Miami Vice

[threadhanger]

Anybody else seen the remake? The whole movie was shot with a true 1920 x 1080 camera, the Viper. It really surprised me while watching it (on my 22'' monitor) that quite a bit of it looked liked it could have been shot with the HV20.

It appeared that Michael Mann even mixed some 30fps shots with the the 24fps. While a lot of the oceanic scenes were stunning, most of the night shots were pretty noisy and amateurish looking. Almost a documentary style. It's an interesting movie to watch if you plan on making some kind of indie film with the Canon.

[Michael Davis]

While a lot of the oceanic scenes were stunning, most of the night shots were pretty noisy and amateurish looking.

Thank you! THANK YOU! That shit looked like GARBAGE. I couldn't BELIEVE that movie got into theaters. The night shots looked like it was bring your son to work day for the lighting department.

God that movie was horrible.

[ESTEBEVERDE]

Thank you! THANK YOU! That shit looked like GARBAGE. I couldn't BELIEVE that movie got into theaters. The night shots looked like it was bring your son to work day for the lighting department.

God that movie was horrible.


So... what do you think were its weakpoints? :hv20-smilie87:

[threadhanger]

A lot of it also looked like it was shot handheld and shaky.

The whole movie was just odd. I noticed it's only getting a 6.1 on IMDB. Part's of it were brilliant, and as always with Mann, I love some of the music. But it just seemed nothing at all like the TV show, which holds up pretty well by todays standards.

[Michael Davis]

What was so wierd is that Mann used that camera first for Collateral, which I really liked, and think it's night photography looked pretty great for video. It's like, they had that movie to practice on, and Miami Vice looked worse for some reason. Then David Fincher used it for Zodiac, and while I think that movie didn't have an ending, it just dropped off mid-sentance, I think it's night photography looked great as well. I just don't know what happened with Miami Vice.

[tcindie]

It appeared that Michael Mann even mixed some 30fps shots with the the 24fps.

It may well have been 24fps footage, but they let the shutter speed drop below 1/48.. 24fps footage with a 1/24 shutter will look like video.

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

Every time I make my case about DOF, I get some people saying "you don't need DOF, Michael Mann's movies look amazing and he doesn't use any most of the time". Well, I guess it's all a matter of opinion. I don't like video-looking movies. And I am opinionated.

[Ian-T]

What was so wierd is that Mann used that camera first for Collateral, which I really liked, and think it's night photography looked pretty great for video. It's like, they had that movie to practice on, and Miami Vice looked worse for some reason. .....
I agree. I don't know what went wrong.....or if it was just laziness on their part. Collateral was great...inspired the heck out of me...but Miami Vice....not a total disaster..but but did not live up to Collateral. It was the night scenes that did it for me in collateral....great shots.

[jmalmsten]

Well, I've been following the the video-on-big-screen trend and in there Manns movies has been quite interesting.

And I say interesting because it's in there, the first time I noticed the importance of shutter speed. I just remembered watching Collateral and Miami Vice and I thought that it looked quite well but it seemed that the sensor didn't fully reset between frames. I pondered quite a while why, as soon as someone tried to make a digital feature, objects and persons went out of focus as soon as they moved and just became a ugly smear. I thought about it when I saw Dogville too and almost came to the conclusion that maybe video isn't made for the screen after all...

Then I learned about 1/48 shutterspeed and what happens if you drop under it. And now my ponderings is just about why did they choose such a ugly shutterspeed? I still have no idea. And also I heard that one of the shortcomings with the equipment that Mann used was that it nearly took up a the size of a truck for the storage and that the big boats used was nearly filled to the brim with storage-equipment to facilitate the cameras. And since the image quality actually ain't better than what we got... I'm left to ask Why? Why bother?

I saw the Star Wars "Prelogy" and just thought everything went to down-right-ugly with ep 2. I saw the swedish Johan Falk thrilogy and it got the same ugly video look starting with part 2... Both trilogies where shot on film for the first film and then the director got HD-bitten and went HD all the way from there.

