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THE NEW MONSTERS SENSORS
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LEFT The ultimate RED camera for now. Weapon hardware and Monstro sensor.
THE LARGE FORMAT LOOK IS SILKY, SMOOTH AND EVEN HYPERREAL. IT ENCOURAGES EXPERIMENTATION
field of view is wider. For instance if you’re shooting in medium-format a wide shot of a mountain range with perhaps 80mm or 100m medium- format lenses, those mountains are being pulled up from the background towards the subject. Your depth-of- field however would be quite shallow so you’re effectively compressing the image. The lens choices for full-frame and full-frames plus are quite wide but once you get in to the medium- format side of things they become much more limited. The speed of these lenses is very varied, from T2.8 to T4 and 5.6 for instance. Although as ARRI is finding, many older lenses are now fulfilling the need for this medium-format market and are being rehoused accordingly. But generally this explains the dilemma of shooting this very large-format; because of the control of the depth-of-field, it’s ultimately a trade-off at this end of things. Perhaps full-frame and plus is the sweet spot.
getting richer colours, wonderful falloff of focus. A look that people have called silky and smooth and even hyperreal. But better than this, large-format helps tell a story more than before with the added experimentation that it encourages. Without being too pompous, this is the new cinema. Cinematographers are also finding that their traditional methods don’t always work anymore with large-format, filtering isn’t being used as before, in fact sometimes they are being dispensed with. Colourists too are finding that maybe they don’t need their zones and power windows as much with large- format to customise the look. So when you widen up the image gate behind the lens you end up choosing longer focal lengths for the same field of view that you’re looking for. For medium-format a 50mm is really a wide lens. You’re changing how much of that lens you’re grabbing if it can cover it; the depth- of-field might be the same but your
BELOW The Sony Venice is their first full-framed motion picture camera. carries a built-in 8-stage glass ND filter system. ABOVE Sony’s new Venice full-frame camera also
the highest end cinema cameras. With this single sensor you needed a new way of filtering the colour so with the Bayer mosaic you’re able to arrange the red, green and blue pixels albeit in a less than equitable way. But Moore’s Law also means that you have a more regular introduction of sensors. RED for instance are staying true to their sensor roadmap of a few years ago and now have the Monstro VistaVision sensor which appears in their Weapon hardware as well as the Panavision DXL rental camera. Sony’s Venice has a brand new sensor and promises more and this year we may see a new sensor from ARRI. THE GIFTS OF LARGE-FORMAT But what is the advantage of large- format cameras like the Weapon Monstro and the new Sony Venice with its new full-frame sensor? In a way large-format is the new playground for cinematography, it allows you to play with depth-of- field, with distortion and chroma to compose a glorious image. You’re
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FEBRUARY 2018 DEFINITION
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