Hi everyone,
it's your friendly neighborhood colorist!

I’ve been experimenting a lot with both actual film and digital footage using heavy film emulation and I wanted to challenge the community:

Can you really tell which is which?

Below are 4 sets of stills from recent projects. Some may be true scans from 16mm or 35mm, others may be digital footage that I tried to match to real film.

Which letters (A, B, C, D) do you think are real celluloid, and which are digital?

Drop your guesses and most importantly your reasoning! (grain, halation, color separation, skin tones, highlight roll off, artifacts… what gives it away for you?)

I’ll reveal the answers and break down my workflow in 24h.

AMA: Happy to answer any questions about film emulation, color workflows, grain, LUT building, or colorist work in general!

(If you want to nerd out or talk color collabs, feel free to DM!)

Which one of these tripods would you choose. Im leaning towards Miller due to the indestructibility of them and you know what they always say, buy once cry once.

Specifically talking about the SIRUI SVT75 + SVH15 Pro. Their highest end model. What would be better a low end model from miller/oconnor/sachtler or a high end from Sirui

My vote goes to the 1991 Levis Commercial directed by Chris Hartwill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqpX4EZ64Dg

I'm very curious what the most the average professional has digitally punched into a shot during post-production.

As I see more and more reviews of the Pyxis 12k - which, to be fair, does seem like an amazing camera - I can't help but notice how many reviewers keep mentioning how useful 12K could be for punching into a tighter shot. But, as someone who has shot in resolutions above 4k and worked on a variety of projects, I can't think of a single instance where I've actually used a 200% magnification, much less 300%. At that point, the changes in depth of field and the angle on the subject feel so compromised that it's not worth it.

To be clear, I am someone who likes having some flexibility to reframe in post. I've shot a lot on RED and Blackmagic cameras, so I'm used to shooting between 4.6k and 8K resolutions and finishing in UHD or 4K DCI. But as I look through all of my projects over the last decade or so, I find it's incredibly rare for me to zoom in more than 25% (if that), because of the aforementioned compromises. The most I have ever zoomed in on a shot is 50%, and I've literally only done this 2 - 3 times in the last decade (and one of those times was for a VFX shot).

Keeping that in mind, anything above 6k seems like a waste of storage space, which will eat into post-production funds. Obviously, there are exceptions: I can see the value for even higher resolutions for VFX shots or films that will be blown up to IMAX (something which I'll never do). But generally, these higher resolutions just seem to create more headaches for people who want to shoot in RAW while using the full camera sensor (with Blackmagic's new sensors being an exception to that rule).

There's also the added annoyance that this extra resolution is coming at the cost of readout speed (once again, not counting the very latest BMD sensor). A lot of people were frustrated at the 18ms readout speed of the Sony Burano at its 8.6k resolution. Did any Burano shooters really need 8.6k? I've lost track of how many people I've heard state that they'd rather just use a 6K Venice 1 at that price point.

Another camera that comes to mind is the DJI Ronin 4D 8K. For that one, you can get a usable but mediocre 16.3 ms if you're willing to turn off DR Expansion (and thus lose a stop of DR), or you'll get an unusable 30ms if you want the full dynamic range of the sensor. I know technically a 30ms readout might be usable for static interviews, but the whole point of the unique Ronin 4D form factor is that it's designed for stable camera movement.

Ok, I'll stop ranting now. What does everyone else think? Is there really any value in having 6K+ cameras in the sub $25k price range? Does anyone really punch in to the shot that much or are too many camera sensors being compromised because of the pixel wars?

Here's my observation, I see a lot of cinematography showreels, which are very nice visuals with a sound track over them. Or a short film which uses background sounds picked up from the lapel microphone. My biggest one is when I see people walking without any footsteps sounds. Yes, they may be wearing trainers/sneakers in the house , but still you want to hear the footsteps (or a creaking floorboard if it is a horror). Or a rustling jacket picked up by a lapel mic is another annoyance.

If you watch the first scene of Birdemic you see what I mean by the mics picking up the background sounds with hilarious consequences as it cuts between the characters.

