ARRI Alexa joins RED to kill celluloid in 2010
 

From:
ARRI Alexa joins RED to kill celluloid in 2010 -- Engadget

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Got 50k to spend big daddy? Good, then meet Alexa from ARRI, a German company founded in 1917 that just happens to be the world's largest motion picture equipment manufacturer. Alexa is ARRI's answer to the RED ONE digital, so don't be held captive by your consumer-based experience of what a camera is or what it should look like. ARRI has a trio of cams slated for release in 2010 offering a 3.5k pixel count, 800+ El equivalent sensitivity, 1 to 60fps frame rate, electronic viewfinder and on-board HD recording. The A-EV Plus model adds uncompressed on-board recording and wireless remote control to the 16:9 aspect ratio shooting A-EV. The A-OV Plus switches things up to a 4:3 aspect and adds an optical viewfinder to the mix. The rest of the details will arrive during an April 6th launch event where ARRI will reveal the complete media, format, and what's promised to be a "super fast workflow."

Until then, check a side-by-side test done by the cats over at Animation World Network pitting a prototype Alexa against a RED One equipped with a new MysteriumX sensor and software. AWN was so enthusiastic by the results of the two cams that it proclaimed, "2010 is the year that celluloid died." Jim Jannard, RED CEO, graciously responded to the test by saying, "We had expected the images to be very similar and it appears that this test confirms that." He then added the following:

"We have believed, since IBC last year, that these two platforms would be the ones standing for the future. We are very proud to be in such good company. But for the moment, we tip our hats to Arri."

Me likey!

Now, where did I put that winning Lotto ticket...

Thanks for sharing.

Arri actually announced this a few months ago at IBC 09, but I couldn't find a single mention on dvinfo so just had to post this article!

There's a small thread on 2k digital cinema

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/hd-uhd-2...meras-ibc.html

I imagine film will continue for some time yet because it does it does have its own look and people like working with it, although much less in budget driven TV.

http://www.awn.com/blogs/tracking-ma...mx-camera-test

Here's video description of the Alexa;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEGkX...eature=related

Although kodak themselves stated that by 2020 they can't see a real viable market for film. That is not to say that it won't exist, as you say it has a look and people like working with it. But cost is just a major factor these days.

I expect film will come down to a specialist manufacturer. perhaps more likely Fuji, since the current Kodak range seems to be trying to be more HD look alike than distinctive. Above a certain budget level the film stock costs become an increasingly lower percentage of the production costs. Although, being also a creative medium with many egos and changing fashions, people wanting to have something that seems to be outside the sausage factory of TV may very well shoot on film, even on lower budgets. At the moment, Super 16 seems to be the format that's suffering more than 35mm, although I know of at least one short film that is being shot on Super 16.

Here's a more in depth post-

Out Of The Dark Ages|HD User Magazine

I'm not quite so sure that celluloid "needs killing." However, people have been proclaiming "film is dead" since long before this, and will most likely keep feeling the need to proclaim it (as if, like this test, they're the first ones ever to make such an announcement) for quite some time to come.

I have to agree, it's been awhile since people have been announcing the death of film. But there is some legitimacy in the recent claims. Since many films are shot and scanned at 2K for digital intermediates anyway (and 4K for bigger budget films), and with the increasing range and latitude of these digital cinema cameras, the aesthetic gap may no longer exist. Even if the budget has no relevance (which it almost always will), many DPs will choose the new digital format over film for creative reasons as well as its technical benefits.

I agree that film is dying as a distribution format, but certainly not for acquisition.

If you are talking about DP's who have shot plenty of film (as opposed to less experienced ones that haven't), I think you would find that given the choice of shooting either film or digital, unless the project itself dictated a specific look that pointed towards digital, the vast majority would still prefer to shoot film if given the choice.

Just had a meeting this week with a DP about shooting a trailer for a feature. With two 35mm cameras, one super 16 Aaton, and the XLH1 available (with a mini-35adapter) - guess what we'll be shooting with?