But as always, with Mann. If there is somewhere they shine, then it's in the fierce realism of gunplay... I swear to god, the end fight of Miami Vice and especially the bank-escape-fight in Heat is just about how close I am willing to get to real warfare. And that's mostly because of the Live sound he uses. As someone said about John Woo, or was it Verhoeven, I think it also applies to Mann, "Some people make action scenes and they look quite visually good, but when this guy makes action, it's visceral, you are TERRIFIED AND FRIGHTENED that the next one might hit YOU!". ;)

But then I think of movies that use HD and actually look damn good... Mel Gibsons Apocalypto for instance (with 16mm footage intersperced in a non-detectable way). Or even the love or hate Godzilla Final Wars. And Sin City was for me the first green-screen-movie that I liked... and that's all because it's the first movie of that kind that DIDN'T go for a full out of focus look (when I watched Casshern and Sky Captain I could have sworn I was looking at some low-life-VHS-bootleg transfer...) For the first time I was shown that HD CAN look sharp if handled right on film... many times when people want "film look" they create artificial blurs and quite frankly it really hurts my eyes when I watch these films...

There is an interesting difference between HD and Film in general. In Film, everyone tries their hardest to get deep DOF... Every commentary DVD-track is filled with comments of how difficult it was to achieve a nice image with everything relevant in focus. And when I watch a HD-production I always hear about "what I did to shorten the DOF" and everyone asks "how did you get so shallow DOF"... It's interesting, this complete difference isn't it? And all the while HD-folks claims to be after the "true" film look...;)

Yes in film they occasionally work with DOF but it's only on video I've seen the obsessive behavior to get an ubiquitous blur around their subject ALL THE TIME... And to put it mildly I just think it's silly...

Whoops, this turned out to be more of a rant about HD in general as opposed to just Michael Mann's HD-movies... But I thing I have stated my point anyways;) If Mann is all right with loosing that much image quality by going digital, I really see no problem for him to go HDV and get rid of the storage-issues for his next feature. And I think Mann is the ONLY one I know that claims that digital works better in low light than film... I just don't get him sometimes... but then again, I do short no-sale-student-films and he does international blockbusters so who am I to judge him?;)

[lordtangent]

And I think Mann is the ONLY one I know that claims that digital works better in low light than film... I just don't get him sometimes...

Video tends to be more linear down in the "toe" area. This be considered a feature in a low light environment. "ASA" for "ASA" stop, video is going to seem to see into the shadows a little better than film. At least that used to be the case. There are plenty of arguments against video in this context though.

The main problem is, at least by my sensibilities, video can't handle the overexposure you get in high contrast "dark" scenes as well as film. Think: shooting into bare practicals. Video just blows out. But film handles it much better. Also, modern films are getting much more linear in the toe. So film is getting pretty competitive with video at seeing into shadows these days.

The issue boils down to linear exposure vs. the innate "LOG-Like" exposure of film. Film just rolls off over exposure nicely where linear devices just hit "1" and then blow out.

Nobody makes a production video camera that rivals film in the Dynamic Range department yet. The Dalsa Origin gets close. It's an AMAZING camera. But it's insanely expensive and still difficult to work with. I'd like to see a cheap, HV20-like camera that uses LOG CMOS to get better dynamic range. The technology is here today. It just no camera manufacturer has chosen to use it yet. And the amazing thing about LOG CMOS? It can be set up to grab even HIGHER dynamic range than film. With modern tricks like "Tone Mapping", it's possible to compress the dynamic range in post into a pleasing picture. Digital sensors have a lot of untapped potential in this area. I'm really interested were things are going to go in the future. We've already had a preview with stuff like "HDRI"

[threadhanger]

I just finished watching 28 Weeks Later, another movie shot digitally. The cinematography for it was almost identical to Miami Vice. Crushed blacks. Noise in the low light shots. Lots of depth of field for 90% of the shots.

