Impressions of NAB 2023

2023 marks the 100th year of the NAB Convention, which started out as a radio gathering in New York City. This year you could add ribbons to your badges indicating the number of years that you’d attended – 5, 10, etc. My first NAB was 1979 in Dallas, so I proudly displayed the 25+ ribbon. Although I haven’t attended each one in those intervening years, I have attended many and well over 25.

Some have been ready to sound the death knell for large, in-person conventions, thanks to the pandemic and proliferation of online teleconferencing services like Zoom. 2019 was the last pre-covid year with an attendance of 91,500 – down from previous highs of over 100,000. 2022 was the first post-covid NAB and attendance was around 52,400. That was respectable given the climate a year ago. This year’s attendance was over 65,000, so certainly an upward trend. If anything, this represents a pent-up desire to kick the tires in person and hook back up with industry friends from all over the world. My gut feeling is that international attendance is still down, so I would expect future years’ attendance to grow higher.

Breaking down the halls

Like last year, the convention spread over the Central, North, and new West halls. The South hall with its two floors of exhibition space has been closed for renovation. The West hall is a three-story complex with a single, large exhibition floor. It’s an entire convention center in its own right. West hall is connected to the North hall by the sidewalk, an enclosed upstairs walkway, as well as the LVCC Loop (the connecting tunnel that ferries people between buildings in Teslas). From what I hear, next year will be back to the North, Central, and South halls.

As with most NAB conventions, these halls were loosely organized by themes. Location and studio production gear could mostly be found in Central. Post was mainly in the North hall, but next year I would expect it to be back in the South hall. The West hall included a mixture of vendors that fit under connectivity topics, such as streaming, captioning, etc. It also included some of the radio services.

Although the booths covered nearly all of the floor space, it felt to me like many of the big companies were holding back. By that I mean, products with large infrastructure needs (big shared storage systems, large video switchers, huge mixing desks, etc) were absent. Mounting a large booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center – whether that’s for CES or NAB – is quite costly, with many unexpected charges.

Nevertheless, there were still plenty of elaborate camera sets and huge booths, like that of Blackmagic Design. If this was your first year at NAB, the sum of the whole was likely to be overwhelming. However, I’m sure many vendors were still taking a cautious approach. For example, there was no off-site Avid Connect event. There were no large-scale press conferences the day before opening.

The industry consolidates

There has been a lot of industry consolidation over the past decade or two. This has been accelerated thanks to the pandemic. Many venerable names are now part of larger holding companies. For example, Audiotonix owns many large audio brands, including Solid State Logic, DiGiCo, Sound Devices, among others. And they added Harrison to their portfolio, just in time for NAB. The Sennheiser Group owns both Sennheiser and Neumann. Grass Valley, Snell, and Quantel products have all been consolidated by Black Dragon Capital under the Grass Valley brand. Such consolidation was evident through shared booth space. In many cases, the brands retained their individual identities. Unfortunately for Snell and Quantel, those brands have now been completely subsumed by Grass Valley.

A lot of this is a function of the industry tightening up. While there’s a lot more media production these days, there are also many inexpensive solutions to create that media. Therefore, many companies are venturing outside of their traditional lanes. For example. Sennheiser still manufactures great microphone products, but they’ve also developed the AMBEO immersive audio product line. At NAB they demonstrated the AMBEO 2-Channel Spatial Audio renderer. This lets a mixer take surround mixes and/or stems and turn them into 2-channel spatial mixes that are stereo-compatible. The control software allows you to determine the stereo width and amount of surround and LFE signal put into the binaural mix. In the same booth, Neumann was demoing their new KH 120-II near-field studio monitors.

General themes

Overall, I didn’t see any single trend that would point to an overarching theme for the show. AI/ML/Neural Networks were part of many companies’ marketing strategy. Yet, I found nothing that jumped out like the current public fascination with ChatGPT. You have to wonder how much of this is more evolutionary than revolutionary and that the terms themselves are little more than hype.

Stereoscopic production is still around, although I only found one company with product (Stereotec). Virtual sets were aplenty, including a large display by Vu Studios and even a mobile expando trailer by Magicbox for virtual set production on-location. Insta360 was there, but tucked away in the back of Central hall.