Yup, 35mm.

(As a side note, in the course of my career, I've seen the advent and near-DEATH of tape as an acquisition format - and film is still being used.)

Which is heavier? 50 pounds of lead, or 50 pounds of cotton? Who wouldn't choose 35mm over super16 or SD video? Question is would you choose 13.5 stops of latitude of film vs 13.5 stops of latitude of digital?

Charles, I think the real reason why DPs with a lot of film experience choose film is simply because digital that rivals film have not existed, perhaps till now (or when these cameras get released). Panavision finally got their butt in gear (with digital) because their rental business was way down due to productions that foregone 35mm in favor of the RED. Initially, productions did it for the bang-for-the-buck equation. But it won't be long where digital will be the medium of choice. Budget aside, the reason I believe this to be true is because digital will allow more flexibility, more types of "looks" and creative choices due to the inclusion & consideration of the post-production process as part of the production process.

Well, I'm going to disagree with just about all of this, I'm afraid.

It's not about quantifiable stops of latitude, it's about the look.

Panavision has been pioneering digital production since they partnered with Sony thirteen years ago to produce the camera systems for "Phantom Menace". (One could argue that they dipped their toes in the water back in the 80's with the Panacam). More recently, the Genesis has been an extremely successful camera that predated RED by a few years. I think perhaps it is more accurate to describe Arri as "getting their butt in gear" with digital acquisition, because in comparison they were dragging their heels while continuing to introduce film cameras. With the forthcoming Alexa (which bears a passing resemblance to R1) they have really gotten in the game.

While there are definite advantages to shooting digitally, the majority of DP's still feel that skin tones are more pleasingly rendered in film, and that film has a "magic" quality that digital simply does not. We are still wrestling with cable tethers and a myriad of boxes all over the cameras, whereas film cameras can, if desired, be remarkably simply dressed in comparison. It's sort of impossible these days to separate budgetary concerns from artistic, but in a theoretical/dream situation where this was not on the table, I will stand firm that the majority of DP's who have been working for a while would still opt to shoot film more often than not, mostly for the look.

Regarding the advantages in post, the DI process for film is well-established and offers all of the possibilities that one can achieve with the same process on digitally acquired footage. Raw digital acquisition still doesn't have the ability to capture more than film.

Much of this will likely change in the next few years, as digital moves past the various benchmarks of film in terms of speed and latitude, and improvement in color rendition. Because technology is moving so quickly, it may be hard to ever reach a place where the camera systems are properly streamlined (as soon as we figure out one system, another one pops up that changes everything once again). And 3D is throwing a good old wrench in the works.

Ultimately, this will be an academic discussion for the most part as the economic pressure to shoot digitally will come to bear on all but the most powerful directors and DP's (although, ironically enough, more indies are able to shoot film now thanks to cutthroat deals on camera packages and lab work). But in terms of pure aesthetic, film still has a lot of fans.

Having watched a digitally projected feature shot on digital last night I must say there was still a way to go in creating the rich look of film. As someone mentioned in another forum acrylics and oil paint - both are used as painting media.

I just wanted to make a general comment that the "feel of film" or its "rich look" did not happen overnight.

And to make the further distinction that there are two types of film: Color and Black & White.

Ever see any of the really early Technicolor films from 1930s Hollywood? Did they give "pleasing or realistic skin tones"? Not for some years. The point is that it had to be worked on and improved - constantly - before it got to a state of aesthetic maturity. Technicolor used to send its representative to the sets of the major Hollywood movies just to make sure that the technology was being implemented correctly and that constant improvements were being made (although she would later clash with Directors and DPs who wanted to take the look of the movie along their own artistic vision rather than her purpose of "showing how good Technicolor can look"). My personal benchmark of when color film (Technicolor) reached full maturity and I'm 100% happy looking at it is Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" (1959). There were many significant milestones before that (such as "The Red Shoes") but nothing I was 100% happy with. So, it took a good 25 years or so (in my view) for color film to reach full maturity.

