Definition November 2018 - Sampler

LARGE FORMAT SPECIAL LENSES AND CAMERAS P44

November 2018

£4.99

FILE FREEDOM HOW OUTLAW KING MANAGED A DATA ONSLAUGHT

MAGIC MONO PAWEL

PLUS

MORE LIGHTING APPS IT’S THE NEW BRAW SAMSUNG’S CURVED MONITOR

PAWLIKOWSKI’S COLD WAR

NEW LOOK

QUEEN BIOPIC SPANS THE DECADES

HANDS ON THE CANON XF705

#MYTURN

© 2018 Netflix

#MYTURN is an official Netflix hashtag and refers to the big change in Season 6 – the final season of House Of Cards. Frank Underwood has left (and we all know why) but this leaves Claire Underwood to put her ‘Lady Macbeth’ in the hot seat. This show has had, from Season 1, three production rules that are not to be broken, and as far as we know the last season will be no different. Those rules? No handheld, no Steadicam and no zoom lenses.

Actually, there is a fourth: the camera is always RED and we think this time the sensor is Helium.

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DATA FREEDOM!

Netflix movie Outlaw King follows Scotland’s Robert the Bruce and his escapades against the old enemy – but the real capture story was the data W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L / P I C T U R E S N E T F L I X

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3D SCANNING FOR OUTLAW

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utlaw King is the untold true story of Robert the Bruce, who transforms from defeated nobleman to outlaw hero during the oppressive occupation of medieval Scotland by Edward I of England.

Data specialists The Digital Orchard provided on-set DIT, lab services and video playback services for the film, which was shot last year in the late summer in midgeridden Scotland – and its unpredictable weather. Sam Spurgeon from Digital Orchard explained the plan. “The director, David Mackenzie, and DOP Barry Ackroyd had agreed that they would always shoot through the ever-changing Scottish weather and not be waiting for cloud cover and the like. In terms of how hard it was I think the weather was certainly on our side, and I think some of the battles were even muddied up to make them feel a bit grittier than they were, although the midges at the end of August were particularly bad. It definitely wasn’t without its cold and wet days, and some of the more remote shooting locations meant four a.m. starts.”

The main cameras were Panavision’s DXL1 as A, B and D, with a stripped-down RED Weapon as their C camera for use on specialist rigs like wire cam and Stabileye.

There was a second RED Weapon as the E camera. On aerial unit days this set would be complemented by either an extra RED Weapon or ARRI Alexa Mini for drone or helicopter work. The DXL1 was used on the Steadicam rig as well.

“Second unit was with cameras D and E, which were one DXL and one Weapon.

Aerial units had a mix of cameras, including an Alexa Mini and another RED. I think the most cameras were seven including another

A stripped-down RED Weapon was the C camera for use on specialist rigs DXL, which came out for a Russian arm and for stunt sequences. Panavision were very helpful to us, especially when they knew we were shooting half way up the side of a mountain. They were great at helping problem-solve and getting us everything we needed, which included changing out battery hotswaps and SDI boards on the DXLs for upgraded versions.

“Our other kit consisted of Blackmagic Design Smart Videohubs, Sony 17in OLED monitors, Apple MacBooks, Fujifilm ISMini LUT boxes, Tangent Ripple grading panels and Odyssey 7Q+ monitors (these

ABOVE Director David Mackenzie inspects the troops during filming.

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Lidar Lounge did all of the 3D scanning for Outlaw King.

They used their cyberscanning photogrammetry rig to create 3D models of all the actors and hundreds of background extras (see pictures) as well as lots of horses and dogs, too. This was used for the big battle scenes in the film to replicate vast armies.

Their cyberscanning rig was set up in a marquee in the middle of the Scottish Highlands – during which there happened to be a hurricane visiting the UK. The team spent the whole night holding down the rig to make sure that it didn’t get blown away.

They also did all of the set scanning, processing everything from huge environments, towns to castles and trebuchets, all during winter in Glasgow, so it was intense work. The Lidar was used for tracking the shots, building CG environments and for making nowruined castles look as they would have done back in their heyday.

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We asked DOP Newton Thomas Sigel about celebrating the look and the music of legendary band Queen in the new biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody Q U E S T I O N S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L / P I C T U R E S 20T H C E N T U R Y F OX

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ABOVE DOP Newton Thomas Sigel on the first day of shooting on the Live Aid stage.

What was your idea for the look of Bohemian Rhapsody? Being a musical biopic, what were your views on aesthetics for the big musical numbers and also the scenes focused on more personal drama?

