Frame & Reference Podcast - 202: ARRI Lens Specialist Art Adams

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

In the second part of our 2 "ARRI" episodes, we have Lens Specialist Art Adams on to talk about the lenses ARRI offers, but also about his work as a cameraman and cinematographer himself, sharing knowledge he's picked up over the years as he does so well as my colleague and fellow contributor at ProVideoCoalition.com!Enjoy!► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠F&R Online ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support F&R⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Kenny McMillan► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello, and welcome to this, episode 202 of frame and reference. You're about to drop into a conversation between me, Kenny McMillan, and my guest, R.E. Lens, specialist, Art Adams. Enjoy. yeah i think i've told you this before but uh your your articles a got me through the end of college uh in terms of you know getting better at just camera work in general but b where the i randomly was offered the job at pro video and uh i was like wait the one artworks at and they're like oh yeah he's one of our writers i was like oh shit like i still reference that some of those some of those articles you've written there they're still very valuable even if they're

talking about like the dd era even thanks i appreciate that i wish i could uh well i mean hopefully i can do more again we're we're talking about maybe i'll do one a month or something like you know area related or something like that it's just you know the job gets so crazy sometimes that you know then the idea of going home and spending days writing an article it's just but i miss it i have the same like now that I'm doing a lot more work this year, mostly shooting documentaries. And it's the same thing. It's like I, especially if I have to edit anything, I don't want to like then just turn off the edit and then just start writing. Because that was the thing that I really appreciated about your articles that I think is missing in a lot of like, you're no film schools or, you know,

obviously pro video or anything. It does it. I think the sort of review space has made everything, even if it's not an ad just kind of formated as one almost and there's not a lot of like my whole thing was like I'll only do a review if possible obviously the pandemic change in things but like I'll only do a review of something if I can use it

a lot of camera companies were not chill with it like you can have it for a week and I was like I hope I have a gig this week you know but yeah the more like in depth like let's test what they're claiming my thing was always send me send me your like PR sheet and I'm just

going to test everything you say I'm just going to put the you know and I'm going to compare like there was a few I won't name them but there there's like one company that's like you're not allowed to compare our stuff to like other cameras and stuff like that I'm always like yeah we don't worry about that no yeah I I tried to think of myself as a journalist you know and not just like camera guy but um yeah I feel like my side gig was and while I was a DP my side geek was educating. Yeah. Taking what I learned and then teaching it to other people because I like to write and I like to.

If I can formulate it in my head and get it out on paper or on a website, I know I've got it. And then other people can get it too. And then at some point my side gig became my main gig. And it's actually been kind of fun. Yeah, because that's the other thing too, right? Like at least for me, I'm an idiot. And I, so I need to know, like, if I can teach it, that means I know. know it. If I can't teach it, I don't know it well enough. Um, dude, a big one was speed

boosters. Oh, yeah. Because everyone gets speed boosters wrong. And I kept, I would ask like Matthew, like, Douglos, I'd be like, all right, in email, I'd be like, all right, one more time. Can you, I have like the, the ASC manual where it's like written out. And I'm like, I'm looking at it going, I still don't think I got it. Yeah. I totally get that. I, I, I found, that if the subject is really complex, I read it, I'll read it and I'll say, I don't know what's going on. And I'll read it a week later and okay, I got 10% more and I just keep going through it and going through it and gone through it. Yeah, I think that's part of it is that there's some things that I have a hard time getting my head around. So I find ways to distill it down so that I

can understand the gist of it. And then I run it by someone who knows it. They say, yeah, it's basically it. And then they go, okay, no, I can share. Yeah. The big thing that screwed me up, like, I think speed, but just because you're lens guy now, I think speed boosters is the one that I've been thinking about the most, like, up to us chatting is like, it's such a simple concept that I think gets distorted. And I think a lot of things with lenses can be distorted, but it's like, okay, so it makes it brighter. And then you get into trouble with people saying, like, because the F stop technically changes, not the T, well, the T, well, the T, stop changes, but because you're putting optics in there, you're not getting a shallower

depth of field. You're actually getting a deeper depth of field because it's now a wider lens. And also, there's no such thing as the full frame look. Oh, boy. Didn't you, you wrote like a whole article, like a series of articles about full frame, didn't you? Yeah, and I'm still thinking about it. You know, we just have the 265 come out and this whole topic came up again. So, and there's so much stuff that interacts that it's actually really difficult to make it a simple thing. But, I mean, it's the bottom line is, as far as I can tell, it's mostly a knock focus. Yeah.

Because you're using a longer lens to capture the same angle of you at the same distance as another camera with a smaller sensor. So your depth of fuel drops. So like between a mini LF and Alexa 35, I think it's one, I remind myself that it's one standard focal length. Right. So, you know, I'm on a 35 on the Alexa 35, I'm going to be out of 47 or 50 on the media left to get the same angle of view. But I lose half, I drop half my depth of field, which is pretty cool. And what I found is if you look at a lot of wide shots, especially in the 65, a wide shot where the background's out of focus is really captivating.

There's such a sense of depth separation, especially if you're on a knees up shot on a point. person, it almost looks like the person's against a backdrop. You know, it's almost like it's a cutout sensation in certain situations that I find really, really interesting. I do find that you can lose it if you see the ground and you see what the person's standing on and you find there's this visual connection between where their feet are in the background. You can lose some of that. It helps if you don't see that connection.

But yeah, there's that and then closeups, I think, uh, To me, it feels like if you're focused on someone's eye and the depth of field is so shallow, it's almost like someone, it's almost like their face is pressing out of the screen in a way. So it's interesting. There's two very different things going on with depth perception with large format. And I don't know that anyone's done a lot of work on this. Well, and the key too, right, is, as you said, at the same distance. Because then you get into the talk about like, well, technically, if you were to frame up the exact same thing,

it would look the same, but the camera would be further back. So it's not that full frame gives you a shallower depth of field, that it allows you at the same distance to do that. It's not that the lens itself does it. There is a masterclass that we did a camera march a few years ago, and it's on YouTube, and James Laxton talks about this, where you can keep the camera at the same distance and use a longer lens,

or you can keep the camera at the distance, you would normally work at and then put on the same lens that you might use otherwise and get a wider field of view but with more detail. Right. And that's his strategy because he finds that it's almost more intimate in a way where you can have this wider shot. You can see the character, see more of what they're doing. But then, yeah, you still get this large format effect.

It's interesting. He goes into it and he does a really nice setup where he's got two people. sitting around a table it's in front of a bar and the focus is on one of the people he's on a 40 millimeter and it looks like you're on a 28 or 25 and the background is so soft

right it's just it's a he really knows how to use that format do you find that people are looking to get into like a 65 because of lensing because obviously there's not a lot of lenses for those massive sensors or because of perceptive detail.

Obviously, if you're going to shoot, you know, AK, 12K, whatever, yeah, you have more resolution, I suppose. But obviously with a larger sensor, your gradations are softer, your apparent sharpness is a little bit more. But why do you think there is such a push towards these larger formats now? I think there's a bunch of things.

It's interesting. The first few 265s that have come in to area rental have gone out immediately on TV shows, of all things. It's really interesting. Wow. I think it's those gradations. I think it's the depth of feel. I think it's the increased resolution,

especially since now you're scaling down to U.HD or HD, and oversampling always has a benefit. One of our lens gurus over an aerial gentleman by the name of Christophoph, Hovston, he's in Berlin. He talks a lot about how. large format lets you see more the character of a lens. Yeah. You see, and it comes across with a strength,

but also a subtlety that you don't get in smaller formats. Right. And you show me how that works and it's really fascinating. So I think that's, you know, there aren't a lot of lenses for the 265, but you see more of what they do when you use them. It's really interesting. Right.