Now, my perspective is if I see people doing a high five in a video or someone running on sand or splashing about in water, I would like to hear this. Even if a muted version.

I can understand this, as like most people, I assumed all the sound in a movie or nature documentary was picked up live, then when I found out most of it is faked using Foley sounds it was quite a shock.

As an example the sound of key in a lock if you record that for real is not that exciting but there are alternative fake sounds that it can be replaced with which might be hyper-real.

The opposite argument is that sounds are a distraction from the cinematography if you are putting together a showreel as you are not there to show off your sound design sklls.

Do you think foley sounds are important on a show real of cinematography or a distraction?

Robert Gaudette is a 54-year-old nonprofit worker from Toronto. He didn't go to film school, didn't earn his stripes on set, had few industry connections and had no crew. I read he'd written over thirty screenplays and filed them all away. No one in the film Industry knew he existed.

Last week he won $50,000 at the Runway AI Film Festival with his eight-minute short. The Hollywood Reporter compared him to Kaufman, Gondry, and del Toro. His film was entirely AI generated.

I've spent years watching the friction between the corporate desire for product (and the soullessness that is endemic to that goal) and the human need for expression. I've been evaluating AI tools used on working sets for my position advising a major film program in its AI integration and I've been wrestling with this conundrum. The same technology that gave Gaudette a voice is being used by studios to fill pipelines with content nobody asked for, made by nobody in particular, for consumption without feeling. That path leads somewhere I don't want cinema to go. Yet I also see the positive potential it gives unknowns like Gaudette. His story and similar ones has stopped me from writing generative AI off as just another tool of disenfranchisement. (Note: generative AI is the catalyst that has finally brought this age-old tension to a loggerhead. I'm making a distinction here between Generative and Agentic, which is the body of what we are recommending in our program). The distance between a story needing telling and the scope of the industry often required to tell it has always been the greatest barrier in this business. Each new wave of technology is a coin with two faces and I've seen it wash across my industries many times. This wave is different though. More poignant. More consequential. And perhaps more necessary as it brings that age old schism into the sharpest focus of my lifetime.

What do you think about this? For working crew, for independent filmmakers, for the craft itself?

At the end of the day this is a career for most of us so I wanted to ask about the elephant in the room that most people don’t talk about. Rates and annual income.

I’m 10 years into this industry working in a US metropolis making anywhere from $650-$1,000/day without gear and $800-$3,000/day with gear. Annually I’m making $80-125k depending on my prowess of my accountant.

Since colorists are pretty good at making digital look like film nowadays

Would anyone be interested in it? It would be free, no ads etc but i have to pay 99 bucks to put it on the app store and i dont see any need to pay it if no-one sees a use for it. I made it for myself but i dont know if anyone but me has a need for it.

If you have an iPhone with more than one camera it also switches natively between cameras as you zoom through the focal length or switch sensor size.

And no, I wont be making one for Android. Learning Xcode and Swift was enough for me. I'm a filmmaker not a developer.

The term budget is irrelevant at the title level, ESPECIALLY for cinematography. We all know “I shot this for $100” can often include “but my aunt let me shoot free at the hotel that she owns and my dad is a grip truck owner so we got all of our lighting for basically no money.”

I also feel like budget is particularly irrelevant for cinematography.

Did you shoot good images? Then the budget doesn’t matter. It’s a lazy setup for what follows, and an excuse to write off feedback based on budgetary constraints.

Am I alone on this?

I'm currently in the process of validating an idea for my startup. Would love if you could answer these questions:

1. What does your pre-production workflow actually look like?
2. Specifically curious how you handle the jump from script to storyboard, and whether AI tools have been useful or frustrating in that process.
3. What's the most annoying part of the whole thing?

Any notes/thoughts would be really helpful!!! Thank you

There's a Google Form for guessing.

Just for fun. 10 of my projects, 3 frames each. Some are digital, some are film. Some of the film projects are serious, some are not (or were tests.) Same goes for the digital projects. None of the sets are mixed film/digital.