The movie is bookended with Queen’s performance at Live Aid in 1985, universally considered one of the greatest rock and roll performances ever. This historic concert was broadcast over 13 satellites by the BBC and can be viewed on YouTube today. It is such an iconic moment in rock history and I wanted to stay true to the quality of light at Wembley that day. The stadium was open to the sky, but by the time Queen went on the sun had dipped behind Wembley’s walls and created a soft, subdued light over the crowd. Being held in the day, the stage lighting, like the whole concert, was minimal. It was also quite improvised, since so many bands were performing, and all without rehearsal.

For the movie we recreated the stage, and I duplicated the lighting rig that can be seen in the broadcast. We did take a little poetic license with the cues, but not much.

After a short tease in the film’s opening, which almost takes the audience on stage, we cut back to 1970 when Freddie has just emigrated with his family to London and he is working at Heathrow Airport. This part of the story was shot with the Alexa SXT and old Cooke Speed Panchro lenses. We created a special LUT for this period that emphasised the golds, yellows and oranges.

It reflects the romantic idealism that Freddie had in the days when he first met Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon. It was all about possibility and potential, with a healthy dose of naïveté.

Eventually Queen forms, they luck into a gig on Top Of The Pops and begin to take off. This is where we made a transition to the Alexa 65 and Arri’s DNA lenses. Where the first act of the story was all handheld, now the Steadicam and dolly start to join in. The world seems to be opening up, getting bigger. By the late 70s, Freddie has completely changed his look and the film has as well, to a less grainy, cooler and more desaturated feel. The pressure of being in a band, trying to stay relevant year after year has taken hold.

By the time Queen went on the sun had dipped behind Wembley’s walls and created a soft light RECREATING THE 1970S How did you plan to recreate the 1970s look – how much did the fashion and production design tune your final choices?

We were very lucky that Brian May is such a great archivist and made a wealth of material available to us. Production designer Aaron Haye was meticulous in recreating some of the most minute details of the actual environments and there is a great deal of concert footage of the band throughout their career to draw from. Not as much as a band in the age of the Internet would have, but enough that I could study how their concert lighting evolved. This attention to detail was critical for us, because we wanted the audience to really feel transported back in time.

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DARK LOVE Cold War is the most colourful black & white film you’ll ever see and it could win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film next year W O R D S M A D E LY N M O S T / P I C T U R E S C U R ZO N & LU K A S Z Z A L P S C

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irector Pawel Pawlikowski and Lukasz Zal PSC collaborated on Cold War, which won Best Director in the Official Competition for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Their previous collaboration, 2013’s Ida, won 69 awards, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.

Pawel Pawlikowski says he always had the idea of making a film about a love story that was loosely based on his parent’s lives and many others who fled Poland for the West. After the success of Ida, he found an opportunity to realise this dream.

Ida was remarkable for its stark black & white imagery, but music is also an important element in Pawlikowski’s films.

“I like music in films, rather than film music. When I write the script, the music is another layer that helps imagine the world, the period and the scene you are creating but I don’t intellectualise it,” he explains.

“In Cold War, I needed something to bring the characters together and came across the wonderful Mazowsze folk ensemble that opened up a beautiful range of possibilities.

This was a third element to explain the history during the Stalinist era and how music was used by the state. I would never start with politics, if there are political resonances today, it was not my intention.

“I identified three songs performed by folk musicians for the soundtrack that had the potential of becoming jazz songs and these

three became characters in the film,” he adds.

“Later, we are in Paris in the 1950s with jazz music and salons, and all those pretentious, over- educated people so full of themselves – it’s the complete opposite of Poland. There are other bits of music that helped out at certain points in the story to give it some energy. For instance, when Wiktor (played by Tomasz Kot) and Zula (played by Joanna Kulig) are lethargically sitting in a bar and Rock Around the Clock starts playing, Zula gets up to dance. It was a good moment to wake-up the audience”.

COMMERCIAL RISK “This is an 84-minute film, covering a time period that spans 15 years and four countries,” says producer, Tanya Seghatchian. “With an unusual screen ratio – we had 57 shooting days. Making a black & white film is challenging – you lose half your audience, so it does limit the commercial

I needed something to bring the characters together and came across the Mazowsze folk ensemble TOP Cinematography Lukasz Zal. ABOVE AND LEFT Actress Joanna Kulig who plays Zula and Tomasz Kot who plays Wiktor.

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LIVING WITH LARGE FOR PART TWO OF OUR LARGE FORMAT SERIES WE TALK WITH SOME HIGHLY EXPERIENCED DOPs ABOUT HOW THEY FELT WORKING WITH THE NEW AESTHETIC W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L / P I C T U R E S E M B E R / N A S A / VA R I O U S

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BIG SHOTS

As soon as the new bigger sensors started appearing the new glass materialised as well. Here is our pick of what’s available for large-format W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L

ARRI Rental DNA SERIES

SIGNATURE SERIES

ARRI

Atlas Lens Co

“It was a 50mm and we put it on the camera and, literally, I was like: ‘This is it’. It was super special. It’s hard to articulate how something is different from the other thing, but I knew that this was the lens, and it really set the standard of how far we could push the DNA glass.” DOP of Solo: A Star Wars Story Bradford Young was talking about his initial feelings about ARRI Rental’s DNA range of lenses.