And that actually, speaking to speed boosters, that is one reason you could use a speed booster is if your lens is intended for a larger format by focusing it down into a smaller format, you do get to see more of the character of that lens on your spoon sensor. Yeah, it's a fascinating rabbit hole to look at the relationship of a lens to a sensor

and what kind of detail you get. And one of the things that Chris Havis talked about is with large format, one of the benefits of the larger sensor is you just see more of the subtleties of everything. And you can do it with a lens that is actually more compromised, shall we say, has more character than you would be able to use on a smaller sensor.

Right. So the large format gives you the ability to use lenses that you wouldn't get much out on a smaller sensor. Yeah. But you would get more resolution and more character. So when did Ari start making, their own lens because obviously for the longest time, you know, your master primes were made

by Zeiss. Yeah, yeah. So when did Ari start bring, I mean, were they initially like taking, especially for the large format stuff, like taking you know, whatever Seekore Seas or something like that and rehousing them? Or was there like an immediate in-house optical team or something like that? Because obviously you guys take a lot of pride

in the products you make and there's a lot of testing and stuff. But I was kind of wondering if you could explain that timeline to me. Boy, I'm not sure. I can explain the entire timeline, but what I can't talk about is the transition to digital. I guess that was a big deal. All our previous lenses were made for film. Film has very different requirements. It's mostly about the course detail and getting contrast in the course detail,

because film is not a super high-resolution medium. And it's also interesting that you don't have anything between the film and the lens. In the digital world, you do. You've got the optical low-pass filter. you've got spectral cut filters like an iron cut filter you've got the cover glass you've got about three millimeters

of glass between the back of the lens and the sensor that has an impact and film lenses are not expecting to see that it's almost like you dropped an additional optical element

behind a film lens and they will look completely unlike well not completely but they will look unlike what they would look like in film so for example master primes look great

on film. And the goal when they came out, and the goal with film was always to get the best image on film that you could, because the film had so much abstraction to it. That's where the abstraction layer came in. Yeah, people were detuning lenses for film. No, they weren't detuning lenses for it. They were always trying to make the best lenses they could make. And then that flipped with digital because, you know, digital is very clean and people felt that loss of abstraction. So basically people started trying to get funkier and funkier. It's interesting master primes get used a lot these days at T1.3 because on a digital

sensor they have a little bit of a spherical aberration glow that comes through that you would not get in film. And it's all because that extra piece of glass is sitting there. So that was something we looked at when we started thinking about what are we going to do with the next round of lenses for digital. We started thinking, as we always do, how do we make something at last? How do we make something that is going to be relevant in 10 or 15 years? How do we make something that's going to stand up to remastering in the future?

We don't know what's going to happen. Right now, we're mastering HCR at about 1,000 minutes, but in the future, maybe people want 4,000, maybe there's some special venues with 10,000. We don't really know what's going to happen. We do know that HDR tends to really stress a sensor and a lens, especially the lens, because you start seeing the aberrations in a lens a lot faster in HDR. So that all kind of factored into like, what is this look? And we don't make our own lenses. What we do is we design the look and then we find someone who can make that look.

And in this case, we've gone with a company in Japan that previously had done primarily medical and satellite optics. but really high-end stuff. And we went with them partially because they do really good work and they could hit all our specs on time and on budget, but also because they didn't give us any pushback. Because the look of signatures was so different to anything that anyone had really done in a cinema warrants before that we got a lot of pushback from other companies

that we had worked with in the past. It said this is not what a cinema range should look like. What were those arguments? I don't know. I just know that we talked to a number of different companies, and they just looked at the specs and said, this is not, you know, I think also it wasn't a good match for perhaps who they were. You know, signatures have a, it's interesting.

It's a beautiful clarity, but because the MTF has a very long roll-off, everything looks very natural. So we don't punch the course frequency details that make lenses feel crispy and digital. we keep it going all the way down so when you look at someone through these lenses it looks like you're just looking at them which is really difficult to do but then the background goes out of focus

we really spend a lot of time on that and it's a very well balanced collection of optical aberrations because you can't get rid of all the optical aberrations it's not physically possible but you can get a nice balance where they kind of play together in a really interesting way

so we've had people say that these feel like very modern lenses with kind of a vintage look to them, which is kind of interesting. I find it fascinating how people describe lenses because we don't have the vocabulary for it. So people will say, yeah, they're very creamy. Well, what does that mean? You could be a flare, it could be flesh tone, could be the background, the boca. So when we talk about lenses to each other, it's interesting to hear what people say, but it's also really hard to figure out what they're actually talking about and everyone perceives this stuff differently, which makes it fascinating because I think we all learn from each other. I regularly will show lenses to people and they'll

say, oh, I see this. I never really, okay, that's really interesting. I hadn't really picked up on that before. It's a lot of fun. Well, and everyone's description, usually I find comes from comparison. You know, no one ever says like, well, I shouldn't say ever, but a lot of times, especially we're talking at DPs, it's like, oh, these, you know, it's always the most popular one. So it'd be like, oh, you know, these kind of remind me of a K-35. And they don't mean that optically. They just mean that the vibe they get is sort of vintage year or whatever. And that's close enough.

Or like, oh, these are, you know, they're sharp, but they're not clinical. They're like, sigmas. And you're like, all right, you know, I get what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting. I just interviewed a DP. It's interesting. Sychers are going to use a lot for fashion.

um as they should they're but what's interesting is i mean this one this one d p was saying you know she she likes a lens that's that's it's sharp i don't i don't think it's i would describe it differently because to me sharp and soft are deviations from natural um and i think these are very natural looking lenses but she describes them as sharp because she finds them easy to focus um and her just her description is kind of like, they're very, they're very sharp, but they also have a soft, natural, organic nature to them. Okay. I get it, but it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah, once

again, it's one of those description things where, what are they really saying? Um, I totally get it. But the idea of having a sharp lens that's also soft is, I think, a little different. And for us, that comes down to that MTF where it just keeps going. Um, we keep the contrast early. The strange thing is a really high-resolution lens won't look sharp. It'll actually look softer because you're actually seeing more of the texture and detail and less of, like, say, a really contrasty lens might make the pores on my face stand out more because it can see the pore and it can see the darkness in the pore. and it's adding a lot of contrast to that so it feels kind of crunchy and it comes out a bit more

but if I have a really high resolution lens now it's going to go across the edge of that pore into that pore across the bottom out the top it's going to be basically I'm just looking at somebody got so high resolution good high contrast not always good it depends where the contrast is

yeah yeah and a lot of the lens that people say are crunchy they tend to really pump the contrast in the coarse details and maybe not do the same in the fine details. So everything feels like it's a little bit edged out, a little more cut out. And in film, that looks great, but that's not what we're really shooting anymore.

Right. Has anyone used the signatures on film? You can't. So that's a great, well, it's a great point. So we came out with this new lens. mount, the LPL mount, because we The PL mount, originally, we invented in the 80s because everyone had their own lens mount.

