As a non-film person, can someone explain what it means to create the same cinematic ‘look’ as Hollywood feature films? What is Blackmagic doing when recording video to make the video feel more professional?
Something that makes a video look amateurish, it's the phone trying its best to prioritise a 'clear image', but that means changing parameters mid-recording.
Now, this isn't bad, it's ideal for someone who doesn't want to lose the moment without worrying about choosing the right setting (imagine a parent recording their child's recital or soccer game). But the trade-off is that it looks choppy.
But if you're in a controlled environment, you can set a fixed exposure (balance between ISO, shutter speed and aperture), framerate, bit-depth, focus distance, colour temperature and microphone gain depending on your intent.
As an example, image you want to have a high-contrast image with a dark silluette of someone and a bright background like a sunset, the default phone camera app will try to guess whether you want to focus on the subject or the background, and will switching between the two randomly. With manual control, you can chose, whatch you want.
A prime example of this is leaving autofocus on when you're moving about. There's many YouTubers who haven't yet learnt this lesson and it can make the video unwatchable.
But it's a slow and smooth motion without any focus breathing intended to highlight an object or an actor, not just autofocus hunting to find something
Focus can be controlled manually on the iPhone (in 3rd party apps).
A dedicated person, called a focus puller, has a remote with a wheel on the side. By turning this wheel the focus puller can remotely control the focus ring of the lens.
The remote usually allows the focus puller to set the maximum range of motion with A/B points. The system doesn't automatically execute the focus pull, but with the hard stops at the A/B points the focus puller can make sure they don't overshoot the target.
Back then the focus puller would use a remote connected by a cable, which is why you see a focus puller running behind the steadicam op in that video.
That's why while you've got A/B points set and marks set on the focus control, you still need a human.
Depending on various conditions (lighting, lens choice, etc) there might be a very large distance range that is in focus - or it might just be a few inches. Even if the focus puller isn’t doing any big focus swings, they are likely making small adjustments.
I''m sure modern neural nets would do a decent job of simulating what a frame taken with one iso/shutter/focus would look like with a slightly different iso/shutter/focus.
Second, modern neural nets are good, but not perfect. I can reliably tell if something was shot with real bokeh, or simulated via software. For serious productions like a commercial shoot, nobody wants to change the shutter speed, aperture, etc in shoot: the DP already knows what look they want before they start filming.
I'm sure it would quickly learn to add/remove motion blur on moving things as appropriate.
Read the Foreword written by Gerald Sussman (SICP author) of the book The Little Schemer.
The most beautiful Foreword I have ever read so far.
¹(The Foreword talks about photography a little bit).
This video explains it nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAh83khT1no
If you are starting out with good data (e.g. 32bit exr workflow), you would be amazed how powerfully and easily you can control what you want and what the possibilities are, with tools like MagicBullet (which offer presets to get you the cinema look with just a mouse click). But if you work long enough in this area you can discover your own workflow and pull it off without these tools, e.g. play with hue&sat, white balance adjustments, the curves, introducing an S-curve for example, color wheels, etc.
to my (literal) perception, using a framerate of 24 frames per second is an even more significant requirement to get the "cinematic Hollywood look".
The overall frame rate gives you the distinction between a typical movie vs a TV-style documentary. The overall frame rate stays fixed across a movie and should normally not be changed.
I can't wait when Hollywood moves to 120fps or better.
For whatever psychological reason, 24 fps "suggests" reality but without "being" reality, kind of like being in a dream, and our brains pay attention to story and action.
While 60+ fps "approaches" reality and it simply starts to feel both uncomfortably real and uncomfortably fake. Uncomfortably real because it feels too much like real-life and we don't have enough of a mental distinction between fantasy and reality, and uncomfortably fake because it looks like a bunch of actors acting and moving in ways that aren't the ways people act and move in real life. It's uncanny valley.
Nobody really knows why our brains respond this way psychologically. They just do.
So for fictional movie/TV content, higher fps is not better. 24/30 is chosen for a very good reason.
(On the other hand, news and sports do great with higher fps, because there's nothing fake trying to be passed off as real.)
I guess it is similar for higher frame rates - it just shows the shortcomings.
I think if the film industry committed to higher frame rates we would have seen massive improvements over the years.
Personally I'm not enough of a film buff to notice the difference. Apparently film enthusiasts do notice, and care a great deal, though.
