Phil Bloom

Sony F3... yummy.

I accidentally came across Phil bloom as I began to research DSLRs as movie making tools. I now realize he has become an unexpected guru of the DSLR video world. I can understand why... not only does he know his stuff, he actually knows how to create beautiful imagery and meaningful tests that real world people can understand and visually see. To cap it all, he seems remarkably down to earth. I have time and respect for Phil Bloom.

If you saw an earlier post you read I was taking baby steps in looking at the Canon 7D for video. It still looks great for a low budget job. But as we all know, the Canon 5D MK ii is what us mortals dream about... well, that was until I saw the Sony F3! Phil Bloom brilliantly shows us why the F3 is such a gorgeous camera. Even on these web clips you can see the F3 blows away the Sony FS100 and MK ii in quality. It is simply stunning in image quality. Should be at over $20,000 a pop! But is the extra quality worth the extra? Only you, your project and your wallet will know. For me, I can't even afford a Canon 7D. But as a former large format professional landscape photographer, I know quality when I see it.

Check out Phil Bloom's site. It is bloomin good. Would love to do his London workshop this July...

Here is a comparison test Bloom did between the Sony F3, Sony FS100 and Canon 5D Mark ii. The low light tests on his father are stunning.


AF100 vs F3 vs FS100 Part 1: The Real World from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Michael Mann talks about digital collateral

The following is an article I found on the net, but the source link of the article appears broken. I can say it was originally from the Hollywood Reporter. It is below in entirety:


Revving up digital cinematography

By Carolyn Giardina

Pictured: Director Michael Mann with the Viper FilmStream digital camera on the set of "Collateral" 

Leave it to Michael Mann to shake up the system. The Oscar-nominated director famous for gritty yet visually dazzling depictions of urban life and an uncompromising attitude toward his craft is now ushering digital filmmaking from the extreme reaches of science fiction and low-budget indie into the realm of high-profile studio thriller. The director has elected to use Thomson Grass Valley's Viper FilmStream camera for his upcoming "Collateral," the Tom Cruise-starrer financed by DreamWorks and Paramount, scheduled for an Aug. 6 release. 


As the first director to road-test the Viper -- much anticipated as the first cinema camera capable of storing images as data, directly to a hard drive -- Mann's choices are worth noting in a creative community coming to grips with the practicalities and pitfalls of digital imaging.


The Viper isn't the only camera Mann is using to shoot the movie, which he describes as a "multimedia" effort. He's using the Sony CineAlta high-definition camera, as well as shooting film, but of the roughly 80% of the finished film Mann estimates he's captured digitally, about 80% originated from the Viper.


Mann says his choice was driven by the film's creative needs. The story -- of a veteran hit man (Cruise) who hijacks a cab and forces the driver (Jamie Foxx) to traverse the streets of Los Angeles, transporting him from job to job until the LAPD and the FBI begin to pursue the vehicle -- seems well-suited to electronic cameras.


"Everything is pretty much driven by story, and this whole picture takes place at night," the director says. "I wanted to see into the night. I wanted the night to be alive so that it becomes very three-dimensional. That's what I was trying to get," says Mann, kicking back at the Santa Monica offices that house his production company, Forward Pass.


"There was a quality to the Viper cam that I responded to," says Mann, who is no stranger to digital cameras, having employed high-definition video for the opening sequences of his 2001 biopic "Ali." In particular, he says, the Viper's color imaging worked well for this particular film. "It had to do with the sensitivity of reds and yellows and oranges. This was not only seeing deeply into the night, seeing what you see with the naked eye and something more than you can see with the naked eye, but also the color information. It had an aesthetic that I wanted."


The Viper operates in several modes. At the high end is FilmStream, which captures unprocessed imagery -- no color correction, no compression -- in the 4:4:4 RGB color space, the full color range of an electronic image signal. (While analog film still offers significantly greater color sensitivity than any electronic medium, 4:4:4 RGB is the highest level currently offered in the electronic realm. Film scanned into the digital domain for effects manipulation or what have you is scanned at 4:4:4 RGB. By way of comparison, broadcast HD operates in a 4:2:2 YUV environment, subsampling in blue and red. The Viper also offers 4:2:2 options.)


Though other high-end digital cameras, including the CineAlta, also shoot in 4:4:4 RGB, Thomson vp strategic marketing and business development Jeff Rosica says that what sets the Viper apart is the proprietary CCDs that capture the image as well as the way the data, once acquired, is distributed. The CCDs capture 12-bit linear image, which is then transmitted and stored at 10-bit log space. "Because it's logarithmic, it actually emulates the most important properties of a 12-bit linear signal," says Rosica. The signal is then transferred to a recording device via a dual-link serial HD connection.