And it was, you were always trying to figure out ways to get lenses on different cameras. The PL mount was a standard. We invented it and then we gave it away. LPL is basically a bigger version of that with a shorter flange depth. So for the same reason that all the DSLR manufacturers are going to be aerial, so they can get the back

of the lens right up. the sensor, that really helps you with lens design because you can do a lot more, a lot more easily. And we thought, well, why are we still working with a 52 millimeter flange distance with P.L mount? There's no, there's no mechanical shutter in there anymore. We're not dealing with film cameras. Let's back it up to 44. And it, we couldn't have made signatures without doing that. Even just that little, what is that, seven millimeter difference? Like, yeah, it's like eight millimeters yeah it makes a big difference interesting and i've really learned a lot about why we do certain things and all and what's interesting is we usually do the hard things so say

if there's a lens that's 28 to 100 uh that someone else makes we're going to make a 24 to 75 and when i ask why that is uh i'm usually told well because we think 24 is more useful and it's more difficult and we can do it so it's it's an interesting perspective. I think a lot of people dismiss our lenses for being very clean, but it's really hard to do that and do it in a way that is really malleable. That's the other thing that we hear a lot is that the look of the lenses is really malleable. And they're meant to be because, so for example, the look of any of our cameras, you can push around on post. The lenses were actually designed with the Alexa 35 in mind because we knew it was coming when the lenses were

in development. This was quite a while ago. We were already experimenting with that sensor. And that sensor gets crazy dynamic range. Oh yeah, you can't blow it out if you try. Yeah, 9.3 stops over middle gray. It's really difficult, but that's also you need a lens that will deliver that because we're all about color and nothing will whack color out faster than, you know, veiling glare. So we worked really hard to make a lens that will deliver everything to that sensor that a lens could deliver because otherwise, why make the sensor? It just didn't make sense.

Right. But there is something interesting in there. If you look at a highlight, you'll see there's a little glow. So if the sun's over here, you'll see this little glow around the sun that takes the edge off. And that's intentional because if you've ever seen an HDR demo where there's a really bright highlight and the camera is moving fast, it'll stutter. It'll go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And that's not anything electronic.

That's your brain. And it does that with anything that's bright and moving. And we've actually, we actually had a service call one time where a feature was monitoring green screen in HDR. And they kept asking, why is everything strobing? And it took a long time to explain to them that green contributes the most of your sense of brightness. So it's going to look brighter and you're going to see strobing on everything. And don't worry about it. It's okay.

it'll be fine in post it'll be fine and post yeah yeah look at it on a worse monitor you'll be much happier yeah but that little glow is designed to take down the edge that contributes to that strobing

because we're we're trying to find ways so that when you go back in the future and you remaster this in some crazy way you're not going to find anything unexpected we want it to look better than when you captured it even though you're doing more to it

yeah and I know you guys have Is it just the signatures that have like the drop-in filters in the back? The Enzo's have those two. They're a little bit different. The signatures, it was funny because the signatures came with a net holder on the back because we thought, you know, we're basically a film company at heart and people use nets and why not make it easy. And it's just a ring and it's got a little groove around it.

You put the net over it. You put a rubber band around it, trim it. and then magnets, you know, right onto the back of the lens. And it's got 12 magnets, so you actually have 12 click stops. So you can orient the weed however you want and then match it across all your other lens and your set at the same time. But on a whim, we went to an eyeglass shop and had some acrylic diopters made. And we made them about a half millimeter too big.

And then we just press them into the ring and we popped them on the back and we went, well, the focus marks what to hell. But this is really cool. Right. So then we started experimenting and we came up with a formula. We have positive and negative elements and they do opposite things. One is undercorrected spiritual aberration, which makes everyone look like a movie star. You get a nice beautiful glow, very soft face, very soft background. The background gets even smooth and signatures already are. You get some coma, so highlights take on this kind of shape that starts swirling around the outside edges of the frame, it's pretty cool. And then the other, the negative elements give you overcorrected, which is what you see in a lot of old lenses where the boca turns into a donut. You've got a dark hole in the center and a hot outside edge, like maybe a K-35, something like that. It's the same general mechanism. And that still gives a softness to the face, but it's not glowing anymore. And then the background

has a little bit more of a hard edge to it. It's a little bit. It's a little bit. a little busier, so it feels more energetic. The feedback we got on those was that the customers wanted the center to be sharper and the outside edges to be softer. Sure. So that's what we did with the Enzo. So there's also a little bit more a difference with the interface. When you put an element on a signature lens, you're putting it onto the lens amount and not

the back of the lens. So if you shim the lens, that relationship will change a little bit. On Enzo's, it's actually on the back of the lens. So if you shim the lens, everything travels together. And that allowed us to do a little bit more with the optics. And we do have a lot of recipes, too. We've been experimenting. So at some point, we're going to come out with some crazy new stuff.

Like a cookbook or like just more stuff? More stuff. You know, I mentioned Christophefsen earlier. About a year ago, I went to Berlin and we spent a week just with his wall of optics. He has all these elements and diopters on a wall and say, oh, I'm going to take one of these and put it with one of these. I'll put it together and let's see what happens. Oh, you know, I'm going to take this out and I'm going to turn this one around and oh, that's much better. And we just did that for a week.

And we got all these crazy cool looks. And at some point, we're going to start cranking those out and it's going to be a lot of fun. That's rad. Yeah, because like when I think of obviously you and Panavision are the two like big players and sort of high end optics and stuff, certainly the two companies have taken very different approaches to how they make their lenses and stuff. But a lot of the times when I talk to DPs on this show, it's always like, and then Dan Sasaki walked in, you know? So is those kind of like home adjustable lenses, so to speak, you know, your little magnet filters and stuff changing the look? Is that kind of your guys is

pocket Sasaki as it were? Or do you have like a service where people are like, all right, I like the signatures. I want these detuned for a project. You know, it's really hard to detune those. We're playing with that, but there's such sophisticated lenses. It's like a sports car. If you

get into the engine, you mess around too much, it's not going to run so well anymore. But, you know, if you want to change the performance, you can put speed bumps on the track and that'll do it too. And that's kind of what we're doing on the back. You know, Area Regional has all these different lenses and they've got their advanced Asaki equivalence. Christop is one of

those. Matt Colsey here in Burbank is another one. And they'll tune their lenses to whatever you want. And they've got a decent. I mean, it's some really interesting stuff. But on the sales side, yes, it's a different philosophy. We want to deliver the best product we can. But we also want to make it adjustable. And that was just how the rear optic thing came about. And also, you know, not everyone can get their lenses tuned. Like you've thrown a little bunch of feature. right can you can you get that done if you're on a commercial can you get a set of lenses detuned for a one or two day commercial it's kind of difficult right and this way you you can just you can swap them in or out uh the other thing is on set for example on a close-up like like our you know how you're seeing us um you can use a really heavy optic and it looks great if you use it on a wide shot it's going to be a bit overwhelming it's a little like diffusion you want to back off. You can use heavier on close-ups

and then lighter on backgrounds because there's more detail and you don't want it to mush out. So there's a certain amount of, you know, you can adjust it for the shot a bit more easily. Yeah, I did, I took a note and then I did get back to it for a second, but because I'm very jump aroundy.

But you'd mentioned MTF a couple times, which and out as like a roll-off. MTF stands for modular transfer function. Modulation transfer function, yeah. So clearly, I don't know what the fuck it means. But I was wondering if you could explain what that is so that people know. When you talk about it having a roll off, like, what does that mean? Wow.

Okay. Let me see if I can, let me see if I can do this one. Because I come at this from the perspective of DP and sometimes. Right. So that's all we need. We don't need the science of it necessarily. What does it mean for a debate? So resolution and the perception of Sharpe.

is all about contrast and there's a difference between how a lens will handle contrast for really coarse details like maybe hair and in skin which has much finer detail and mtf basically measures the contrast across all of that detail so you can see all right the lens is really there's a lot of contrast so i see a lot of detail in the coarse frequencies but then when you get to the fine frequencies it drops off which means now you don't see a lot of contrasts, which means that that detail kind of flattens out. And there's actually a lot of lenses where that happens really quickly. And I see this on a lot of less expensive lenses where the coarse details are great and the fine details drop off

and it feels little plasticy to me. Because that balance isn't there. We're talking about high frequency details getting, you know, it's almost like a, I'm thinking Photoshop, you know, when you would do like frequency separation, But it takes place in the lens, correct? Right, right.