Of course, everyone has a big push for “the cloud” in some way, shape, or form. However, if there is any single new trend that seems to be getting manufacturers’ attention, it’s passing video over IP. The usual companies who have dealt in SDI-based video hardware, like AJA, Blackmagic Design, and Matrox, were all showing IP equivalents. Essentially, where you used to send SDI video signals using the uncompressed SDI protocol, you will now use the SMPTE ST 2110 IP protocol to send it through 1GigE networks.

The world of post production

Let me shift to post – specifically Adobe, Avid, and Blackmagic Design. Unlike Blackmagic, neither Avid nor Adobe featured their usual main stage presentations. I didn’t see Apple’s Final Cut Pro anywhere on the floor and only one sighting in the press room. Avid’s booth was a shadow of itself, with only a few smaller demo pods. Their main focus was showing the tighter integration between Media Composer and Pro Tools (finally!). There were no Pro Tools control surfaces to play with. However, in their defense, NAMM 2023 (the large audio and music products exhibition) was held just the week before. Most likely this was a big problem for any audio vendor that exhibits at both shows. NAMM shifts back to January in 2024, which is its historical slot on the calendar.

Uploading media to the cloud for editing has been the mantra at Frame io, which is now under the Adobe wing. They’ve enhanced those features with direct support by Fujifilm (video) and Capture One (photography). In addition, Frame has improved features specific to the still photography market. New to the camera-to-cloud game is also Atomos, which demoed its own cloud-based editor developed by asset management developer Axle ai.

Adobe demoed the new, text-based editing features for Premiere Pro. It’s currently in beta, but will soon be in full release. In my estimation, this is the best text-based method of any of the NLEs. Avid’s script-based editing is optimized for scripted content, but doesn’t automatically generate text. Its strength is in scripted films and TV shows, where the page layout mimics a script supervisor’s lined script.

Adobe’s approach seems better for documentary projects. Text is generated through speech-to-text software within Premiere Pro. That is now processed on your computer instead of in the cloud. When you highlight text in the transcription panel, it automatically marks the in and out points on that source clip. Then, using insert and overwrite commands while the transcription panel is still selected, automatically edit that portion of the source clip to the timeline. Once you shift your focus to the timeline, the transcription panel displays the edited text that corresponds to the clips on the timeline. Rearrange the text and Premiere Pro automatically rearranges the clips on the timeline. Or rearrange the clips and the text follows.

Meanwhile over at Blackmagic Design’s massive booth, the new DaVinci Resolve 18.5 features were on full display. 18.5 is also in beta. While there are a ton of new features, it also includes automatic speech-to-text generation. This felt to me like a work-in-progress. So far, only English is supported. It creates text for the source and you can edit from the text panel to the timeline. However, unlike Premiere Pro, there is no interaction between the text and clips in the timeline.

I was surprised to see that Blackmagic Design was not promoting Resolve on the iPad. There was only one demo station and no dedicated demo artist. I played with it a bit and it felt to me like it’s not truly optimized for iPadOS yet. It does work well with the Speed Editor keyboard. That’s useful for any user, since the Cut page is probably where anyone would do the bulk of the work in this version of Resolve. When I used the Apple Pencil, the interface lacked any feedback as icons were clicked. So I was never quite sure if an action had happened or not when I used the Pencil. I’m not sure many will do a complete edit with Resolve on the iPad; however, it could evolve into a productive tool for preliminary editing in the field.

Here’s an interesting side note. Nearly all of the Blackmagic Design demo pods for DaVinci Resolve were running on Apple’s 24″ candy-colored iMacs. Occasionally performance was a bit sluggish from what I could tell. Especially when the operator demoed the new Relight feature to me. Nevertheless, they seemed to work well throughout the show.

In other Blackmagic news, all of the Cloud Store products are now shipping. The Cintel film scanner gets an 8mm gate. There are now IP versions of the video cards and converters. There’s an OLPF version of the URSA Mini Pro 12K and you can shoot vertical video with the Pocket Cinema Camera that’s properly tagged as vertical.

Of course, not everyone wants their raw media in the cloud and Blackmagic Design wasn’t showing the only storage products. Most of the usual storage vendors were present, including Facilis, OpenDrives, Synology, OWC, and QNAP. The technology trends include a shift away from spinning drives towards solid state storage, as well as faster networking protocols. Quite a few vendors(like Sonnet) were showing 25GbE (and faster) connections. This offers a speed improvement over the 1GbE and 10GbE ports and switches that are currently used.

