{"id":8283,"date":"2010-03-24T06:18:21","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T06:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philipbloom.co.uk\/?p=8283"},"modified":"2010-04-07T18:37:28","modified_gmt":"2010-04-07T16:37:28","slug":"shootout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philipbloom.net\/blog\/shootout\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Zacuto Shootout: DSLRs Vs 35mm FILM!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of January I went to Chicago to be co-DP on the great Zacuto shoot. DSLRs vs Kodak and Fuji Film. It was a hell of an experience and as someone who has been advocating the use of DSLRs for video I was about to find out whether I was right it backing these.<\/p>\n

It’s been an epic shoot, in numerous locations over a period of weeks and has a huge number of very well know people in the industry giving their opinions. Rick McCallum, Shane Hurlbut ASC, Kevin Shaninian, Stephen Goldblatt ASC and many many more.<\/p>\n

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I just watched Part 1 and it’s great. A lot of people were concerned there was going to be a bias towards DSLRs and we were doing this to show that film is dead. Far from it. Every one of is, especially the ones like me who have never shot 35mm, respect and love film. After all I have been desperately trying to emulate that “film look” all my career on video. These Canon DSLRs have really been “game changers” for me. I love what they do, am totally aware of their limitations and simply work around them. Every single camera has limitations. The DSLRs are no exception.<\/p>\n

Bob Primes, ASC, devised the main tests whilst I was in charge of getting the best out of the DSLRs and I also ran the low light test which is coming in episode 3. For those who are interested I discussed at length with Tim Smith of Canon about the best picture profiles for the cameras. We settled on in camera settings, many will argue that we should have gone “superflat”, and I am sure it would have been great but in the end what we went for was sharpness all the way dowb, Contrast all the way down and Saturation down two notches. The reason we turn sharpness all the way down is simply the camera is too sharp and it also accentuates the`flaws of the camera. It’s very easy to bring back a little bit of sharpness in post. That is my recommendation.With the flat PP I was able to get about 2 stops more latitude in these cameras.<\/p>\n

GH1 settings were smooth, contrast down 2, sharpness down 2. Noise reduction zero.<\/p>\n

With the ISO we did some noise tests on the different ISO and found that on the Canons 160, 320, 640, 1250, 2500 were the most noise free. Interesting and surprising as I had always thought 100,200 etc were the native ISOs. \u00a0To get these you need to go into ISO expansion in the register new settings and make the ISO increments 1\/3. Interesting the Rebel T2i only has 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400. I have not done a noise test on this camera so I cannot say. All I can say is the best we could get image noise free was using the 160 etc…<\/p>\n

Now the Zeiss lenses were not the expensive ones. We used the ZF series meaning it is easy to match the colours across the range of digital cameras.<\/p>\n

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I want to explain why we chose these “DSLRs” are not others. Simply to qualify it needed to be 24p ideally but most key was the ability to get full manual control. No full manual control and the camera was binned from the test. This is also a DSLR v 35mm film test. No RED camera as that is neither. Also if we went down RED route we would have to use all the others out there. Even with the cameras we had it was an enormous task. With every camera out there commercially it would have been a year long endeavour!<\/p>\n

What did you think of the tests so far? What was you favourite. Let me know in your comments below. I would love to hear them!<\/p>\n

I was fortunate enough to see my work projected on the Stag Screen back in December and knew then that these cameras were something truly special. Seeing them put up against film was always going to be worrying and of course film looked fantastic but look at just how good the Canons looked…we are getting there for sure!<\/p>\n

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There is much more to come in the tests. Just to be clear though, we did not do tests on the very known flaws of rolling shutter, aliasing and moire. We all know this is a big pain with DSLRs and of course does not exist in film, but then again every camera I have ever used has its flaws. We simply focused on latitude, resolution and sensitivity.<\/p>\n

Also…please check out these fab photos by the very talented Sara Collaton.<\/a><\/p>\n