Working with some 6k footage from a Sony Venice, and I gotta say, it’s incredibly f***ed up. It’s… bad. I will add it’s 48 FPS, but the rolling shutter is almost incomprehensible coming from a camera that is promoted this way. There are absolute jello frames as the camera bounces, distorted, skewed, warped, and completely planar track unfriendly. Is this a common problem with this camera or did something go terribly wrong?
If its a rolling shutter, you are guaranteed to have a bad time. Only global shutters are good enough for most of what we need to do. What you are experiencing is a common problem not only with the Sony Venice, but with any camera that doesn’t have a global shutter.
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I can dig that Randy- but most digital cameras are gonna have a CMOS sensor and rolling shutter, i.e., my beloved Arri Alexa still has a rolling shutter, although the readout is very very fast and I’d challenge you to fisticuffs if you could find rolling shutter artifacts. I don’t wanna damn this Sony Venice to hell though (which, I have been on a daily basis) so quickly. Is it operator error? What happened here? Or is this just the norm? However, it’s left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth.
I think you should be damning it to hell. That camera should’t be used for visual effects applications. Your Arri Alexa has a rolling shutter, sure. But it does have what I believe is a best in class read out time, and it isn’t 6k. It will have some kind of rolling shutter artifacts. It’s also likely much smaller than 6k.
Any additional vibrations from car mounts, helicopter mounts, drone mounts, wind, a butterfly flapping its wings, are all real world challenges for the Sony Venice. Unless the shutter was dragged open the whole time or someone was drumming on the camera, it can’t be operator error, but camera error.
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Yes! Thank you Randy, this is what I thought! Like- what is this s**t? And to add insult to injury- why are you shooting 6k? Are you that insecure of your composition that you feel you might need to push in that far? Kubrick is rolling in his grave. He’s doing a tony hawk 360 kick flip to be exact.
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Don’t forget, 6k isn’t really about pushing in and framing. What I’ve found is that the sensors are kinda soft and noisy at 6k. Shit, some of the lenses that people are using can’t even resolve detail that high. 5k and up is all about reducing noise and increasing effective sharpness.
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It’s not a popular camera in the upper crust of advertising productions. I think I’ve only seen it once or twice on an ad.
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Worst footage in terms of noise/compression that i’ve dealt with in the last few years was off an 8k panavision sensor (which I believe is the Red Monstro)
Even when resized down to 4k it’s still a mess. 4k is not better, 6k is not better, 8k is not better. Just rent an Alexa. If you need 4k I’ll upscale it and it’ll look better than a native sensor from another camera manufacturer.
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Y’all should check out the Team Deakins podcast where they interview Franz Kraus from Arri about the development of the Alexa. It was very informative about their sensor development and technical choices.
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Which is funny because in the Olden Days Panavision got in a pretty public spat with Red over CCD vs. CMOS and color reconstruction/interpolation and megapixels vs. resolution. It was technical but also quite catty. I loved it.
For pure hd video, I thought the Genesis was a nice camera, once they worked out the worst of the kinks. Shame it didn’t scale.
On a purely historical note, I happened to be at Panavision one day when they wheeled the “Star Wars” prototype through the office. Swear to god the fucking thing was just a betacam with a Primo bolted to it.
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Because I love you Andy, here’s a link to an interview where Panavision’s then-SVP of Digital Imaging, John Galt, shit talks RED and Dalsa in an open forum. Notably, the sensor in the Genesis was from Sony, and it’s kind of delicious that they’re using a RED sensor now:
I got a look at some Dalsa images as part of the camera research for Zodiac, it was bad, and I’m really glad very few of you have ever had to deal with the footage from that thing.
My thoughts at the time on the John Galt interview had made their way to a friend of a friend at Dalsa, and I wish I could find the response because, apart from all the name calling, it contained many gems such as COLOR RECONSTRUCTION IS NOT INTERPOLATION, which seemed like a pretty thin semantic hair to be splitting when you’re trying to market a cinema camera.
Anyhoozle, with all the advances in realtime HDR capture and increasing pixel counts and frame rates, I’m honestly surprised that jello-cam is still a thing.
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We are predominantly working with Sony Venice footage here and I have to say, I am yet to have a single shot with any noticeable rolling shutter issues. I’d say they either stuffed up on set or there is something faulty with that camera. Personally, I love the Venice, pictures as good as the Alexa, and the X-OCN RAW format is incredible
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