Finally, one of the joys of NAB is to check out the smaller booths, where you’ll often find truly innovative new products. These small start-ups often grow into important companies in our industry. Hedge is just such a company. Tucked into a corner of the North hall, Hedge was demonstrating its growing portfolio of essential workflow products. Another start-up, Colourlab AI shared some booth space there, as well, to show off Freelab, their new integration with Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

That’s a quick rundown of my thoughts about this year’s NAB Show. For other thoughts and specific product reviews, be sure to also check out NAB coverage at Pro Video Coalition, RedShark News, and postPerspective. There’s also plenty of YouTube coverage.

Click on any image below to view an NAB slideshow.

©2023 Oliver Peters

Time to Rethink ProRes RAW?

The Apple ProRes RAW codec has been available for several years at this point, yet we have not heard of any professional cinematography camera adding the ability to record ProRes RAW in-camera. I covered ProRes RAW with some detail in these three blog posts (HDR and RAW Demystified, Part 1 and Part 2, and More about ProRes RAW) back in 2018. But the industry has changed over the past few years. Has that changed any thoughts about ProRes RAW?

Understanding RAW

Today’s video cameras evolved their sensor design from a three CCD array for RGB into a single sensor, similar to those used in still photo cameras. Most of these sensors are built using a Bayer pattern of photosites. This pattern is an array of monochrome receptors that are filtered to receive incoming green, red, and blue wavelengths of light. Typically the green photosites cover 50% of this pattern and red and blue each cover 25%. These photosites capture linear light, which is turned into data that is then meshed and converted into RGB pixel information. Lastly, it’s recorded into a video format. Photosites do not correlate in a 1:1 relationship with output pixels. You can have more or fewer total photosite elements in the sensor than the recorded pixel resolution of the file.

The process of converting photosite data into RGB video pixels is done by the camera’s internal electronics. This process also includes scaling, gamma encoding (Rec709, Rec 2020, or log), noise reduction, image sharpening, and the application of that manufacturer’s proprietary color science. The term “color science” implies some type of neutral mathematical color conversion, but that isn’t the case. The color science that each manufacturer uses is in fact their own secret sauce. It can be neutral or skewed in favor of certain colors and saturation levels. ARRI is a prime example of this. They have done a great job in developing a color profile for their Alexa line of cameras that approximates the look of film.

All of this image processing adds cost, weight, and power demands to the design of a camera. If you offload the processing to another stage in the pipeline, then design options are opened up. Recording camera raw image data achieves that. Camera raw is the monochrome sensor data prior to the conversion into an encoded video signal. By recording a camera raw file instead of an encoded RGB video file, you defer the processing to post.

To decode this file, your operating system or application requires some type of framework, plug-in, or decoding/developing software in order to properly interpret that data into a color image. In theory, using a raw file in post provides greater control over ISO/exposure and temperature/tint values in color grading. Depending on the manufacturer, you may also apply a variety of different camera profiles. All of this is possible and still have a camera file that is of a smaller size than its encoded RGB counterpart.

In-camera recording, camera raw, and RED

Camera raw recording preceded the introduction of the RED One camera. These usually consisted of uncompressed movie files or image sequences recorded to an external recorder. RED introduced the ability to record a Wavelet-compressed, 4K camera raw signal at 24fps. This was a movie file recorded onboard the camera itself. RED was granted a number of patents around these processes, which preclude any other camera manufacturer from doing that exact same thing, unless entering into a licensing agreement with RED. So far these patents have been successfully upheld against Sony and Apple among others.

In 2007 – part way through the Final Cut Pro product run – Apple introduced its family of ProRes codecs. ProRes was Apple’s answer to Avid’s DNxHD codec, but with some improvements, like resolution independence. ProRes not only became Apple’s default intermediate codec, but also gained stature as the mastering and delivery codec of choice, regardless of which NLE you were using. (Apple was awarded an Engineering Emmy Award this year for the ProRes codecs.)

By 2010 Apple was successful in convincing ARRI to use ProRes as its internal recording codec with the introduction of the (then new) line of Alexa cameras. (ARRI camera raw recording was a secondary option using ARRIRAW and a Codex recorder.) Shooting with an Alexa, recording high-quality ProRes files, and posting those directly within FCP or any other compatible NLE created the simplest and smoothest capture-edit-deliver pipeline of any professional post workflow. That remains unchanged even today.