Mann and his team began an extensive testing phase by recording material in FilmStream onto a DVS digital disk recorder. "The total capacity was 55 minutes, and it took 35 hours to download (to videotape for dailies)," Mann says. "So obviously that wasn't ready for feature film production." 


Next, they tested S.two digital mags to store the uncompressed raw data. "So our storage went down to something that was physically manageable in a much more compact hard drive," Mann says. "But what it posed upon us was a long-term storage capacity of 330 terabytes, which is economically unfeasible with the current limits of the drive technology." (A terabyte of storage costs about $50,000.)


Mann then decided "to see what would happen if we put a mild compression on (the images)" and switched to Viper's VideoStream mode, which offers a 10-bit 4:4:4 RGB video, as opposed to data, signal and provides light image processing allowing for truer color reproduction in the field. "With FilmStream you're getting raw data. VideoStream functions more like a normal high-def camera, which allowed him to control the ASA," says "Collateral" associate producer Bryan Carroll.


Both modes lens in 2.37:1 widescreen without any loss of vertical resolution.


"We took it all the way to the equivalent of a release print, so it's not like we were looking at something on a monitor and taking it on faith," Mann says.


While employing the latest in digital imaging technologies, Mann took care to note that his storytelling fundamentals are essentially unchanged. "In our system, we impose on everybody the grammar and syntax that we are shooting film. All the disciplines apply, and that's very important on the floor during production. We are mixing a digital culture with a film culture, and it has to be film grammar."


That approach drove the design of a massive workflow system that brought together the material from the film camera, Viper, and the other camera system Mann employed, Sony's CineAlta F900 HD. The HDCAM footage essentially had to be handled as camera negative. Everything that was shot -- film and digital -- was digitized into Avids for postproduction, during which a digital color grading session will take place.


Mann cites Carroll as well as Thomson's Mark Chiolis, Laser Pacific's Leon Silverman and Terry Brown and Panavision's Nolan Murdock as integral to working out the bugs in the system.


Prior to filming, a team including Mann and A-camera operator Gary Jay, (who has worked with Mann since 1992's "The Last of the Mohicans") guided modifications to the Viper.


"The camera body itself wasn't ergonomic for use on a production," Mann says. "We wanted weights added to the rear of the camera to increase the mass and balance back there. We needed rods for the matte box and focus-bracket system because we do a lot of hand-holding. The control buttons needed covers because you could unbalance the camera and not know you did it. This is small stuff, but it's major when you just got done having a take that's brilliant, or you think that the actors were brilliant and it looks perfect, and you find out you switched it to FilmStream."


With his arsenal of camera technology, production began and Mann focused his attention on directing. Dion Beebe ("Chicago") came on board as director of photography.


As 27 pages of the "Collateral" screenplay take place in a car, mobility was a priority. There were some limitations as the Viper was cabled to its recording deck. Mann says that when he wanted complete mobility for handheld work, the crew used the CineAlta F900 (which is configured more like a camcorder, recording to either standard Sony HDCAM or SW tapes).


"The benefit is that there is a 55-minute tape, so in that sense there are fewer interruptions," Mann says. "(With film) if you are hand holding and you have a 400-foot mag in there, every three minutes and 45 seconds you are having to stop." (There are third-party developers working on Viper recording options, including a portable drive to enable cinematographers to work untethered.)


Creatively, he says, "there's no silver bullet in all of this. ... You have to know what you want, more so than film. In film, you can rely on certain conventional looks, almost like a perceptual preset about what you're used to having. Not so in video, it's a much broader spectrum so you have to know what you want.


"What I like about the Viper is it sees colors, it sees things, in a different way," Mann says. "People are reaching for more expressive ways to visualize and have emotional impact. That's what it all comes down to, the emotional impact to tell a story."

Dante Spinotti & Michael Mann history of collaboration

One of the key people that has helped to bring Michael Mann success is his Director of Photography. Dante Spinotti was the first to collaborate with Mann on a feature film, this being Manhunter. Spinotti is now something of a cinematographer legend, and here is an excellent interview with him. I include an excerpt below about his arrival on the set of Last of the Mohicans, but he refers to some of the other movies he has worked on. To read the full interview click here, but an excerpt is included below:

DCR: What about The Last of the Mohicans?