The range now comprises 14 lenses with a new set of DNA LF lenses being announced very soon for the new ARRI LF camera.

The lenses have been customised

by ARRI Rental with help from cinematographers like Bradford, and guided by other cinematographer input.

The 50mm lens became the genesis for the whole set of lenses; ARRI Rental used that lens as a template and productized two prototypes of the 50mm for Bradford. Then the other lenses started to fall into place.

The source of the glass is still a secret.

Accompanying the new ALEXA LF camera are 16 large-format ARRI Signature Prime lenses, ranging from 12mm to 280mm and fitted with the ARRI LPL mount.

While the Signature Primes exemplify state-of-the-art optical precision, they have been designed to render organic, emotionally engaging images, gently softening and texturising the large format with natural skin tones and a creamy bokeh. A fast T-stop of T1.8 facilitates shallow depth-of-field and the smooth focus fall-off gives subjects heightened presence in the frame.

The ARRI Signature Prime range is the first cine lens series to feature machined magnesium lens barrels, making the optics lightweight and robust. They are also the first to incorporate ARRI’s nextgeneration LDS-2 Lens Data System, with high data rates and absolute encoders for fast initialising. LDS-2 extends lens data possibilities and is being licensed to other lens and camera manufacturers.

To prove that the trend for anamorphic lenses isn’t waning, we saw a new company pitch up last year called the Atlas Lens Co, although it has been planning its launch for three years. This is an exclusively anamorphic company.

Its Orion Series anamorphic lenses are unique in that they offer a traditional 2x anamorphic squeeze and are designed for a full height 4:3 or 6:5 anamorphic imaging format, so great for sensors like the Alexa LF, Alexa 4:3, Sony Venice, Canon C700FF, Red Monstro, Red Gemini, and others.

From a prototype 65mm the company now offers a range including 32mm T2, 40mm T2, 50mm T2, 65mm T2, 80mm T2 and 100mm T2 – all with well controlled barrel distortion. This is a matching set so the coatings and designs are engineered for multi-use shoots.

An Interchangeable Mount System means you can use any PL Mount camera, compatible EF, E-mount, or Micro 4/3.

Verdict

Verdict

We know the glass is a mixture of the new and old but big respect to ARRI Rental for developing such customised glass for its customers.

NUMBER IN LENS SET RANGE COVERAGE

14 28MM – 200MM FULL ALEXA 65

ORION SERIES

Verdict

“I was surprised by the quality of the lenses and how light they were, they capture the format beautifully.” DOP Kieran Fowler NZSC, ACS. NUMBER IN LENS SET RANGE LENS MOUNT

This is a classic-looking series of anamorphic lenses with controlled flare and noticeably beautiful bokeh but with modern engineering.

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12MM – 280MM LPL

NUMBER IN LENS SET RANGE

6 32MM – 100MM

LENS MOUNT

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IMS

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U S E R R E V I E W | C A N O N X F 70 5

CANON XF705 CAMCORDER PRICE £6999/$6999

Canon’s very successful XF range of broadcast cameras is joined by the highly communicative and high-resolution XF705 W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L

anon’s XF range of camcorders has always been one of our favourites, mainly because they are great workhorse cameras. This form factor of fixed lens and multiple buttons to hand is a busy shooter’s dream. We love the way they compress footage at high rates with accessible codecs and store the resulting MXF files on nice, freely available, relatively cheap media – this time SD cards, not Compact Flash.

For the 2018 model, which is called the XF705, the improvements are totally predictable but no less impressive. Using the HEVC-XF codec you can now shoot UHD, which is 3840x2160 at 50p and in 4:2:2 10-bit. We used Lexar 1000x SD cards, which can record to 150MB/s; the XF705 tops out at 160Mbps.

HEVC stands for High Efficiency Video Codec, which is the way 4K is compressed for delivery to homes.

Our 64GB Lexar cards gave us around 110 minutes in 4K from the two SD card slots on the side of the body at the 160Mbps mode.

You can shoot with Canon’s XF-AVC codec if you’re not quite ready for 4K UHD, but resolution and quality is down to 1920x1080 with a sorry 4:2:0 8-bit result.

As you can choose the option of 1920x1080 using the HEVC option, you shouldn’t need XF-AVC; the only reason would be if your NLE couldn’t deal with the new HEVC codec, which may be a problem initially.