Despite ARRI’s success, only a few other camera manufacturers have adopted ProRes as an internal recording option. To my knowledge these include some cameras from AJA, JVC, Blackmagic Design, and RED (as a secondary file to REDCODE). The lack of widespread adoption is most likely due to Apple’s licensing arrangement, coupled with the fact that ProRes is a proprietary Apple format. It may be a de facto industry standard, but it’s not an official standard sanctioned by an industry standards committee.

The introduction of Apple’s ProRes RAW codecs has led many in the industry to wait with bated breath for cameras to also adopt ProRes RAW as their internal camera raw option. ARRI would obviously be a candidate. However, the RED patents would seem to be an impediment. But what if Apple never had that intention in the first place?

Do we have it all wrong?

When Apple introduced ProRes RAW, it did so in partnership with Atomos. Just like Sony, ARRI, and Panasonic recording their camera raw signals to an external recorder, sending a camera raw signal to an external Atomos monitor/recorder is a viable alternative to in-camera recording. Atomos’ own disagreements with RED have now been settled. Therefore, embedding the ProRes RAW codec into their products opens up that recording format to any camera manufacturer. The camera simply has to be capable of sending a compatible camera raw signal (as data) over SDI or HDMI to the connected Atomos recorder.

The desire to see ProRes RAW in-camera stems from the history of ProRes adoption by ARRI and the impact that had on high-end production and post. However, that came at a time when Apple was pushing harder into various pro film and video markets. As we’ve learned, that course was corrected by Steve Jobs, leading to the launch of Final Cut Pro X. Apple has always been about ease and democratization – targeting the middle third of a bell curve of users, not necessarily the top or bottom thirds. For better or worse, Final Cut Pro X refocused Apple’s pro video direction with that in mind.

In addition, during this past decade or more, Apple has also changed its approach to photography. Aperture was a tool developed with semi-pro and pro DSLR photographers in mind. Traditional DSLRs have lost photography market share to smart phones – especially the iPhone. Online sharing methods – Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, cloud picture libraries – have become the norm over the traditional photo album. And so, Aperture bit the dust in favor of Photos. From a corporate point-of-view, the rethinking of photography cannot be separated from Apple’s rethinking of all things video.

Final Cut Pro X is designed to be forward-thinking, while cutting the chord with many legacy workflows. I believe the same can be applied to ProRes RAW. The small form factor camera, rigged with tons of accessories including external displays, is probably more common these days than the traditional, shoulder-mounted, one-piece camcorder. By partnering with Atomos (and maybe others in the future), Apple has opened the field to a much larger group of cameras than handling the task one camera manufacturer at a time.

ProRes RAW is automatically available to cameras that were previously stuck recording highly-compressed M-JPEG or H.264/265 formats. Video-enabled DSLRs from manufacturers like Nikon and Fujifilm join Canon and Panasonic cinematography cameras. Simply send a camera raw signal over HDMI to an Atomos recorder. And yet, it doesn’t exclude a company like ARRI either. They simply need to enable Atomos to repack their existing camera raw signal into ProRes RAW.

We may never see a camera company adopt onboard ProRes RAW and it doesn’t matter. From Apple’s point-of-view and that of FCPX users, it’s all the same. Use the camera of choice, record to an Atomos, and edit as easily as with regular ProRes. Do you have the depth of options as with REDCODE RAW? No. Is your image quality as perfect in an absolute (albeit non-visible) sense as ARRIRAW? Probably not. But these concerns are for the top third of users. That’s a category that Apple is happy to have, but not crucial to their existence.

The bottom line is that you can’t apply classic Final Cut Studio/ProRes thinking to Final Cut Pro X/ProRes RAW in today’s Apple. It’s simply a different world.

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Addendum

The images I’ve used in this post come from Patrik Pettersson. These clips were filmed with a Nikon Z6 DSLR recording to an Atomos Ninja V. He’s made a a few sample clips available for download and testing. More at this link. This brings up an interesting issue, because most other forms of camera raw are tied to a specific camera profile. But with ProRes RAW, you can have any number of cameras. Once you bring those into Final Cut Pro X, you don’t have the correct camera profile with a color science that matches that model for each any every camera.