SPINOTTI: Michael Mann called and spoke with me about this film, and he sent me the screenplay. What else would you want from life than a chance to film a great story set in 1700? Michael’s visual references included a couple of paintings, including Thomas Cole and Alfred Bierstadt. This is very typical of Michael. He shows you a simple image and says, ‘this is the movie.’ The paintings all showed how small human beings are in the scope of nature. Michael wanted everything to be extremely accurate. He offered me the picture, but it took a lot of time for him to put this project together. While I was waiting, Gary Marshall offered me a film called Frankie and Johnny. That was the film, which finally allowed me to get into the camera Guild. That opportunity was very important to me. It enabled me to work on other films in Hollywood, and also because I was always connected to union activities in Europe. Gary Marshall is a wonderful director and human being. A few weeks after we finished Frankie and Johnny, I was in Rome. 

One of the producers called and said Michael Mann wanted me to shoot The Last of the Mohicans. They booked me on a Concorde on a three-hour flight on Friday night. I was jet-lagged when I arrived and saw this amazing set of a British fort with actors dressed in military uniforms from 1700. All of our lighting was going to be based on sun and moonlight bonfires, torches and candles. There was a wonderful cast, including Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. Michael said he wanted was to keep the look monochromatic. One of the scenes that I was happiest with reproduced the pounding power of a waterfall in an interior shot set in a cave at night. You can’t see the waterfall, but you can feel its immense power in the pounding water on the faces of the actors. We bounced light from a couple of 4K Xenon’s with some big 12 x12 Mylar frames that a grip was shaking in front of them You can see the pattern of moving light on the faces and feel the power of the waterfall.

Full interview is here > 

See the effect Dante mentions about reproducing the flickering light on the faces in the scene below:

Michael Mann's The Insider Cinematography

Here is a good find on the net. A useful blog featuring top cinematography stills from history's most memorable movies. Featured amongst the greats is Michael Mann's The Insider - a personal favourite. The blogger also has a video of Quentin Tarantino giving his top 20 films. I am pleased to see The Insider at number 11. See it below this post or go to the link here.

Evan, the blogger, commented on The Insider stills in the following way:

It was shot 2:35. Unfortunately it hasn’t been released in an HD format yet except on tv. So this is an HD tv rip and they pretty much always use the same 16:9 aspect ratio for all their television releases. When it is released on blu-ray I’ll post it again. But it’s better than nothing for now.

In his later years Sydney Pollack would purposely frame shots with people at opposite edges of the frame so that his movies couldn’t be cropped to a different aspect ratio.

Another blog, with an excellent comment on the art of cinematography, with a comment on Public Enemies can be found here.

Camera used on Michael Mann's public enemies

About 95% of Public Enemies was shot with the Sony F23.

Do you fall weak at the knees whenever you see a gorgeous.... camera? If so, then we are alike. I love cameras (and yes, I would love a RED). We all know they are a workers tool, and nothing more. But a workman gets attached to their tools, and I am very sentimental about all the cameras I own. So, for all the camera buffs, here is an interesting mann link on the camera used for Public Enemies – The Sony F23 (which unlike the RED, isn't that pretty).

Here is an extract of the article – for the full link, click here.

A few months before principal photography began on “Public Enemies,” Mann and Carroll tested the F23 on a series of commercials. On one set, it was mounted to a race car driving at speeds of up to 140 miles per hour. On another, it was handheld with the operator running between football players on the practice field to capture the shots.

“The F23’s ergonomics, film-like design and incredible amount of features – such as multi-speed recording, ramping and, of course the 4:4:4, 10-bit quality – proved to be bullet-proof,” Carroll said. “The camera just works and does its job.”

About 95 percent of the movie was shot with the F23, while the Sony PMW-EX1 camcorder handled shots that required a more mobile tool. For example, the compact EX1 camcorder was used to lens the interior of planes and cars during high-speed chases.

American Cinematographer Magazine

You cannot be a Michael Mann fan without being a true appreciator of fine cinematography - a hallmark of every movie he has made. There are a number of American Cinematographer back issues you can purchase that feature interviews with top cinematographers, but I think the ones featuring Mann films are regretfully now out of stock, as a quick search didn't bring them up. However, all is not lost as they provide back issues in digital format too, going back to May 2007. So the Public Enemies feature can be downloaded at just $5.95. For those who don't know what an issue looks like, check this November 2010 issue out. Nothing Mann related in this issue, but I have been a subscriber and its worth every penny. Enjoy. Just click the Expand button to view it full size.

