the compositor's talent not the quality of the shoot. Conversely someone can get great footage and screw it up in post. But it's a lot harder to screw up good footage than bad footage so it's always good to capture a good image.

The same can be argued for or against RED. I'm not taking a side on whether that's a pro-red statement or an anti-red statement.

As to this Zacuto shootout... I think all the cameras look like shit. So I don't really care if they look "Similar". Yeah they all look about the same--like a badly shot 90s porno for cinemax. But there are a number of cameras in there that do look shittier.

Very well put, very good points.