American Cinematographer - September 2012 - 84

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Optimizing Digital-Camera Workflows
tion has the right to expect that they can all be plugged into one timeline for post. Until every post facility can do that — and provide meaningful digital archiving — we are still facing a significant deficit in the post world. It is our hope that ACES is the solution to that deficit.” Another criticism of the Camera Assessment Series was that the scenes the cinematographers blocked out and shot were too much like camera tests rather than real scenes with cinematic qualities. For the ICAS test, the cinematographers prepared only two narrative scenes, both of which told stories that could have been lifted straight out of an actual film. The scenes were shot on the lot at Warner Bros. The first sequence, titled “Serious News,” was a daylight scene set in a 1940s diner. Large windows provided views of a bright, harsh, sunlit exterior, and the interior was lit mainly with the resulting ambient light. The story follows a young paperboy. A long tracking shot starts on the street outside the diner and leads the boy into the diner, where he hawks his wares to the patrons. One of the buyers is a mysterious man sitting in a dimly lit corner; he reads a headline about an arson and hastily exits the diner. Completed in one smooth camera move, the sequence contrasts the exterior’s hot, bright skies with the interior’s deep shadows. The second scene was a Felliniesque night exterior. A young woman dressed in theatrical clothing dances her way through a rainy alley and past a couple of homeless men near a barrel fire. She offers her coat to a shivering young mother sitting on the curb near a storefront window, and then joins a hodgepodge of city dwellers for an exuberant dance on the rainy street. The sequence encompasses the intense high contrast between deep shadows, bright flames, low light on faces, bright lights in the windows of buildings adorned with neon signs and hot streetlamps. The wet streets pick up specular highlights, and the eccentric characters wear colorful costumes that push the color

Right: The PGA’s Hawk Koch worked with Lori McCreary, the CEO of Revelations Entertainment, as the ICAS supervisors. Below: Stump on location with coproducer/post supervisor Cory McCrum.

native color space into the 16-bit floating-point color space of the ACES OpenEXR format. The cameras used in the ICAS test were the Arri Alexa, Canon’s C300, the Red Epic, and Sony’s F3 and F65, along with an Arri 435 Xtreme shooting Kodak Vision3 250D 5207 (for the day scene) and 500T 5219 (for the night scene). All of the footage captured by the cameras was recorded with the full range of recording options: the Arri Alexa recorded to both internal SxS cards in the ProRes 4:4:4 format and an onboard Codex recorder in ArriRaw; the Canon C300 recorded Rec709 HD to internal Compact Flash cards, as well as Canon raw log to an external recorder; the Red Epic recorded 16-bit
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raw Redcode R3D files to SSD cards; Sony’s F3 recorded Rec709 HD to SxS cards and uncompressed HD via duallink HD-SDI; and the Sony F65 recorded to an HDCam-SR deck and also to its internal 1-Terabyte solid-state memory cards in 16-bit raw. Depending on the manufacturers’ decisions, the highest-quality image from each camera was selected and processed through the individual IDTs to bring the footage into the ACES container. (Before being sent through the IDTs, footage from the Canon C300 and Sony F3 was uprezzed to 4K through Nuke. EFilm scanned the film footage at 6K and then resized it to 4K for the assessment.) “It’s not a one-size-fits-all world anymore,” says Stump. “You can mix and match cameras, and each producAmerican Cinematographer

American Cinematographer - September 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2012