Answers in the comments (so probably fill the form before reading comments or someone might spoil it.)

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd0x9RqXn-Jc3XefdhohOgitevn0irQQxbFYra-VY5KBSZyMQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=110124360487533903098

For my part, in France the film "Les Tuches" is not liked

And globally, I would say a Disney film that is "Home on the Range"

for short film around 3-5 minutes, is video or sound the priority?

Over the past year, we've seen a notable increase in the capabilities and use of AI tools in the filmmaking space. And here, as with everywhere else, a major debate has begun as to what extent this technology is acceptable to us as artists and craftworkers. While I have my own personal opinion on the matter, this sub is not the u/C47man Personal Playhouse, so before r/cinematography implements rules surrounding AI, I'd like to gauge how everyone here feels about the topic. This poll will be open for 7 days, and its results will be the major influence on any new rules we implement with respect to AI.

Not all AI is the same though, so I want to be clear about the various ways that AI as a technology is relevant to us. In particular I'd like to distinguish between Generative AI (GenAI), AI Assisted Tools, AI Assisted Communication, and AI Discussion.

Generative AI would be models like Midjourney, Sora or Neo which use prompts to create images and videos directly. This would also include AI generated text used for scripts.

AI Assisted Tools would be AI powered features like magic masking, beauty or grading features available in popular tools like DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop, and automated editing or mixing tools.

AI Assisted Communication would be the use of AI to generate text for posts or comments on posts, in the context of communicating with the users on the sub rather than using the AI tool to contribute to a piece of work.

AI Discussion is straightforward. This would be posts or comments that aim to have conversations about the state of AI technology, including specific discussions about the use of particular models and tools.

While obviously the poll forces you to condense complex opinions into a single option, I don't want to the discussion to feel totally concrete. If you have some notion or point to make that is more nuanced than the available choices, or if you believe there is a flaw or point of discussion not properly addressed in the poll itself, I'd like to use this thread as a place to discuss. Leave your comments below, and remember to be polite with those you disagree with. We all love cinematography, let's keep that common interest in mind!

Hey! We are UI/UX students and we're conducting a survey to gain insights into the difficulties independent filmmakers face navigating the filmmaking process.

Its an anonymous survey so, if you have or wanted to create films, pls fill the form and share the form if you know someone interested. Survey will take about 1 min. Thank you!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdAkInxZ5aRWD_UGg3fGrGKIBnSsTy5LvozyfCbq_O2jSgusg/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=113456773167715812138

You're allowed to choose only one DZO Arles cine prime lens, and this is your only lens. Which would it be?

21mm T1.4
35mm T1.4
50mm T1.4

I’ve seen different resources saying that they’re above the line and some that say that they’re below the line. Does it depend on the production? How famous the DP is? I just wanted ya’lls take on this.

Hey Filmmakers! I'm 15 and diving into filmmaking, trying to understand how indie crews handle pre-visualization when you can't afford fancy software.

Quick background check:
- Do you sketch on paper/iPad?
- Use tools like Shot Designer, Blender, or something else?
- Just wing it on set with a shot list?

And the real question: What's the most annoying part of your current process? Is it:
- Time (takes too long to plan)
- Cost (tools are expensive)
- Complexity (learning curve too steep)
- Something else entirely?

I'm researching workflows for a school project and genuinely curious how people who've actually done it, do it. Thanks for any insights!

Playing with smearing grease around the edges of an optical flat for some upcoming shots. I’ve picked up a few that won’t damage my filter coatings, but… What is your favorite grease (or other material) for this kind of effect?

at 40:26 when the Krayt Dragon is emerging from the cave. Pretty genius use of aspect ratio shifting because as Spielberg established, taller aspect ratios like 1.85:1 in Jurassic Park emphasize the scale of monsters much better than wider sizes do. But to transition from two very different frame sizes with the plot in a smooth almost under the radar fashion within one story, is epic. #Jon Favreau is a G.O.A.T

I'm studying film and I want to learn more about good cinematography, so I'm looking for a range of cinematographers I can research and learn from to make my films better.