In the case of these clips, FCPX doesn’t offer any Nikon profiles. (Note: This was corrected with the FCPX 10.4.9 update.) I decided to decode the clip (RAW to log conversion) using a Sony profile. This gave me the best possible results for the Nikon images and effectively gives me a log clip similar to that from a Sony camera. Then for the grade I worked in Color Finale Pro 2, using its ACES workflow. To complete the ACES workflow, I used the matching SLog3 conversion to Rec709.

The result is nice and you do have a number of options. However, the workflow isn’t as straightforward as Apple would like you to believe. I think these are all solvable challenges, but 1) Apple needs to supply the proper camera profiles for each of the compatible cameras; and 2) Apple needs to publish proper workflow guides that are useful to a wide range of users.

©2020 Oliver Peters

Did you pick the right camera? Part 3

Let me wrap up this three-parter with some thoughts on the media side of cameras. The switch from videotape recording to file-based recording has added complexity with not only specific file formats and codecs, but also the wrapper and container structure of the files themselves. The earliest file-based camera systems from Sony and Panasonic created a folder structure on their media cards that allowed for audio and video, clip metadata, proxies, thumbnails, and more. FAT32 formatting was adopted, so a 4GB file limit was imposed, which added the need for clip-spanning any time a recording exceeded 4GB in size.

As a result, these media cards contain a complex hierarchy of spanned files, folders, and subfolders. They often require a special plug-in for each NLE to be able to automatically interpret the files as the appropriate format of media. Some of these are automatically included with the NLE installation while others require the user to manually download and install the camera manufacturer’s software.

This became even more complicated with RED cameras, which added additional QuickTime reference files at three resolutions, so that standard media players could be used to read the REDCODE RAW files. It got even worse when digital still photo cameras added video recording capabilities, thus creating two different sets of folder paths on the card for the video and the still media. Naturally, none of these manufacturers adopted the same architecture, leaving users with a veritable Christmas tree of discovery every time they popped in one of these cards to copy/ingest/import media.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I am totally a fan of ARRI’s approach with the Alexa camera platform. By adopting QuickTime wrappers and the ProRes codec family (or optionally DNxHD as MXF OP1a media), Alexa recordings use a simple folder structure containing a set of uniquely-named files. These movie files include interleaved audio, video, and timecode data without the need for subfolders, sidecar files, and other extraneous information. AJA has adopted a similar approach with its KiPro products. From an editor’s point-of-view, I would much rather be handed Alexa or KiPro media files than any other camera product, simply because these are the most straight-forward to deal with in post.

I should point out that in a small percentage of productions, the incorporated metadata does have value. That’s often the case when high-end VFX are involved and information like lens data can be critical. However, in some camera systems, this is only tracked when doing camera raw recordings. Another instance is with GoPro 360-degree recordings. The front and back files and associated data files need to stay intact so that GoPro’s stitching software can properly combine the two halves into a single movie.

You can still get the benefit of the simpler Alexa-style workflow in post with other cameras if you do a bit of media management of files prior to ingesting these for the edit. My typical routine for the various Panasonic, Canon, Sony, and prosumer cameras is to rip all of the media files out of their various Clip or Private folders and move them to the root folder (usually labelled by camera roll or date). I trash all of those extra folders, because none of it is useful. (RED and GoPro 360 are the only formats to which I don’t do this.) When it’s a camera that doesn’t generate unique file names, then I will run a batch renaming application in order to generate unique file names. There are a few formats (generally drones, ‘action’ cameras, smart phones, and image sequences) that I will transcode to some flavor of ProRes. Once I’ve done this, the edit and the rest of post becomes smooth sailing.

While part of your camera buying decision should be based on its impact on post, don’t let that be a showstopper. You just have to know how to handle it and allow for the necessary prep time before starting the edit.

Click here for Part 2.

©2019 Oliver Peters

Did you pick the right camera? Part 2

HDR (high dynamic range) imagery and higher display resolutions start with the camera. Unfortunately that’s also where the misinformation starts. That’s because the terminology is based on displays and not on camera sensors and lenses.

Resolution

4K is pretty common, 8K products are here, and 16K may be around the corner. Resolution is commonly expressed as the horizontal dimension, but in fact, actual visual resolution is intended to be measured vertically. A resolution chart uses converging lines. The point at which you can no longer discern between the lines is the limit of the measurable resolution. That isn’t necessarily a pixel count.