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S PECI FI C ATI O N S 4K: UHD/50P UP TO 160MBPS XF-HEVC: 4K UHD/50P 4:2:2 10-BIT HDR: HLG/PQ INTERNAL RECORDING AND OUTPUT 12G-SDI: SINGLE CABLE 4K UHD TRANSFER WIDE-ANGLE LENS: 25.5-382.5 15X L-SERIES ZOOM SENSOR: 1.0-TYPE CMOS IMAGE PROCESSOR: DUAL DIGIC DV6

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BELOW The new Canon XF705 ticks all the boxes and includes HDR recording and streaming formats.

SPONSORED BY

SENSOR This time, for the new XF, Canon is using a 1.0-type CMOS sensor and DIGIC DV6 processing to deal with the extra processing needed to manage the big jump in resolution and other data-hungry processing.

The body also has some large air intakes around the body to keep things cool, but this was a preproduction model so might change when you order yours.

Arguably with this new 1.0-type sensor you can start experimenting with depth-of-field to a certain degree and especially when you use the monitor’s touchscreen to focus –

“THE XF705 FEATURES CANON’S AMAZING DUAL PIXEL AUTOFOCUS SYSTEM” ABOVE The camera keeps a superb ‘L’ lens with nicely resolved 4k.

another box ticked for the XF705.

You can also consider the XF705 as a possible backup for some larger sensor cameras.

In front of the sensor is a 4K resolved L-series Canon lens which has a 15x optical zoom range, a maximum aperture of f/2.8, a wide angle of 25.5mm and IS options (IS is available in five axis) including the well-known Powered IS which tries to simulate a tripod mode and does a pretty good job of it. This lovely L

lens has three independent control rings with end stops to ensure that the camcorder has the level of manual control that is expected.

In fact, this lens is the second truly standout feature of the XF705.

Again, as it has done before, Canon has sought advice from broadcasters and cinematographers for input on the design of this camera, and the lens handling is where this is most obvious. The focus ring can be used as a true, manual control

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SAMSUNG CJ890 43IN CURVED MONITOR PRICE £899/$1000

Samsung’s new curved monitors are scientifically proven to be better for you – but it’s that cool factor that will get you first W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L

part from looking very cool, there is some science behind the new curved screens from Samsung. Research by Seoul National University Hospital found that Samsung’s curved monitors were more effective in reducing eyestrain than its flat monitors.

Interestingly, the greater the curvature of the monitor’s screen, the more effective it proved in reducing eyestrain.

There was also a clinical study conducted by Dr. Gang Luo, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Eli Peli, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, which showed that, when performing nearly one hour of intensive visual tasks, fewer users reported eyestrain and blurred vision with a curved monitor than with a similar widescreen flat monitor.

But show this beautiful curved screen to heavy screen users (probably most of us) and the last question will be about scientific studies – people just want them.

Samsung’s CJ890 is a 43in LCD monitor with LED backlight, with an aspect ratio of 32:10 and a resolution of 3840x1200. The LCD screen is a VA type as opposed to IPS (vertically aligned not in-plane switching); VA screens are optimised for looking head-on whereas IPS screens can still be seen at high angles of view.

VA screens also have better contrast and black uniformity.

REAL ESTATE An aspect ratio like this, with a resolution like this, doesn’t ring any format bells (4K is 4160x2160 at 16:9,

ABOVE The cool curves of the Samsung CJ890 are almost as much of a draw as the health benefits.

generally) and with such a monitor that has so much real estate, it’s all about what you do with the space.

The CJ890 can help by providing features that offer the multiple screen user a bevel-free life with its Picture by Picture and Picture in Picture features, and you can choose between your device’s native aspect ratio or use the whole 3840x1200.

Multiple inputs encourage you to change your viewing habits – especially great for editors. Imagine having your viewing window and timeline on the same screen at the same size as you’re used to.

Inputs are dominated by USB Type-C, with three ports just for Type-C connections (one just for PC connection). These give you data and power, and also with the right adapters access to DP and HDMI

“IMAGINE HAVING YOUR VIEWING WINDOW AND TIMELINE ON THE SAME SCREEN”

devices. Other USB ports can talk to USB A-C devices. Others include HDMI, DP and audio.

CONTROL There are four small buttons on the front of the panel that will shortcut your way around and also present a menu with all the options. Three buttons together are shortcuts to finding a signal source, initiating PIP and PBP, and switching which USB connectors you want. The solitary button is more of a jog wheel with which you can access setting, PIP/ PBP, source and the off button.

The picture menu is your standard deep dive into brightness, contrast, sharpness and colour changes (with what Samsung call Magic Bright), and Eye Saver Mode will lessen blue light levels.

Flat screens will soon look very dated once we all migrate to curvier, cooler products like this great monitor from Samsung.

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