Dion Beebe on shooting Michael Mann's Collateral in HD

Here is an excellent article I came across detailing DP Dion Beebe's (Miami Vice, Collateral) approach to shooting Collateral. I made the mistake of thinking Miami Vice was a poor visual outing for Dion when I first saw it. But many viewings later, I don't know what I was thinking. Miami Vice is stunning and in some instances, genius. At some point I will post my top cinematographic moments... but there are many.

You can get the full article by clicking here, and read a snippet below:

On an HD shoot, Beebe quickly learned, the devil’s in the details — like the sudden appearance of filter dials on your camera. "With a film camera, you load the film and you go, and you know that if you’re running six cameras, you’ve got a standardized system in place so you’re getting the same results," he explains. "But if you’re running four HD cameras, you’d better step through each, making sure that the gain setting is the same, that the matrix settings are all the same— that there aren’t color shifts within them. You need to switch between them on the HD monitors and make sure they’re all matching up. There’s none of this just-pick-it-up-and-roll unless you’ve pre-set everything beforehand. It’s all very doable, but there’s a whole new set of things you’ve got to factor in."

Beebe acknowledges that Collateral has spurred "a lot of discussion" about the continued viability and relevance of the film medium, concerns that he dismisses as largely irrelevant to the job at hand, which is storytelling. In the end, he says, both film and HD formats are just tools used in service of a narrative. The trick is to get out of the way of technology, rather than stay in thrall to it. "There can be information overload when you step into the digital domain and the HD world, in terms of compression and bits and storage— these elements that, in the end, have nothing to do with what you’re trying to do in telling the story," he says. "My feeling is that technology will take care of itself. You will have the expertise around you to solve the technical challenges you’re going to meet. I’ve always felt happy to just step over the technology and find a way of creating the image."

DSLRs being used on Michael Mann's "Luck"

David Presley with a Canon 1D Mark IV for use on "Luck"

Seems Michael Mann continues to innovate in the digital realm, working with David Presley, Mann's main video technician, on the exciting forthcoming TV series "Luck". And I thought Mann was a Nikon fan.


By: Jared Abrams
I got the chance to hang out with David Presley this weekend during some tests of the new Canon 1D Mark IV for an upcoming pilot for HBO called “LUCK”. David is Michael Mann’s main guy in the video department. He was doing some tests of the rolling shutter on the 1D. We set up some duvetyne above this white on white ceiling fan to get some strobing at fast shutter speeds. The HBO pilot is based on horse racing and David wanted to try to use DSLR’s because of their size and image quality. I set him up with Birns and Sawyer who had the only 1D in town.

Shooting Public Enemies

Emulating the period of the 1930's was one of the major challenges facing Michael Mann and DP Dante Spinotti. Here is an excellent overview of many of the technical and aesthetic approaches Mann mixed together to produce Public Enemies. For any creative endeavour to be fully realized the mastery of technique has to be attained. Without it, artistic visualization can never be achieved. Mann's strength is in his ability to visualize and execute. This article reveals the processes behind Mann's decision to employ certain technical approaches to Public Enemies.

Here is a brief extract of what is a long article:

“We did tests down in the parking lot [of Mann’s offices], set up with some posters from 1933 and cars and lights,” Spinotti says. “We did side-by-side tests with a film camera next to the F23, shooting daytime and going into twilight and then night. We also did various lighting tests. Company 3 [Santa Monica, Calif.,] did the transfer for both, scanning the film and then bringing the digital files into a digital negative and then printing, and then we compared film prints. The results were interesting: The F23 was extremely sharp, probably a bit sharper than film itself. The tonal range wasn’t the same as film—we all know the tonal range of film holding onto the highlights is extraordinary and digital hasn’t quite met that yet. But nevertheless, the way that digital dealt with shadows, really reading into shadows and darkness and doing it with extreme sharpness, convinced Michael, and I agreed: The way to go was digital. The other consideration was the agility and elasticity of working with those cameras and how Michael could work his preferred way. All this would let him go into an area that is almost hyperreal.”

Read the Full Article: Click Here

How DP Dion Beebe adapted to HD for Michael Mann's Collateral

Dion Beebe is famed for being the Oscar Winning Director of Photography for the stunning Memoirs of a Geisha. Anyone who has any doubts about Dion Beeb's ability are nuts - he is genius with a camera. The following is an excerpt of an interview with Dion Beebe, DP of Michael Mann's Collateral.

Ready, Set, Shoot!