The second point to mention is that camera sensors are built with photosites that only loosely equate to pixels. The hitch is that there is no 1:1 correlation between a sensor’s photosites and display pixels on a screen. This is made even more complicated by the design of a Bayer-pattern sensor that is used in most professional video cameras. In addition, not all 4K cameras look good when you analyze the image at 100%. For example, nearly all early and/or cheap drone and ‘action’ cameras appear substandard when you actually look at the image closely. The reasons include cheap plastic lenses and high compression levels.

The bottom line is that when a company like Netflix won’t accept an ARRI Alexa as a valid 4K camera for its original content guidelines – in spite of the number of blockbuster feature films captured using Alexas – you have to take it with a grain of salt. Ironically, if you shoot with an Alexa in its 4:3 mode (2880 x 2160) using anamorphic lenses (2:1 aspect squeeze), the expanded image results in a 5760 x 2160 (6K) frame. Trust me, this image looks great on a 4K display with plenty of room to crop left and right. Or, a great ‘scope image. Yes, there are anamorphic lens artifacts, but that’s part of the charm as to why creatives love to shoot that way in the first place.

Resolution is largely a non-issue for most camera owners these days. There are tons of 4K options and the only decision you need to make when shooting and editing is whether to record at 3840 or 4096 wide when working in a 4K mode.

Log, raw, and color correction

HDR is the ‘next big thing’ after resolution. Nearly every modern professional camera can shoot footage that can easily be graded into HDR imagery. That’s by recording the image as either camera raw or with a log color profile. This lets a colorist stretch the highlight information up to the peak luminance levels that HDR displays are capable of. Remember that HDR video is completely different from HDR photography, which can often be translated into very hyper-real photos. Of course, HDR will continue to be a moving target until one of the various competing standards gains sufficient traction in the consumer market.

It’s important to keep in mind that neither raw nor log is a panacea for all image issues. Both are ways to record the linear dynamic range that the camera ‘sees’ into a video colorspace. Log does this by applying a logarithmic curve to the video, which can then be selectively expanded again in post. Raw preserves the sensor data in the recording and pushes the transformation of that data to RGB video outside of the camera. Using either method, it is still possible to capture unrecoverable highlights in your recorded image. Or in some cases the highlights aren’t digitally clipped, but rather that there’s just no information in them other than bright whiteness. There is no substitute for proper lighting, exposure control, and shaping the image aesthetically through creative lighting design. In fact, if you carefully control the image, such as in a studio interview or a dramatic studio production, there’s no real reason to shoot log instead of Rec 709. Both are valid options.

I’ve graded camera raw (RED, Phantom, DJI) and log footage (Alexa, Canon, Panasonic, Sony) and it is my opinion that there isn’t that much magic to camera raw. Yes, you can have good iso/temp/tint latitude, but really not a lot more than with a log profile. In one, the sensor de-Bayering is done in post and in the other, it’s done in-camera. But if a shot was recorded underexposed, the raw image is still going to get noisy as you lift the iso and/or exposure settings. There’s no free lunch and I still stick to the mantra that you should ‘expose to the right’ during production. It’s easier to make a shot darker and get a nice image than going in the other direction.

Since NAB 2018, more camera raw options have hit the market with Apple’s ProRes RAW and Blackmagic RAW. While camera raw may not provide any new, magic capabilities, it does allow the camera manufacturer to record a less-compressed file at a lower data rate.  However, neither of these new codecs will have much impact on post workflows until there’s a critical mass of production users, since these are camera recording codecs and not mezzanine or mastering codecs. At the moment, only Final Cut Pro X properly handles ProRes RAW, yet there are no actual camera raw controls for it as you would find with RED camera raw settings. So in that case, there’s actually little benefit to raw over log, except for file size.

One popular raw codec has been Cinema DNG, which is recorded as an image sequence rather than a single movie file. Blackmagic Design cameras had used that until replaced by Blackmagic RAW.  Some drone cameras also use it. While I personally hate the workflow of dealing with image sequence files, there is one interesting aspect of cDNG. Because the format was originally developed by Adobe, processing is handled nicely by the Adobe Camera Raw module, which is designed for camera raw photographs. I’ve found that if you bring a cDNG sequence into After Effects (which uses the ACR module) as opposed to Resolve, you can actually dig more highlight detail out of the images in After Effects than in Resolve. Or at least with far less effort. Unfortunately, you are stuck making that setting decision on the first frame, as you import the sequence into After Effects.