And it's just a matter of, can the lens reproduce that contrast? Because maybe as it gets smaller and smaller, maybe there's enough flare. The coatings are not good enough to reduce the amount of flare necessary to maintain the contrast. There's also details in how the optics are formed. You know, for example, just a basic curve is great at focusing light through the center. of it, but it's not great at focusing light from the outside edges at the same point at the center. And that has an impact.

There is also a stigmatism, which is when light will focus in one axis, but not another. Because if you think about it, now I'm going to get myself in the trouble here. But you've got a curve of the lens that will affect how light focuses that way, but then you've also got the shape of the lens. And both of those can be made uneven. And they both affect how light focuses in different axes. One will focus, like a line like this might go soft. You've got a stigmatism there.

But a line like this might be okay. So the radial lines have one focus, and then the tangential lines, which go around, have another focus. And that's why we have As spherical elements Exactly As spherical elements Then take that part where

Okay, the light through the center is going to focus here Light through the outside edge is going to focus here You change the shape of the lens To kind of bring it back So they're all together And most of the time

That's good Signatures, a big part of their look is that is really, really well corrected And that has a lot to do with the boca and the rendition of skin And things like that But sometimes if you let they go nuts so you get some really great effects,

especially around the outside. And that's why you're always getting crazy stuff of the outside edges or older lenses. It's much easier to focus through the center than it is the outside. That was the thing they already struggled with. And depending on how they're trying to solve that problem, you get different looks. And that's what makes the vintage of lenses so interesting.

Well, and those vintage lenses, correct me from wrong, like oftentimes we're handmade. You know, now we have computers that are that are lapping glass and like making it, you know, that my assumption has been for the longest time that like this explosion of new lenses coming out of China, you know, all these random companies are oftentimes optically perfect because they're just computer made. And in many cases, boring. You know, like you get it. I'm glad you said that.

It's kind of boring because it's like a computer made it, you know? It's not really. Yeah. No, that's exactly what I see. I look at these lenses and I agree, yeah, technically they're great. They don't do anything for me. And that was why we did what we did and tried to do some stuff with the aberrations that were still left. I mean, there's always this human element.

And, you know, I don't know enough about how we balanced all of that. I just know that I love the look. I like lenses where I can see the subtleties in a frame. I want to feel the texture of the wood. I want to feel the sunlight bouncing off the floor and, you know, lighting up that corridor. I want to see the direction of the shadows. I really want to feel what the shot, you know, I want to feel the shot even though I'm not there. That's what really gets my attention when I see that kind of thing.

It just gets me so excited. I love thinking, especially when I say, a D.P. who lights in a very natural, a beautiful way. And I just say, you know, that probably looked like that. You know, that could look, that, that environment could look like that. And it's just beautiful. I just love that. And I glintzes that show me that. As a D.P. and as an educator, then, what are some of the things that you've seen when people are evaluating a new camera where they see, you know, example footage like you're talking about? And then they go, oh, I should get, whatever, a Venice, an R.E., a Canon, sorry, whatever,

when they should be looking at the lenses. It's interesting because you almost got me stutter on cameras. I mean, you're going to have to a little bit. That's your OG baby. Exactly. So what you said earlier about learning through comparison is really, that was, I believe in that very strongly because I think, Anything on its own can look pretty good.

It's when you start comparing it, that you really start educating yourself as to what it's doing. One thing I've learned about cameras, and I spent a lot of time as a DP looking at camera color. I was fascinated by it. And what I learned is that there are a lot of cameras that maybe do color reasonably well, but maybe not with a fine brush.

But people don't notice because they're generally more tuned to the texture of color within a frame than they are to the actual colors. And you can go see beautiful abstract paintings with three colors. And they're interesting, visually interesting, but maybe if you want to see something with a much more subtle range of colors that blend into each other and much more subtlety, maybe, you know, that's, there are cameras that can't really do that well.

So it's been interesting to kind of see. how people perceive color because I think there's this idea now that all cameras kind of can look the same. It depends on how much you work you want to put into them. We

developed our latest version of our color science slug C4 or also we call it reveal because it does. We actually took three different color gamets and auditioned them with colorists. And so these are the options

which one do you like and they all chose the same one. So that's the one way I went with. That's the kind of stuff that we try to do, we try to deliver the best color, but we also try to make it so that the people have to work with it can get where they want as quickly as they can. And then the lenses factor into that as well. Now, you may not want a lens that delivers gray color,

and that's fine. There's lots of stories that are, you know, except lens flare is very well or can be muted or have, you know, It's more about the vibe than it is about seeing all the detail. And that's fine. But if you did want to see all the detail and capture the color and everything at a scene, you have to factor, you have to combine the right lens with the right camera under the right circumstances to deliver that. And that's what we've tried to do.

And once again, we're trying to go after what the hardest thing is. Right. Because you're going to always knock it down. You can always make it look like something worse than it is. you can't always take something worse and make it look better. Right. Well, and speaking of comparison, I feel like that's why, you know, obviously, if you don't live next to a rental house, it's very difficult. But if anyone has the opportunity to do like a lens test with a bunch of different things, it's fascinating when you have the same camera, the same observer, how wildly different color can look.

You're like, oh, you know, if I've seen this a bunch, like, you know, you slap two apparently the same. lens on two different cameras and one's a little more magenta and one's a little more pink or green and you're like, oh, so we need to calibrate the cameras. It's like, I bet it's the lens. So that brings, so that's something that's really interesting because for a long time, people would take, they would take a little green out of our white balance presets. So if you went to 3,200, the DIT would go in into, you know, the CC menu and say go to minus three. pull a little green out. And we always wondered why that was.

And actually, as a DPI, I found myself doing that. But I found I wasn't doing it all the time, and I couldn't quite figure out why. I eventually learned that our older cameras used a mid-range ultraprime as a white balance reference. Because when you set the white balance, you have to look through the camera at something. And ultra-primes are very neutral to maybe a little bit cool.

And so if you put on a warm lens, it was going to start looking maybe a little yellow green. And now with signatures, signatures are the new reference lens going forward, starting with the Alexa 35, you put the warm lens on it. It looks a lot more normal. Gotcha.

Because, yeah, that wasn't always a thing, or that was always a thing that I noticed with Alexa footage, was that it would always appear green off-rip. But to be fair, most DPs would prefer green over magenta, it seems. and that kind of built-in greenness, I found my, you know, shooting mostly with Canon, I found myself like starting to, and especially when I was younger,

just when I guess that's what it's supposed to look like, you know, that's the pro camera. I must, I must green, you know, and shipped everything that way. But it's because of ultra-price. Yeah, in that case, it was just the preset was captured through a very neutral, the slightly cool lens.

And now signatures are warmer by 100 or 200 degrees Kelvin so it's not really an issue anymore yeah the because I remember the article that borderline saved my life was that you wrote was when you

made the matrix comparing or like shifting the cannon the 300 to the Alexa and the reason I said it almost saved my life is because I went and did that with every Canon camera over here at a rental house

and then made them as picture profiles that people could buy. And that happened right at the pandemic. And had I not done that, I would have been on the street. Wow. So I did steal your idea. I'm sorry, but I'm here today because of it. I give it freely. That was fun.