Although I didn't like 28 Weeks, it was the story and directing that sunk it for me, not the camerawork. Digital just has it's own look. The almost infinite dof isn't that bad. In a way it puts you more into the story because you see everything. This gives more of a playground for the eye to wonder. The difference between whatever camera they used in this movie (and Miami Vice) and the HV20 is pretty minimal when, on the other hand, you compare digital to 35mm.

For some reason I keep thinking of comic books when I see digital films like these. Frank Millers art comes to mind.



By the way, what does "Video tends to be more linear down in the "toe" area" mean?

[lordtangent]

I'm kind of using using film terminology to talk about video, which isn't really fair since video and film are different and both use different "yard sticks" in terms of how the technicians measure them/work with them... but...using more of the "film like" terminology:

Every film has a "characteristic" exposure curve. The toe area is the part of the curve at the base (normally plotted to the left of the curve). All film has a roughly "s" shaped characteristic curve while most electronic sensors have a nearly linear curve.

OK. I mentioned that film and video use different terminology...Underscoring an interesting and HUGE disconnect between "film-land" terminology, and "digital/video-land" terminology: When talking about "linear" in film , what they are usually referring to is the "linear" portion of the characteristic curve. The thing is, in film that curve is plotted in log base ten corrected density... The "linear" portion of the curve is anything but. It's actually quite compressed. (the graph is in log space)

But when we talk about "linear" in video, we mean it literally. Each increase on the graph is equal to the same amount of input. (the graph is in linear space) IN comparison to film, in video there is no compression at all in exposure space. (other than basic gamma, which isn't much) That is why video seems to "blow out" so easily.

You can underexpose with a video sensor to try to make up for the lack of "head room" but the limiting factor is the signal to noise ratio of the sensor. In practice it is very difficult to produce a sensor (for a reasonable amount of money) with a good enough S/N it would allow one to reduce the exposure to the point that the sensor produces the same 11 plus 3-5 highly compressed stops that film can produce. (It's those last few stops that REALLY spell the difference between film and video)

That is why I'm such a proponent of LOG CMOS. LOG CMOS is practically "digital film" in terms of how it's characteristic curve can be programed. (in fact it can be programmed to have MORE compression than even film) With just a few more transistors on the imager chip, the chip itself can do the exposure compression BEFORE the A to D conversion and give a much higher dynamic exposure range without introducing noise. The state of the art LOG CMOS technology is even programmable. You can dial in any amount of compression you want from zero to "insanely compressed" If a true linear image is desired it can be extracted later in software. (It's a pretty trivial color transform if the curve of the sensor is known)

Yeah, really I'm quite amazed the technology has not found it's way into consumer devices at least, because in combination with a semi-decent auto exposure it makes taking good pictures (or at least usable pictures) almost fool-proof.

[Erik Bien]

I just finished watching 28 Weeks Later, another movie shot digitally.

Camera-nerd fact check: 28 Weeks Later was shot mostly on Super 16mm (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/technical) film.

[jmalmsten]

Camera-nerd fact check: 28 Weeks Later was shot mostly on Super 16mm (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/technical) film.
Then one should bring up 28 Days later which was shot on DV (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/technical) If I remember correctly... ;)

Loved that film rrrrriiiight up at the moment it turned into a regular zombie-slasher...:(

The Weeks one does seem a bit more interesting since I don't have to suffer the misunderstanding of the first;)

[RobPhoboS]

This film is always like Marmite to most people (love it or hate it).
I totally love it, M.Mann is one of the best directors we have working and he's not afraid to try out new techniques to convey his work.
Its kind of funny because sometimes an effect or style can make you just hate the entire film, I for one threw '300' in the bin after 40 mins (I swear they only shot 30mins of footage and just slowed the whole thing down).

Anyway, there are soo many people (here included) that are obsessed with trying to make something look like film and end up shooting crap rather than having good content. I personaly hate the look of 'video' or dv, so I do my best to make sure it at least doesn't look like that.

Not really sure what I'm waffling on about but hey the post is a bit longer now.
:D

[threadhanger]

"I swear they only shot 30mins of footage and just slowed the whole thing down"

You know, I think you are right. The whole movie could of been done with CGI like Beowolf.