Any DP making a first move into digital cinematography might expect to have time to study the new format, running tests and experimenting with different approaches, before actually lighting a scene and rolling tape. But Beebe landed on Collateral with no ramp-up time. Two weeks of production had already been completed with cinematographer Paul Cameron (Swordfish, Man on Fire), whom Beebe was hired to replace. So he hit the ground running, calmly assessing how Mann’s decision to shoot digital would complement the story he was trying to tell.

"Certainly when you look at it on screen, the format is different from film," Beebe notes. "It’s a different result. Because you’re seeing a night world that is richly illuminated, with an enormous amount of depth, it’s slightly unsettling. It feels almost otherworldly, and it’s somehow a little bit alienating. I think that works so well with the storyline and with the journey of these two characters in this cab, because it becomes this alien landscape. You’re left with a different impression, certainly, than if it were shot on film."

The decision to switch between the Grass Valley Viper camera, Sony’s HDW-F900 camcorder and 35mm film throughout the shoot had more to do with practical issues than with aesthetics. For example, Beebe says the production favored the F900s, with their onboard recording, when the camera needed to be very portable— scenes shot inside the cab, for instance— and film cameras were used when action scenes needed to be overcranked, one area where digital cinematography still lags far behind the curve. The Viper’s main disadvantage was its umbilical-cord connection to the hefty HDCAM-SR decks that were used to record the data. ( Sony has since introduced the portable SRW-1, a streamlined approach to image capture that would have been welcome on Collateral.) But that inconvenience was outweighed by the Viper’s ability to capture a widescreen image across the camera’s full vertical resolution, rather than simply masking the top and bottom of the frame to the desired aspect ratio. In the end, Beebe says, the Vipers "did the bulk of the work."

Read the full interview here

Dion Beebe - Miami Vice Cinematography

If you are like me and interested in cinematography, why not pick up a back copy of an interview with Dion Beebe on shooting Miami Vice the movie. You can purchase it at the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) website.

Michael Mann again relies on LaserPacific for front-end and preview services.

Michael Mann has always been willing to use new technology during the production and post production of his movies. For his latest movie, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, Michael Mann and DP Dante Spinotti, ASC, tested various digital cameras before settling on Sony's F-23. They were supported in this pre-production testing by their trusted partner, LaserPacific. Once Michael Mann had settled on the F-23, LaserPacific helped to determine the best camera set-up and workflow.

Working on Public Enemies reunited LaserPacific with Michael Mann and his post producer, Brian Carroll. Just as on Collateral and Miami Vice, LaserPacific provided video dailies for editorial and studio executives along with dailies playback on location. This includes playback of the digital dailies on a calibrated projector in a custom screening room, set up by LaserPacific's skilled projector engineers.

Technical workflow for post production on Collateral

As someone very interested in photography (I own a large format camera), I am very interested in the digital technology Mann employs for his movies. Collateral was of course renowned for its digital over film choice. Here is an excerpt from a tidy interview with Michael Mann on post production of Collateral. As ever, click here to see the full article.

F&V: Break down the workflow in terms of shooting.

We shot about half the movie on film, and then 20 percent with the Sony CineAlta HD camera, and the rest with the Viper FilmStream. The CineAlta has two more stops of range at the high end, so before whites clip and burn out, I’ll see details. So if I’m shooting in front of a car, I’ll see the outline of the car’s headlight with the Sony camera, but I won’t with the Viper camera. That’s the strength of the CineAlta camera.

F&V: What’s the strength of the Viper camera and how did that mesh with the workflow?

It’s got this glorious, lustrous mid-range, particularly in the records it makes of reds, yellows, oranges and blues. I love that look. Basically it’s a different chip. The Sony uses a Japanese chip while the Viper’s is made in Northern Europe, and I don’t know why but it has this totally different palette of rich Rembrandt-style colors. Maybe it’s the Dutch chip [a 9.2 million pixel frame-transfer CCD]. Go figure, but that’s the way it is. That was a big issue to us— how it looks on video— but now I’ve got to film the thing out, get a [Kodak] Vision release print and put it up on a 60-foot-wide screen. Now what’s it look like? And the heightened resolution, meaning more information, is there in the Viper, so that was really our camera of choice. Then we recorded to HDCAM-SR tape using Sony SRW-5000 machines. That was the best format available to us, and that way we could get compressed images made and then work on them and tweak them later in post. The drawback with the Viper was that you’re hooked to a bunch of recorders by these umbilical cords, so when I had to be freewheeling with the camera I’d go with the Sony camera, which uses cassettes instead.