That was kind of borne out of frustration that, you know, at the time, a lot of, you know, early on airy cameras were expensive. And I couldn't get them on every job. So I would, I just spent a lot of time trying to get other cameras to look like Gary Cameras. And yeah, I could never really get there. I think I could make things better. And I kind of look back at that now and knowing what I know now.

I'm not sure I should have even tried. I guess I'm glad I did. But there's so much, yeah, there's so much going on in these cameras now. It's, it's. And there's a lot of stuff that I don't know that, you know, closely guarded secrets and locked rooms. that I would just love to know. Well, and my whole thing with those

picture profiles was like, it's not going to make your camera look like an Alexa, but if you shoot this next to an Alexa, it'll make it slightly easier in the grade. And that was like my only promise. And people seem to be like, all right, close enough. And I do think, to be perfectly honest,

I do think there is a placebo effect. You know, like people will use the K1S1 Lut after just a regular color space transform it looks like an Alexa now it's like did does it do you have an Alexa did you test it or are you just happy that you get you get a serviceable image when you do this you know um but yeah the whole the whole like it

makes it look like an Alexa I think must be the most um common reference point that people have like every every camera is always like does how close does this no one does that with red oh my you know i tried i i matched my c500 perfectly in up with a lot to oh that's raptor and it's dead on i did the same thing with the lf actually that was a little less dead on but uh the c 500 mark two specific i guess mine you know because you always have to like what at what granularity can you say this is acceptable

but my c 500 with that lut i got it 98% to the Raptor. And I put that online. And I was like, who wants like free Raptor? Zero. Zero people want that. They don't care. Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting.

I mean, I guess we have been the gold standard for a long time. You know, the thing that really upset people is when we did make the change from long C3 to long C4, we, we fixed things that were technically wrong in log C3 that people really liked. Oh, interesting. I think the biggest one is that we used in LockC3 all the tools that every other manufacturer uses in terms of mathematics. And when I talked to our R&D team, they said the biggest part of the look is by far

of the back end processing, whatever, the map, however you build that look. And using all those tools, we did really well, but what we couldn't get was the perceptual brightness. We couldn't get that right. So you can get the shoe right, but it will be brighter or darker than you would perceive it if you were actually just looking at it. And I noticed this, it's in greens, it's in magentas, it's in skin tone. And the skin tone is the one that people really miss. There seems to be this desire to go back to 5247, you know, back to the 80s, which is, you know, a very good stock. Yeah, it's a good stock. But it, it makes, didn't look a very particular kind of muted orange kind of color.

And that was what our old color science used to deliver. And the new color science gets everything right. And I have actually been in situations where I've got a camera, I've got a monitor next to me, and I'm shooting something in daylight. And I did this with Laquois sparkling water cans the first time. So we were going to show the camera to a rental house. And before they came in, we had all these Laquois sparkling water cans on the table. And the light was coming in from, it was just skylight coming in.

And the camera was aimed at the table. And I looked at the monitor and I went back and forth and they looked the same. So I went to the cafe, got a bunch more cans out of the refrigerator, lined them up against the monitor and then just looking back and forth. I could see they were the same. And those were really strange colors. There's a lot of colors in there that cameras don't like. Like cyan is a really difficult one.

purples and magenta and red and yeah and then there's a bunch of really strange girls and the Alexa 35 delivered all of them and that was a big wow moment for me but there's a lot of people who say we really liked

those those aberrations in color that we got from the old color science so there's at least one guy who is selling a lot that tries to turn your Alexa 35 into a mini which I think I think is awesome When I talked to our R&D team, they say, why would we do that?

You know, this is so much better. It is, but, yeah, so it's, yeah, it's been interesting going through this transition because we, we don't change things like that very often. It took 12 years to get around to doing that, but it had a big impact when we did. And people are now getting used to it, and some people really like it because they know that's another thing. It's really hard to get a camera to reproduce something that's perceptually very, close to what your I sees.

But the closer we can get it to that, the more space you have to push things around. Well, and that was actually something I was going to bring up was, I think, you know, with lenses, obviously you've got sharpness charts or whatever they're called, you know, focus charts. Those never tell the whole story. Those just tell you about resolution, you know, with cameras, it's always that Macbeth chart, you know, where they'll, you'll throw it and resolve and then you'll make it. Like, I see this all the time on Reddit, people going like, oh, you know, I'm starting out coloring and they'll be like, shoot a chip chart and then do the thing and resolve where it automatically. I'm like, you're going to, you're not going to like it.

First of all, I don't know how good that feature is, you know, I, but, quote unquote, accurate colors aren't what you want. Nine times out of 10, you want it, you know, with a little bit of, I suppose, style to it. But when I was talking to buddy about cameras, what's his name? I don't have my phone. Your guy, the camera. Camer T. Chase. Chase.

He was talking about, you know, the main colors are like Coke, red skins, sky, and grass. Like those, those need to look the way we imagine them, not the way they are. And I imagine that that sort of ethos comes through when you guys design lenses. like those colors need to be just because the camera makes it look correct technically, you know, legally the lens has to agree with that as well.

Yeah. You know, we did take a little leeway because so from what I'm told you can use leaded glass still to make lenses in Eastern Europe. Letted glass solves a lot of problems.

Damn it. Yeah, exactly. What's a few workers to make some good lenses? So, yeah, we won't do that partially because it takes a lot to protect the workers and then partially because what do you do with the toxic waste? You know, it just doesn't make sense. But there's another glass that we found that does the same stuff. It's just a little warmer.

And when we looked at it, it's about the same hue as skin tone. So it's maybe 100 degrees. The primes are about 100 degrees warmer. than neutral and the zooms will be 2 to 400 depending because there's a lot more glass in them but it pops skin really nicely so that was kind of an artistic decision

that we decided to go with so you're not getting the perfectly accurate color to the camera through that lens but perceptually it's going to look really nice right and a lot of the color I think also has to do with how we handle flare which is

really good. And actually, we, we improved the lens mount for the, it was the PL mount for the Alexa 35. You can take an old PL mount off a mini or a mirror and put it on an Alexa 35, but the stray light protection is not the same. Because on that camera, you had 7.8 stops over middle gray in the Alexa 35, you have 9.3. That's a big difference. I mean, that's like four times more in terms of highlights that I'm getting to that. Right. So we had to build a new PLMEL for the Alexa 35 to make sure that that stray light was controlled. Because if you have a camera, that kind of dynamic range and you don't do that, then what's the point?

Your color is going to get melted up. Your shadows are going to come up. And actually, that's another interesting thing that signatures do. I don't know how we do it, but it's something to do with the coatings. But they have a toe like film. So instead of the contrast going down into the shadows like that, it kind of rolls off at the bottom. But you still have, so they feel low contrast, but you still have a pure black if it's in the frame. Because a lot of lenses, when they're low contrast, it just means the bail ink layer has brought everything up.

Right. But in these, you can see in the shadows, but if there's a black in there, you still get that. It's really interesting. Enzos are a little different. Enzos are a little contrastier because they're less expensive lenses. They do have more of a steeper fall off, so they feel a little snappier. Were the Enzo designed as the more like affordable package? So if the signatures are the new master primes and the Enzo's are the new ultra primes.

Gotcha. But more advanced, I would say, because the close focus is crazy. I can get down to, on a miniala, if I can get down to that tall, the height of my hand. On all of the lenses except for two, the 10 and the 14, 10.5 in the 14, if we focused that close, you'd be inside the lens. So we didn't go quite that far. That's a specialty lens. Yes. What are you guys designing for the 265 then?