And what did color film eventually push aside? Black and white had reached an incredibly high aesthetic level by the 1940s, with all of those film noirs, not to mention the classic "Warner Brothers look". (A lot of that has to do with great art direction too.)

Just as Spielberg and Tarantino disdain using digital today, so did some top-line directors and DPs rail against shooting in anything other than Black and White. And purely for aesthetic reasons. The great Billy Wilder shot B&W exclusively until 1963, made one in colour and then promptly went back to B&W. Only in the 1970s did Billy fully switch to color (I suspect due to investors' pressure). But Billy was one of the great noir directors and got sensational results with B&W. So that was entirely understandable.

I guess all I'm saying is that I see a great deal of analogy between the "B&W/Color" phase and the current "Film/UHD" phase. And that the current aesthetic qualities of color film which are now treasured by DPs were not present when it first started. It took years of hard work and constant improvements to get there.

That's what I like about the RED company. They've got no illusions about what they've still got to do and so they're doing it. And now that Arri has joined the party in a serious way, I'm sure that digital acquisition will continue to rapidly improve towards its full aesthetic maturity. It might still take a few years, but it will happen.

Purely my two-cents-worth.

EDIT: Oops. I just remembered that Wilder did "The Seven Year Itch" with Monroe in color in the mid 50s.

The reason many still prefer film is that digital looks like the real world while film glorifies it now as always, me i dont mind the real world.

Film is all about making it look better than real -- as in the Technicolor masterpiece NXNW that David points out above.

That's a great argument David, very original and I appreciate your adding it. It's ironic that it has taken the DI and digital restoration process to return many of the early color films back to their original glory, possibly improving the skin tones beyond how they were originally presented!

Martyn, I think you are right in that film glorifies to an extent, but I would say that if digital was truly able to present things realistically, that would be a best-case scenario. There are still a lot of examples of plastic or waxy-looking skin tones produced even by the best of our current cameras. High-resolution images seem to magnify every wrinkle and pore in a way and present them straight-up, while our own "high-res capture system" (i.e. our eyes/brain combo) doesn't necessarily register that information.

Consider it this way: if you have a crush on a young lady, you may tend to overlook the fact that she was out late last night and has a few bags under her eyes, or the beginnings of crow's feet, etc. If a director wants us to have a crush on his leading lady in a romantic comedy, being that we don't have an automatic attachment to her, it's best if we don't represent the actresses' flaws but present an idealized version of her so we see her as the romantic interest sees her. It's as much a part of filmmaking as editing or scoring or whatever results in creating a mood. Certainly the choice can be to show the character warts-and-all, but that's a different kind of movie. Plenty of films have been made on 35mm that accentuate the "real" look of the actors (21 Grams comes to mind) to prove that film is more than capable of this.

When "ER" switched from 35mm to RED for the last few episodes of its run, I thought it looked remarkably similar except for the occasional plastic-looking rendition of skin tones. This sort of thing is a work in progress of course--I look forward to seeing more footage of Mysterium-X to see how this may have improved. We're getting there.

The new M X sensor and Alexa look extremely interesting.

Film can also make the world look extremely gritty, while digital can look very clinical. Again, this is something that will be developed and I suspect much depends on how the images are handled in post. The whole process effects how the image looks, which seems to include if it's a print or digital projection.

The picture on the B & W CRT V/F often looks better than the rather boring colour version on the monitor.

Sure, it's always about the look, as it should be. But if you have more quantifiable stops of latitude and dynamic range, you're naturally going to have more "look" options.

Charles your an author for sure,i cant argue with you but i have to say most of the HD tv
material is filmed digitaly over here and most of it looks realy good.