The bottom line is that there is no way to make an educated decision about cameras without actually testing the images, the profile options, and the codecs with real-world footage. These have to be viewed on high quality displays at their native resolutions. Only then will you get an accurate reading of what that camera is capable of. The good news is that there are many excellent options on the market at various price points, so it’s hard to go wrong with any of the major brand name cameras.

Click here for Part 1.

Click here for Part 3.

©2019 Oliver Peters

Did you pick the right camera? Part 1

There are tons of great cameras and lenses on the market. While I am not a camera operator, I have been a videographer on some shoots in the past. Relevant production and camera logistical issues are not foreign to me. However, my main concern in evaluating cameras is how they impact me in post – workflow, editing, and color correction. First – biases on the table. Let me say from the start that I have had the good fortune to work on many productions shot with ARRI Alexas and that is my favorite camera system in regards to the three concerns offered in the introductory post. I love the image, adopting ProRes for recording was a brilliant move, and the workflow couldn’t be easier. But I also recognize that ARRI makes an expensive albeit robust product. It’s not for everyone. Let’s explore.

More camera choices – more considerations

If you are going to only shoot with a single camera system, then that simplifies the equation. As an editor, I long for the days when directors would only shoot single-camera. Productions were more organized and there was less footage to wade through. And most of that footage was useful – not cutting room fodder. But cameras have become cheaper and production timetables condensed, so I get it that having more than one angle for every recording can make up for this. What you will often see is one expensive ‘hero’ camera as the A-camera for a shoot and then cheaper/lighter/smaller cameras as the B and C-cameras. That can work, but the success comes down to the ingredients that the chef puts into the stew. Some cameras go well together and others don’t. That’s because all cameras use different color science.

Lenses are often forgotten in this discussion. If the various cameras being used don’t have a matched set of lenses, the images from even the exact same model cameras – set to the same settings – will not match perfectly. That’s because lenses have coloration to them, which will affect the recorded image. This is even more extreme with re-housed vintage glass. As we move into the era of HDR, it should be noted that various lens specialists are warning that images made with vintage glass – and which look great in SDR – might not deliver predictable results when that same recording is graded for HDR.

Find the right pairing

If you want the best match, use identical camera models and matched glass. But, that’s not practical or affordable for every company nor every production. The next best thing is to stay within the same brand. For example, Canon is a favorite among documentary producers. Projects using cameras from the EOS Cinema line (C300, C300 MkII, C500, C700) will end up with looks that match better in post between cameras. Generally the same holds true for Sony or Panasonic.

It’s when you start going between brands that matching looks becomes harder, because each manufacturer uses their own ‘secret sauce’ for color science. I’m currently color grading travelogue episodes recorded in Cuba with a mix of cameras. A and B-cameras were ARRI Alexa Minis, while the C and D-cameras were Panasonic EVA1s. Additionally Panasonic GH5, Sony A7SII, and various drones cameras were also used. Panasonic appears to use a similar color science as ARRI, although their log color space is not as aggressive (flat). With all cameras set to shoot with a log profile and the appropriate REC709 LUT applied to each in post (LogC and Vlog respectively) I was able to get a decent match between the ARRI and Panasonic cameras, including the GH5. Not so close with the Sony or drone cameras, however.

Likewise, I’ve graded a lot of Canon C300 MkII/C500 footage and it looks great. However, trying to match Canon to ARRI shots just doesn’t come out right. There is too much difference in how blues are rendered.

The hardest matches are when professional production cameras are married with prosumer DSLRs, such as a Sony FS5 and a Fujifilm camera. Not even close. And smartphone cameras – yikes! But as I said above, the GH5 does seem to provide passible results when used with other Panasonic cameras and in our case, the ARRIs. However, my experience there is limited, so I wouldn’t guarantee that in every case.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to really know when different brands will or won’t create a compatible A/B-camera combination until you start a production. Or rather, when you start color correcting the final. Then it’s too late. If you have the luxury of renting or borrowing cameras and doing a test first, that’s the best course of action. But as always, try to get the best you can afford. It may be better to get a more advanced camera, but only one. Then restructure your production to work with a single-camera methodology. At least then, all of your footage should be consistent.

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Click here for Part 2.

©2019 Oliver Peters