Is there like, because obviously that's going to be less people shooting that, just overall. Yeah, I'm less involved in that because it's on the rental side, but they're cooking up some interesting stuff with a lot of character because that's where they live. So we live on the side where we're trying to give you the best, image possible and you can push it around later. They're trying to give you custom looks that only

they can deliver, which is kind of the rental house thing now is everyone wants to have something that you have to go back to that rental house for because you can only get them there. But they've done a really good job with some of the things they're working on. I don't know how much I can talk about. But there are some very interesting things coming with a lot of character that's designed to work really well with the 265. And that's about all I can tell you. I've seen at least one of my minute. It was really cool. And it was exactly what they described. You know, there are things that if it was on a camera of a smaller sensor, I would say, yeah, that's interesting. It's maybe a little, you know, little crazy, but, but with the big sensor, that craziness actually starts

becoming subtle. Yeah. And it's a really different look. You know, I, when I was, I was thinking about this the other day because I, I'm too online because I, like, part of me, it's as wanting to maintain my status as an educator. I do try to stay on like Reddit stuff to see what people are asking, what people are talking about to see if there's something I can elucidate. But it's, it's getting harder and harder because like the the breakdown between what stuff is called and what people perceive is starting to really get out there and and um i was thinking the other day about how there was this crab bucket mentality about full frame there was like remember that whole i don't know maybe like 10 years ago there's this whole you don't need full of every youtube video you don't

need full frame and i was kind of on the same boat and i to this day you don't need it obviously the a 35 is not full frame uh but i am now having owned that c5 and use like an LF and stuff. I'm like, and it is nicer. If I could have a 265, I probably, I probably would use that over, you know, lens choices notwithstanding. I do kind of like a bigger sensor now.

They got me. Well, you can lease the 265. It's going to be a little expensive. They'll have to sell the entire apartment building. Yeah, they're really expensive to me. I mean, our sensors are custom, which is how we get so much out of them. But, yeah, making a sensor that big is, it's a big deal. I mean, you have a lot of failures for every sensor that comes out correct because it's an analog process in the end, making a sensor.

So sometimes it works really well. And every once in a while, you'll get something, Silicon didn't do what it was supposed to do. So, yeah, they're pretty pricey. It's interesting, though, because a lot of, there are people who have very strong. hold opinions on which to use. Some people just go back and forth, but whatever project that's right, you know, they just choose whichever works, but some people really like large format or those additional, I think, depth cues. For me, it's definitely the tonality of having more photosites. I found that I, because like going back to like the articles that

you wrote and stuff, the things that always I loved was like you were able to highlight like here's one factor isolated that here's like the bouquet of things that this one factor has. And I would just kind of min-max everything when I was starting out. You know, like every purchase I ever made was always like doing, all right, that's an isolated thing. All right, that's fine. I'm happy with that level. All right. This versus what I think now is like, boy, it's an FX3.

They shot the creator on it. Get that, you know. Like, but don't you want to know there's so many things. but that I say all that to ask you like obviously going from DP to working at Ari I'm sure you've learned quite a bit that DP you would have loved to have known uh you know however many years ago five 10 years ago but uh I was wondering if any of those things come to mind that you would tell like DPU now that you have all this backed up knowledge I don't know if I want to tell anyone you know the thing is I think there's I think the more you know, the more you realize that everything you knew was wrong. I remember just learning about light meters and the fact that they're most sensitive to grain. Because that's, there's, there's green and everything. Usually it's the red and the blue that change, and that's where your color temperature comes from.

The problem is if you're metering something that's blue or red, it may come in a stump darker. and but that nobody ever notices because what does an under-expose pure red or pure blue look like anyways? But the more you learn about stuff like that, you kind of go, oh, oh, here's a good one. Focus ramping. I didn't know about this.

When I started at Airy, I wanted to reverse engineer signatures to really understand the look because I knew I liked the look, but I didn't know why. So I lined up a bunch of lenses and I shot the same subject. And I noticed that all the other lenses, it was like a 75 to 85,

depending on the manufacturer, at about six feet. All the other lenses looked about a half to two-thirds of a stop darker than the signature. So I emailed Munich and I said, so what's going on that our lenses are magically brighter

than all these other ones? And they didn't understand why I was talking about that they were very confused and I finally sent them a lineup. I put all those, stitched all the pictures together and send it to them. And they said, oh, that's focus ramping. Okay, what's focus ramping?

Well, T stops are set looking through the center of the lens at infinity. And when you focus closer on a lot of lenses, the T stop will change. It'll get smaller. Interesting. And it happens on most every lens. It's most noticeable, I guess starting at like 40 or 50 and up. but a 75 at 6 feet every other lens I looked at

did this and signatures didn't and then I checked Enzo's and Enzo's don't do it either and they're doing something in there to eliminate this but I had no idea this was a thing yet every lens I'd ever shot on did this right well and it's one of those things too as a cameraman like you a lot of times you just deal with the image

you've been given you know it's like oh if you notice you're like oh that's darker it or whatever you know got to go Like, just shoot it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, take some ND out or whatever. But, yeah, I never would have known. That's crazy that focusing can change that.

It makes sense. You're moving light rays around. But, yeah. And also, you know, every lens will have illumination fall off at the edges. But it's really interesting when you can actually get it and look at the equipment to that and just see how it changes from lens to lens. So, for example, signatures will do that wide open. It's a nice fall off at the edges.

You don't really notice it. but there's a little vignetting effect. There's a cat's eye that's really nice. Enzo's drop off a little sharper, a little faster and a little farther. And it has an effect on rack focusing. So one thing I was told was whenever I look at focus breathing out of the lens, I should stop down to about T8.

Because if you're wide open and the background goes out of focus too fast, you won't be able to see the breathing. It'll just go out of focus. But if you stop down, that's when you can really see the size change happening, that you may not notice wide open. And if you're always shooting wide open, you'll never see it.

But if you go outside and you stop down to a four or five, six, and then suddenly you do a rack focus, you're going to go, you know, it's going to be really distracting. But it's interesting with illumination fall off, it creates the perception that things are going out of focus in a different way. So if you have more fall off at the edges,

that basically means the aperture at the edges is smaller. So you actually have a little more depth of field at the edges. So when you go out of focus, the center is going to go out faster, and it almost feels like it's going like that. Like the center is coming towards you, like it's going out faster than the sides are. That's a subtle effect on.

signatures. On the end of those, it's a bit stronger. But it's really interesting because if you're shooting something like a brick wall or something with texture, it really does feel like bulging towards you. It's this really interesting sensation. Right. But it's bulging without like curvature. It just, it's perceptual. It's perceptual. It's just the center is more out of focus than the edges. So the edges don't feel like they're doing much, but the center is going out of focus. So it feels like there's this depth effect happening. It's really not. you know, I've seen, obviously it's not corrected for this or it's not intentional. So it's like, I guess, the worst version of what you're talking about. But sometimes using, you know, whatever, Super 35 lenses on full frame. Because most of them do cover. You know, it's actually the longer, you know, it's fine. But I can't, I think it was one of my Nikors or something. Maybe not. Maybe you know what? No, no, the Nyquors are full frame. I think it was my Sigma 18 to 35. I chucked it on my C500. And I noticed. that like the focus would come back at the edges so it'd be like out of focus out of focus

and then it'd be back in focus around the edges and I was just like what the hell like I was shooting a fashion thing and I was like that I don't know if I like that that could be yeah that could be field curvature also but but the elimination fallout will do that as well yeah that's really interesting you know the most interesting thing I saw and I won't name who made the lenses but And I got called in by a friend that operated a B camera on a corporate job. And he had, I would say, some affordable zooms, let's say. It was a wide zoom and a long zoom. And he lit for the wide zoom and the contrast on the long zoom didn't match at all.

