The Alexa from ARRI has had a lot of us hanging in anticipation.
The commercial production company Backyard in Venice, Calif., was one of the first to put the Alexa through its paces on a Humana spot titled “Grandparents” for agency RAPP and directed by Chace Strickland. Shot on location in Los Angeles this August, the commercial is about the relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. The spot was shot in various locations and lighting situations, which proved to be a great test for ARRI’s latest offering to the digital world. Having shot with every form of digital format, I was highly anticipating the experience.
I must admit I don’t normally go to prep days but this one was not to be missed.
We had two cameras both armed with Angeneiux 24-290 zooms. The Alexa offers various recording formats but based on the D21 ‘s amazing resolution on the LOC C files, it was only obvious to go down the same route so we went straight into S-TWO decks capturing LOC C and additionally captured Pro Res 4444 on SXS cards on one of the cameras.
The camera has a high sensitivity of 800asa and it is recommended to keep it at this for capturing maximum dynamic range so I decided to use a combination of Tiffin ND 2.1s and 1.2s. This allowed me to shoot as wide open as possible to get as little depth as possible, which is a rule of thumb in the digital world. We then opted to view the monitor out at REC709.
The camera is very user friendly; all the controls are intuitive so for film people it’s great. It took me an hour to figure out everything I needed to. The menus do not lead you down a rabbit hole. They give you enough options to do what you need. It really is designed for film people.
The LOC C files went off to the editor while I kept the Pro Res files to download myself.
The first evening I downloaded the rushes from the Pro Res 4444 cards on to my laptop and ingested them into Final Cut and then Colour.
I was surprised. ARRI had been bragging on at how good these were but I didn’t expect anything like this. In appearance they looked very much like cinema DPX files (flat). After a tweak in Colour I was really blown away at the dynamic range. One of the locations we shot was outside the concert hall in downtown L.A. with a backlight water fountain with atomizing water. The contrast level was so high that it even hurt to look at it with the naked eye. What the Alexa captured on Pro Res was so good that I could push the highlights even more if I needed to. I’m sure I was getting more than 13.5 stops latitude on Pro Res, leave alone LOC C.
Although I have embraced HD technology, at heart I am still a film purest.
But to make film look this good, I would need to do a 4k scan and grade it very precisely on Baselight with an amazing colourist. Here I was doing it myself on my MacBook Pro in FCP and Colour, after wrap. Finally as a DOP I have total control over my images in a Mac friendly format. So really there is no math to do as far as I’m concerned. It’s always been about controlling the image for me. We have come a long way from the days when we’d send Polaroids in to the colourist to match colour. Now I can virtually finish off the colour grading on my MacBook Pro.
But just to see this through all the way, we also put the Alexa through its paces at The Mill in London with some vigorous testing. The bottom line was that when colourist Adam Scott got to grips with the footage on Baselight, we found very little visual difference between the Loc C and Pro Res. The Pro Res had everything he needed to get a look going. With the LOC C we could obviously push it a bit deeper.
Bottom line is I would use Pro Res 4444 for most of my commercial work saving the LOC C only for sfx green screen type jobs. The raw files are yet to be tested.
The workflow I would recommend is real simple and very production friendly. The Pro Res files can either be ingested into FCP or Avid Media Composer 5. Without any trans-coding. For DOP’s who want total control over the image in a DIY format I would recommend Colour as a grading platform, which can be directly accessed, from FCP. A 17″ MacBook Pro or new 27″ imac is adequate enough for most commercial applications.
Zubin Mistry (www.zubinmistry.com) was born in 1967 into a family of cinematographers and inventors. His father and uncle were DPs and grandfather an inventor. Spending most of his childhood on Bollywood movie sets, Mistry took his first shot looking through the eyepiece at seven, and was hooked. Moving to England at the age of 13, he graduated from film school in 1989 and accidentally fell into the advertising industry and has been shooting commercials for the last 21 years. “Commercials are a great way to experiment and it’s been fun being able to do a job you love and get paid for it. My passion has always been to shoot movies and tell stories.”