Its actually fairly neat and cool that they put time and money into this app to further their ecosystem. I guess theres a large overlap of people that film with iphones and also want to buy a legitimately good, budget cinema camera in the pocket 4k/6k.
I don't know HN's opinion of blackmagic, but they do some pretty cool stuff. With the purchase of a camera they include Davinci Resolve which is a fully featured Adobe Premier Pro rival. For reference premier pro is $21 a month, and the cheapest blackmagic cinema cam is the pocket 4k which comes in at $1200, after 5 years you have a free camera (thats still actively updated) if you consider Resolve to be equivalent to Premier Pro. Also they've constantly pushed the industry to be more affordable. They were pretty much the first that let you use a consumer usb c SSD to record raw formats. When the camera released, you could get 1tb samsung T5's for around $100, while one of their rivals RED cameras made you purchase a proprietary SSD that still costs $1500 for 480GB. Also in terms of affordability, it wasn't unheard of for a cinema camera to charge thousands of dollars to be able to use a cinemaDNG raw or ProRes, yet blackmagic cameras came with multiple raw recording options for free.
That's also included with the speed editor, which is ~$400 and provides an awesome input device for Resolve.
2. The "cinematic look" comes from a combination of things:
- good lighting (using professional lights in most situations)
- 180 degree shutter angle (aka "24fps"), or slow motion where appropriate
- careful and artistic color grading
- taking time to set up the scene in advance & good framing
- good lenses
- good camera sensors (mainly, high dynamic range)
- holding the camera still or moving it smoothly through the scene (except when deliberately not, as in for instance The Office)
- music
- and, more important than you'd think: very high quality audio (good mics, appropriately mic'd, low noise, dubbed in post if needed, SFX added)
3. In short, what creates the "cinematic look" is many factors (and, usually, people) coming together as a system. This app lets your phone be part of that system.
4. What makes this app unique: (1) it integrates directly with Davinci Resolve in a way that's probably more convenient than Filmic Pro for that workflow and (2) it's free.
People have been making films and TV shows on iPhones for years, so this is more of an incremental event in the industry.
Lightning:
- Edge or back lightning, if dramatic
- Wraparaound (cradle) lighting, if for pleasantness
- Low key look for interiors (no white walls)
- Artificial light needs to be motivated as much as possible
Set design
- Add bankers light for any money related film, normal table light for anything else
Lens
- Anamorphics to avoid perspective distortion typical to spherical lenses, also for the "rich depth of field" effect
- Surprisingly the best lens technically don't give the most "pleasing" (at least in "hollywood" terms) image. They are even called "clinical" or too sharp. A lot of DP's like lens with a "character", altough some artifacts are regarded universally ugly (like the longitudinal chromatic aberration, which pukes green and cyan fringes around the image)
Camera
- High dynamic range camera, no clipping of highlights or blacks (add light, if necessary)
- Must be able to retain true image details, any digital sharpening in the source footage immediately puts things off
Color grading:
- Good tone mapping: should look "good" in black and white, mostly solved with lighting
- Pleasing color palette: color harmonies, gradients in good perceptual color space, like okmap. Mostly solved by set design, character and dress design
- Even saturation: previous point should cover "nice colors", but the saturation is one of the most overlooked aspects. It can be highly or sparingly saturated, but too much variation in a single frame quickly makes for a garbage image. Also, one has to fight most software color manipulation tools, which tends to brighten up highly saturated parts, where in reality, they should go darker
That's a whole package of things, for a camera control specifically, typical operator or AC wants:
- Manual focus pull
- Way to judge "exposure", measured in IRE
- Some way to approximate highlight to shadow exposure ratio; 2:1 for "happy" look, 4:1 for dark, 5:1 or more for Batman
- Highlight clipping warning (especially important on talent's skin)
- Shutter angle control (typically 180 or 90 degrees), instead of the shutter time used in photography
Is there an app that can take footage without oversharpening?
That's main reason, why cinema cameras are picked.
I suspect that it could be possible now, to an extent. We have quite good image restoration tools, some based on neural networks. Maybe one could be trained for iPhone specifically.
Movie cameras work differently with a shutter speed fixed at 24 fps, except for some scenes with specific requirements (for example slow motion). The light is controlled using the ISO, the aperture, the lighting, and ND filters.
A nice trick people are using with smartphones to get the cinema look is to use an app like Blackmagic Camera, lock the shutter speed at 24 fps, and mount a variable ND filter on the smartphone to control how much light is received by the sensor, since we can't control with the aperture.