Right. The shadows fell off a cliff. So clearly the wide zoom was lower in contrast and the long. Lens was higher in contrast, and he couldn't get the match at all. The client kept saying, what's going on with this? This is crazy. So it was, that was a really interesting lesson. There's so much to know.

I know. It just goes on forever. And the thing that I do, I don't know if you feel this way, but the more that I've done this podcast, more that I've, you know, read things that like you read and other people read, the more I learn, the more I get the ASG magazines, the less I care about, about about the new information because like it's like I've learned so much and the new information rarely moves it's always interesting you know it's always like look at this new feature look at this new lens like but then it's always like at the end of the day when I'm standing there on set

like you know I'll choose already because I know it's going to it's always going to match it's always going to work right that's at now as a working VP like that's all I really care about you know it's like oh but this this new whatever does Because X, Y, it's got 8K now. And it's, I don't, I don't care. I don't, like, I know enough about resolution now that I don't care. You know, it's fascinating how, and then there's always more, which is fun. I love learning.

So it is fun to learn those things. But, like, functionally, I find myself being a bad teacher because it's like, just, it doesn't matter. They don't know it doesn't matter. Like, they want to know why it doesn't matter. So I find myself fighting with that all the time. I made really pretty pictures when I had no idea what I was doing. And I still don't know how that happened. Yeah.

And now I know a lot more. And yeah, you kind of have to start. One thing I found that I was doing later in my DP career was I would learn all this stuff. And then I would use it to deal with everything in prep that I could eliminate that was going to cause problems. So I would get on set and just shoot. there were certain things I did that I just did habitually. For example, I got burned by an HMI with the magnetic ballast. And it went off speed.

I was at 180 degree shutter 24 frames and didn't see the roll bar is going through the frame at the time. But in post, boy, they showed up really, really clearly. So then I went to a 144 shutter for everything. Just by default? Yeah. Because that's one 60, well, it's 160 of a second. You don't really see any more motion or less motion blur.

And it puts you right in the middle of the flicker free window in a 60 hertz country. So if you're shooting in a store and there's an old fluorescent tube in the back with a ballast that's starting to go, you have more leeway before it shows up than you do at 180 at 24. Because 180 at 24 puts you right on the edge of where stuff's going to start to happen. Right. So it doesn't have to go very far before it shows out. So I just started doing that. And I had noticed that exit signs and stores would flicker and, you know, Christmas time, Christmas lights would flicker.

Yeah, if I just went to 144, everything cleaned up. So I disagreed. And actually, I had learned this when I was a camera assistant because I had a DP that I worked with on a TV show. We just had 144 all the time. he had gotten burned once by HMI's flickering when the generator went off speed and he said never again and after a while I came to understand and appreciate that so that's the kind of stuff I felt like I would learn and then I would just start building into my routine right so I didn't have to think about it anymore but I completely relate to what you're saying well I you know the big one

for me now is not wanting to think about it is I bought I invested in a color meter Because, boy, I hated, you know, you got lights from multiple manufacturers, whatever. And it just bugged the hell. And this resulted in a great article on pro video that still gets people like commenting on it all. And I was like, hey, Jeremiah, do we get paid more? If people comment and he was like, no. But because, you know, you type 5600 in the back of the light. Is it?

That is it question would bug the hell. I'd be on set, like, micromanaging lights. And so I just got the color meter. It's $1,800, and I've never slept better. You just, boop, yep, that matches. Boop, yep, that matches. Matches the incoming window, like, we're good. Took 30 seconds, and I'm not, I don't have an ulcer.

Well, okay, so I did get myself in trouble with a color meter once because what I, okay, so my, one of my gap, actually a couple of my gappers said that whenever we go into a situation with fluorescence, they only ever use about two-thirds of the correction, because to go all the way, it just doesn't look right. And I didn't understand why until I shot, it was a spot with shooting inside a car and pushing all the light through the window. And of course, the window was green. Right. So we put in some minus green to take that out on and on the meter, it looked fine. But the image, everyone looked really ready. And we fix it in post.

And what I realized is that the color meter is sampling three points, but it's not really telling you. Maybe you have a more sophisticated one. You have the C-800 that was made four LEDs, four fluorescent. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this one,

it was basically telling me when I hit, when I took the green out of the window, but it wasn't telling me that the shape of the spectral response of the gel was a complete mismatch for the window in terms of what the jail was designed to do. So that was an interesting little educational moment. What's interesting about lights, though, so we have Alexa mode in our lights now.

And, and, uh, KinoFlow. Oh, yes. So, yeah, I think, yeah, I know they have kind of a lot system. yeah but it's like four can it's only four it's like the pan of it the dxel the Alexa I want to say Venice and very cam I think it's okay right this one was so this is really interesting one thing I didn't realize is that you know CRI only measures how you're like your your your I sees things right so when manufacturers talk about CRI you know nothing to do it how the camera sees yep that's the other reason I got the color meter I was like TM30

baby, give me the real. Give me the real shit. Yes, TM30, yes. That's what he does. So what was interesting is also to know that the primary, the green primary for the human eye and the green primary for rec 2020 are different greens. And the camera is going for rec 2020. The actual green is farther around the, if you've got the CIE chart,

you know, 2020 is a triangle over here in the corner, but you've got all this as well and the human eye is somewhere over here well if the light is tuned up so green is here for your eye it's going to look too green on camera and I think that's why a lot of lights do look too green because they're going

for the only common reference there really is which is the human eye because all cameras see things a little bit differently so Alexa mode does a bunch of stuff it tries to give you the best spectral response by balancing the output of the LED

but it also brings that green back. So by eye, it looks a little magenta if you switch between it, but on camera it looks dead on it. That was really interesting. There was something else about that too. Yeah, oh, it seems to work on other cameras because we have looked at other cameras from other manufacturers just to see if they benefit and it seems to work.

And what I've been told in the past is everyone has used. using the same basic dyes for their color filter arrays because there's only so many materials that will pass remotely the right spectral part of the spectrum for red, blue, or green. It tend to be a lot sloppier than prism cameras, so there's a lot more overlap, but you can do it. And that will actually adhere to, you know, the sensor in the right way. So everyone's using kind of the same stuff. The only thing it seems you can really control is the crossover. So basically you can say if these are like this, you know, if they're crossing over a lot,

I can make them a little more saturated and I can change that crossover point or I can change this one, make this a little bit more, less saturated in this one a little more. And you can kind of tune it that way. But the basic colors are all the same. And that seems to be why this light, as far as we can tell, looks, it helps everything so far that we've tested. And this is the new sky panel X? This is the sky panel, yes, the X, the X 21 and, yeah.

And the orbiter, there's an, there's an upgrade that you can turn an orbiter into, you can give it the same modes because it's the same color engine. Gotcha. That's cool. yeah i don't i don't uh because you guys are the 800 pound gorilla i don't often get you know i got i got my i got my keynote flow LEDs and i got my uh mega light cloth and that you know especially when i'm doing interviews you know like big ass soft source that you can fit in a backpack that's coming with me yeah yeah absolutely yeah i had one corporate client where we always use our internal package and what what we did was we took uh four by four black white cards

and scored them or cut them in half and then put them back together with you know tape and enough of a gap that you could fold them and I had four of those and you could stick them on a cart and wheeling through doorways

and then when you got there you can unfold them and I could do a lot with those four bounce cards I could block a window I could create a big soft so I could do all sorts of stuff so yeah you you get to be really creative

I'm gonna have to make those because I that's a great idea well my lighting but go ahead oh sorry like the lighting that I have right now is from this window, but what I would do in an interview situation, I would

set up one of those cards here white face in, and then I would, the back would be just behind my head and it would go forward. And then I'd take another one black side in and put it right here. And then I put the light behind this one so like that one.