I agree Martyn, I've seen plenty of great-looking HD (like to think I've shot some myself)!
Sometimes, though, things go a little awry.

Insung, not quite following your point on this--you initially presented it as "Question is would you choose 13.5 stops of latitude of film vs 13.5 stops of latitude of digital?". My response was based on this theoretical argument, which isn't yet true.

Once digital supersedes the range of film, it will be interesting to see what is chosen. For studio work where the values are entirely controllable, extended latitude isn't as much of an advantage as it would be when shooting in daylight.

Bottom line is that for many DP's, how a face is rendered tonally, texturally and emotionally is a high priority, as it should be. This is not something that can be quantified numerically, it's pure feel and subjectivity. And most still feel that film is superior in this regard.

Yes Charles once again i cant argue, but as has been said film has improved a lot and digital can only improve as well,watching a 70/80/s tv series being shown on a channel here at present shows how film has improved,in those days outdoor shots were done with 16m film and the indoor ones with tube video cameras,the difference is very noticable with the indoor parts being cleaner and a lot sharper also better colour IMO,i know in the cinema world 35mm
is another league.

Martyn:

Most of what you were seeing with that classic BBC look was a function of the telecine being used. As the pickups improved over the years and with the introduction of the flying spot scanner, the look of film for television improved significantly. So ironically, it was the video technology used to transfer film that made the video look better!

If you look at some of the early Super16 features that were made in those days, especially ones that have been transferred to HD in modern days, I think you'd see a very different looking image than in the old-school telecines.

If you run those old film inserts through a modern telecine it's surprising how good they are.

the video on the programns is vastly superior though.And telecine from old 35mm is better, and i have yet to see any good standard 16 mm transfer,i used it briefly 30 years ago and despite paying for top quality transfers the quality is not in HDV class.

Often shot with EMI 2001 cameras. Interesting in that they had 4 tubes - a luminance channel as well the 3 colours. These cameras were used well into the 1980s on "Eastenders".

The film on these shows is the old telecine transfer using a TV contrast print. For about the last 20 years they've done the transfer using the negative. Yes, there is a jar between the two media, however, any superiority often depended on the story being told and who the film cameraman* was. You could have some great location work and then cut to some very visually bland studio scenes. The film chain has improved immensely in the last 30 years, although in raw resolution terms standard 16mm is probably pretty similar to HDV.

It would've been better to keep to one medium or the other. However, telecines have improved immensely from that period, so they never really got the best out of the film. They also used a lot of edge enhancement on the video during that period.

*This being the BBC term for a DP at the time.

Martyn--I would suggest that you may have seen examples 16mm-originated modern television shows and not been aware of it. For at least the past 10 years, it hasn't been easy to spot (due to grain reduction, improved stocks and transfer technology). It's been a few years since I worked on any but back in the day, I did "Scrubs"and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and I recall that "Sex in the City" was shot on Super16. In the feature realm, "The Hurt Locker" is a recent credit and there have been quite a few along the way that have been a surprise to me when I learn about them ("Leaving Las Vegas" for one).

Charles i know super 16 is far better than standard 16 which i have yet to see make good transfer, if there are any i would like to see.
Bryan have a look at all creatures great and small on freeview 12, telecine must have been pretty bad if it is the sole reason for the vastly superior video filmed sections.Onother point recent programns showing peter sellers 16mm would have surely been telecined as good as possible.

I see, didn't realize we were comparing standard 16mm to Super16. It's a bit of a dual-edged sword though--at this point no-one would shoot standard 16 unless for an effect, so that footage is all going to be both shot on older, inferior film stocks and having suffered a bit of aging. Thus a modern retransfer would still be showing the age of the material.

Well anyway, let's get this one back on track. I for one am looking forward to seeing and using Alexa!

charles good luck i will never get the chance.

(insert sad-faced emoticon here)

Telecines have improved a lot since the days of "All Creatures Great and Small", as have the film stocks. A editor friend did a telecine of an old BBC drama film insert from around that period to be inserted into a new series of a drama and there was a big improvement over the old TK of that film.

