From Ed David…
Sony F35 vs Red One MX vs Digital Bolex 16 – Skintones and Highlight and Motion from Ed David on Vimeo.
Testing skin tones, motion, and highlight. This test was interesting because I'm in a daylight environment with outdoor light leaking and the keylight is a 1k rifa light with I thought full CTB on it, but maybe it was half ctb but anyway to see how the F35 and Red One key it out. It's not super natural it's pushing skin tone to see what is possible. Oh well – just kind of for me.
Results for me:
Red One and F35 both have a nice color sensor, f35 has better highlight handling – but off the start skin tones from the red one seem to be more pleasing to me. F35 has better motion rendering – its small but noticeable. But I really don't think either camera is that much different for what I need. For a major motion film I'd probably go F35 over red one because the motion is important but for web stuff – it all seems the same probably.
The digital bolex is not a 400 ASA camera – I rate it as a 200 ASA camera – so it's not for me at all. It's too noisy for me at 400 ASA. So its the same as the Ikonscope camera.
We were pulling skin tones off a tough key – 1k rifa with 1/2CTB in a room where temp was not set at 5600k even though both cameras were. I am really happy with how the red one performed – it pulled nice skin tones very well. Digital bolex – I don't know how I screwed it up but I did. I think first we underexposed it – but also – it's okay ergonomically it's not good for me so I'm not going to try to learn how to shoot better with it. You can only record interally and then offload after you are done – so it's not much of a workflow. And the form factor is heavy and awkward with a weird low-res monitor and no top mounting points and has a crank thing on it that does nothing – is this nice to say? No, it's not at all. I'm sorry just maybe trying to save someone from buying this thing – to know what they are getting into. I think everyone would be better off just buying a used camera on ebay – like the f35 or red one or f3 or c300 or c100 or fs700 – no camera is that great, but something about it doesn't make it seem that workable. Plus I'm not into recording from a hdmi stream – I don't trust the connections. I trust HD-SDI
Also red does have more natural resolution it seems than the f35 – but I don't know – I didn't shoot test charts which I need to do. But the trade off is its motion isn't as nice.
Digital bolex is not for me. It has a nice grainy image which I feel like I can get in post – it seems to have limited lattitude.
CREW:
Special thanks to the actors and the camera people – Nachiketa Amin, Phil Kibbe,
and Carolina Ravassa and my producer Lily Henderson.