So I'd have a big soft source, negative fill. If I needed a little fill, I could take a piece of typing paper or just stick it up on there. It went a little piece of tape. Right. And I did so much. I spent years figuring out how to make it that simple.

Yeah. My thing now is just using the color meter, finding the window, and then just tuning whatever. Yes. And then just making it match. That it's all, which is technically what I've done here. I'm technically, I have a light here. But there is a big window.

But I'm also such a dork. You know, this is my office so I can manipulate it to stay. So I have a big piece of 251. Covering the entire window. So the whole, and then I have a line. But what you're doing is a really great trick that I learned a long time ago watching a DP on a TV show. I was B-camera operator and I came in and I saw he was always putting the fill on the same side as whatever the dominant life source was. And I tried it and it worked so well to clean up faces and like really fast.

Because if you and also it added a lot more tonality to it because it. if you're doing something where you're just soft light fill, you know, you get two tones. Right. But if you have, you know, soft light, less soft light, and then this falls off, you get a range. And it's really interesting. And if I was in a situation where I couldn't move the light coming in through a window, well, you could a filler on the same side, you kind of tone it down, you wrap it around. Yeah, that's a great trick.

Yeah. The one you'll appreciate that I did, and then I'll let you go because I know I've kept you over. I took a bounce card I just went to whatever the art store and so I think it's probably like three by two something like that and I taped this like metal bracket

to it just like a piece of flat metal and then from the top of it taped some of the extra 251 I had so I just had this thing right and then I have this inflatable balloon light that has magnets on the back. And with the color meat, I found out it's actually, it's a very cheap light. It was like 30 bucks.

But it fits in your back pocket when it's deflated. And I would, I needed to basically get into this very small bar. So I took the, the show card with the metal thing. And then I blew up the inflatable light magnet. And then the diffusing, the diffusion was hanging down and I angled it off a sea stand like that. So, you know, it was like kind of a, I don't know, 45 degree angle. And then magnet shown the light through the diffusion. And, dude, I have to send you some of the stills.

Like, it looks incredible. I was so proud of myself. Wow. That's great. That's really smart. Yeah. As soon as it said magnet, I went, oh, I think I know where this guy's going. That sounds really cool.

I got into stuff like that where I was trying to get like a key grip on a job to, we had a 12 by bounce and I wanted him to just tie like a 12 by half grid to the front of it and then just tilt it like that and let the the fusion hangs oh that's that's that'll never work no no he talked me out of it and you know like um two months later we're on a job and we're doing something similar like a book line he just does that like oh where you figure that all i got that from some dps somewhere works great please that it yeah he jerk yeah yeah because you can do that like even uh one thing that i've done is basically the exact same setup actually

the same fucking thing but I put you just get the um whatever baby clamp with the pin whatever that's called cartilini clamp with the pin and then just attach it to the bottom of the C stand

and shoot it up into the bounce and then through the diffusion you got your little uh and it you know it extends the lengths for you and you get the nice if you need like a one stand solution it's funny. The one, the two best purchases I ever made were I bought two six by grid cloths, full grid and a light grid. And I found so many uses for that. And one of them was I, I had these two, I think there were Kino celebs that came in in a kit with whatever gear I had rented. And I wanted to turn them into a big soft source. And so I just put them together. But then they still weren't soft enough. So then I just clipped the diffusion to the top door and to let it hang. oh this is great and there's a guy in australia who started he did some videos about he calls it mushrooming where he'll take a light like that and just throw a diffusion over the top of it and

it it looks great you're you're definitely doing all the right stuff so that's really cool well i very much appreciate that but i'll show you the one thing that i bring on every every shoot and it's work it's i needed it every time one set shower curtain Big ass shower curtain. This cost me five bucks at Ross or whatever. I use it all the time because, you know, it's like some, we were shooting in Dallas, you know, and we just had these big windows at this Airbnb and we didn't have like a gaffer for one of the shoots.

Shower curtain, you know, the same thing. Too many desperate, disparate lights, you know, shower curtain. I can fit a T bar in a backpack now, you know, everything's so small. shower curtain and it looks great it really really does you know it's funny i i saw i was walking through my my brother-in-law's um your laundry room at his house on a winter day and he had a leak and there's a bunch of painters dropcloths or something he taped up over the windows and the winter sun in the distance coming through that this long this is the most amazing laundry room i've ever Everything glowed. It was fantastic.

And that's what I, yeah, what you're describing, I'm sure that has the same kind of vibe. I found there was one, I was doing a lot of work in small sets for this one company, and I found if I put shower curtain over the top of it, I could put lights down through it just for Nels. And it caused enough of a glow that I could put it right there, and it would be soft, but I could keep it off the back wall. But it was a little bit of a fire hazard.

LEDs have helped in many ways. Yes, yes. That's how old I am, pre-L-A-D. Yeah, well, I mean, I remember this, it sounds so stupid now, but I remember feeling like I had finally made it. And I was, I was shooting a medical information thing where, like, the acting was like intentionally over the top because we're supposed to be showing you, like, if a patient does this do that you know and you're not supposed to be subtle about it and uh and uh the guy who

ran the studio we were shooting in it was like a medical studio for this that they just had they built years and years ago and uh he he was still on tungsten everything and luckily he had working air conditioning but i remember feeling like i hadn't made it i was like i find i'm finally a real dp because they had a zip light i had never seen a zip light in person And I was like, oh shit, that's David Fincher used that, you know, whatever, you know, that was on Fight Club. And now, yeah, some of that, some of that mystery is gone when you see it. You can get a sky panel at a really good price now. But, yeah, well, I'm sorry I kept you over a little bit.

That's not a problem. We should just have you back on to talk about all the various camera tricks you've learned, because I think, many dPs would it's it's a lot easier to talk about it for an hour than write an article so yes and i would yeah i would yeah that's one thing that's we've had a discussion about that here is like well i could write articles through bbc yeah but that's going to take you out of action going two days yep yeah so yes i would i would love to go back cool well uh yeah right right down a little list i'll write down a little list and then we can just go back and forth about all right i have a new idea, and I think that'd be a fun one.

I think that's a great idea. Yeah. We should do that. Cool. Well, lucky for me, five years of this podcast, I just now got an offer of sponsorship. So, you know the company Visco? Yeah. It used to just be a phone app, but now they have all kinds of film emulation

plugins for Lightroom. They want to sponsor the podcast. So I'm about to hop on a call with them next. good for you I know because fucking Glenn Garland

gets like five I'm going to cut this out he gets like five grand an episode like the ACE pays for it really yeah and like film tools

gets a cut or whatever and I was just like can I how do I do that and then Avery's just like oh well you know figured out and I was like what

come somebody help but yeah hopefully you know it's not it's not super film making adjacent but it's you know it's close enough and the the metrics say that everyone who listens to this is either my age or your age so they probably also work camera people like they take photos and so so because i was i was very much like i'm not gonna come

out here and take a better help just that's not you know or whatever you know some you know liquid some random yeah here's here's how you can get food delivered yeah yeah it's like i'm not i'd rather keep the money. I'd rather just make it a free education resource. But yeah, I'm going to hop on to that column out. So I appreciate your time and let's do the cameraman one soon. Please. I enjoy this and I'd love to do it again. Frame and Reference is an Albot production produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can do so by going to frame and refpod.com and clicking on the Patreon button. It's always appreciated. And as always, thanks for listening.

Thank you.