The Peter Sellers film could be Kodachrome, which is a projection contrast stock and that gives problems in shadow detail. It was an issue with the reversal stocks that were used for shooting news and current affairs, plus the lower budget programmes.

Some how this location film cutting to studio video always seems more blunt on the comedy programmes. Ideally they should be one or the other, but reality in the days of 2" Quad VTRs. plus having large expensive TV studios, which to be utilized, meant mixing the two mediums. In the 1980's, there was the option of shooting on a portable 1" VTR, although editing costs would've been high, since you could only do an on-line edit. In the end, this would've come down to economics, they used to reuse the Quad VTR tapes and many programmes were lost over the years.

This thread got me thinking about how or what makes film look better or more magic to
the human eye, and how ARRI's new camera could put it over the edge.
Breaking it down to the microscopic, is it that film which uses layers of
silver halide salt crystals which are 3 dimensional cubic in shape and blend the colors in
emulsion layers, compared to digital pixels which are flat and blend the
colors on their edges? Does the ARRI utilize a different type of pixel,
octagonal or 3 dimensional in shape?
I looked around but couldn't find any specs on the ARRI's 'newly developed CMOS sensor'.

Here's Rodney Charters (24) talking about the Alexa.


The two frame thing at the beginning refers to the dual gain architecture of the sensor, not HDR.

Let me chime in as an upcoming Producer/DP from the new generation. I have never worked with film, ever, turned down every 35 job that came my way. Bear that in mind when evaluating these comments.

The choice was absolutely not one of aesthetics or any flavor of picture quality, but one of workflow. What I see in digital acquisition is a revolution of process that cuts labor, time, and inevitably, people, out of the equation. Smaller cameras, smaller lights, smaller crew, and a little CGI set extension means a much lower budget for a comparable product. I know that at the top of the game, for the big hollywood features, equipment budget maybe isn't an issue. But here in the middle, if I cut 20% of the budget without cutting 20% of the final product, that goes to the bottom line.

While I respect and appreciate RED for fueling the fire of digital cinema, I have yet to enjoy any experience with the RED One. I find the workflow extremely cumbersome, especially the buggy post-production. Picture quality typically comes down to lenses and lighting; the RED or any other high end camera is not going to magically add production value just by mere presence. Those cameras can fight for whatever 3K 4K 19K moniker they want, but I have yet to work on a project where raw resolution was the bottleneck.

What I'm really trying to say is that digital acquisition has found its place in the new workflows. Film cameras will persist where the old process prevails, and that's in most studio features. Once the digital distribution process becomes more streamlined, I think you'll see film acquisition start to step out of the light, but we're talking at least a decade in this country.

Interestingly enough, other countries such as China and India that are just now getting theaters are getting them in the all-digital flavor. And the bulk of film revenue comes from international small-screen sales and other non-theater income. Suffice to say, the industry is in flux. Of course, content is (and always will be) king.

With the 35mm sensor cameras the crew size stays pretty much the same as with 35mm film cameras. Even with 35mm film you could go off and shoot material on your own. Any savings are in film stock and the lab costs, although other costs may come into the equation, which may off set these savings.

The RAW workflows are different to traditional video workflows and they tend be more time consuming with the rendering. I suspect this is why HDCAM SR will continue to be used and this is an option with the Alexa.

I wouldn't throw out time just for the sake of it; thinking time one of the important creative elements and is often lost when working on a production, resulting in people tending to fall back onto how they've always done something.

Looks like the Alexa will be offering ProRes 4:2:2 and 4:4:4.

ARRI Alexa Camera: Digital Cinematic Bliss | Gizmodo Australia

The brochure for anyone interested.

http://www.arridigital.com/sites/def...20Brochure.pdf

Seems it's modular, but going about it in a different way to RED.