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EURO CINE EXPO 2023 - MOTORWORLD, MUNICH
Amsterdam, 2023-07-05 - Miga Bär
Except for the weird arena that is Motorworld, where basically all the supercar manufacturers of the world have a small showroom in a big conference center, this event can be likened to the BSC Expo in London, albeit a bit smaller.
The 5 halls with exhibitors were mostly filled with manufacturers of lighting, grip and peripherals. Except for Sony and Blackmagic, none of the camera manufactures had a presence on the show floor, the same was true for most lens manufacturers except Leitz and P+S Technik. With little surprises on the stands it became evidently clear that this event is not aimed at hearing the scoops about the latest and greatest of the manufacturers. Rather, it’s aimed at connecting people and sharing insights through the various presentations that are hosted.
On that last topic, the event offered an impressive lineup of seminars and workshops, attracting a decent crowd which also made the expo a great networking event. With 3 rooms for seminars and workshops running in parallel, I could only attend a selection of what Euro Cine had to offer and enjoyed every bit of it. Some of the highlights were:
All you need to know about... LEDs!
A highly scientific presentation on the difficulties of working with LED light, how LED lights in urban environments have changed the look of cityscapes entirely, how to correctly judge the qualities and shortcomings of LED lighting fixtures and how as a cinematographer you can make yourself aware of the pitfalls and consequences of your LED lighting choices. This session was organised by the IMAGO Technical Committee and hosted by Philippe Ros AFC and David Stump ASC/MITC. These two gentleman have gone on a bit of a European tour with this presentation, as it was also recently presented at the Visual Media Lab Conference in Stuttgart and the Oslo Digital Cinema Conference. And even though both the presenters have a tendency to go off on scientific tangents, the presentation was highly digestible and quite insightful. The most important takeaway: every cinematographer should have a € 10,- Spectroscope in their standard toolkit to measure the spectrum of any given light, it’s a real eye opener (pun intended)!
Artifical Intelligence & Cinematography - Chances & Risks
With a healthy dose of scepsis I walked into the Black Box seminar room, where Felix Hüsken, renowned colorist and BVK board member was presenting his observations on how filmmakers can utilise the current state of AI in their creative process as of today. He managed to convince me that the current suite of widely available tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney and Relight (amongst others) can already be used to our benefits, even if the results aren’t ready for prime time yet. The main use case he presented was in the pre-production phase, where these tools can effectively help create a look book, mood board or look references to guide conversations about the visual direction of a production. In a way, Felix presented an AI driven next step in what Shotdeck has done for us over the last few years.
Did he present a silver bullet? I don’t think so. But it can be very useful to help translate the images a director, cinematographer, production designer, etc have in their minds to a visual reference for everyone to see.
Artistic Decisions on Cinematography - To be Burnt or not to be Burnt?
Another session in the series of IMAGO hosted presentations, this time a panel conversation about the desire to have camera manufacturers provide creative control to cinematographers. This has been a hot topic within the IMAGO Technical Committee for years, most visibly through the long conversations with SONY that eventually led to adding a Sharpness slider within the set of RAW parameters on Sony cameras.
This was a promising session with a lot of very high profile names on the panel. Unfortunately, the chosen setup didn’t allow for a real conversation. After all 12 or so participants were given their 5 minutes to present their view on the topic, there was no time left to actually discuss the various statements that were made. A more suitable setup might’ve been to have a real round table open conversation between the speakers, and have the audience sit around that as bystanders. Given, this would require a bit of pre-existing context for the audience, but would’ve provided room for more debate to take place.
Nonetheless, there were very interesting views and opinions shared within the almost 2 hour session. ARRI presented their work on the Textures that are available within the Alexa 35, Suny Behar (director/DP of the HBO Camera Assessment Series) held a passionate plea both about making decisions as part of the creative process, but also to preserve these decisions as metadata, to enable future remastering as much as possible. Some of the participants fervently rooted for the burning in of creative decisions, either because constraints help the creative process or out of fear to loose control during the postproduction process. The most striking observation to me came from Pascale Marin AFC, who showed the importance of pragmatism by explaining how she would choose the amount of burnt in creative decisions on the level of confidence her director will show to her. She also hinted towards this conversation being more on the political and human level than the technical level, which I couldn’t agree with more.
I’m looking forward to the next step in this conversation, as the topic is a very interesting one.
AFC Lens Conference
Promoted as a conference, this turned out to be a screening of two extremely thorough and extensive lens tests that the AFC has performed over the last 5 years. In the first round, executed 4 or 5 years ago, 31 different s35 lenses were tested in a well thought out set, in which highlight detail, shadow detail, depth of field, flare, halation, focus breathing and many other characteristics were clear to discern. The second test, performed in 2021, did the exact same thing, but now with full frame lenses.
What made this a fun exercise was the fact that all lenses had received a two letter codename and the audience got pen and paper to keep notes on your observations during the screening. I have to admit that sitting through 2x 31x 1,5 minutes of the same 2 shots is tedious, especially as it was just that, showing the recordings, with no sound or commentary. Nonetheless I found it incredibly fascinating to see all the differences.
The most striking observation: s35 lenses come in all kinds of different flavours whereas full frame lenses are a lot of different iterations of vanilla and a few more exotic flavours.
I touched base with Pascale Marin from the AFC after the session to see if she would be willing to share the DCP of these tests with other societies. The AFC is very open to this idea, so I hope to host a screening of these tests for NSC members sometime later this year.
HDR On-Set Workshop
Hosted by BandPro, a Munich based reseller of cameras and peripherals, a small set was built in which colorist Felix Hüsken, DIT Christian Saure and make-up artist Julia Schlotke showed participants of the workshop what to pay attention to when shooting for HDR, and how to correctly monitor for HDR, both when you are fortunate enough to have HDR monitoring on set and when you don’t have that option. I especially had a great conversation with Julia Schlotke about the impact that sharper lenses, higher resolution and higher dynamic range have had on her work over the last decade.
On display were some of Small HD’s current monitors: the 350 nit limited 24” OLED and the 1000 nit 24” Vision series. Even though the list price on these models is still very steep, Small HD finally gives us hope that HDR monitoring on set will be something within reach even for lower budget productions in the next few years. The image quality and tracking of the PQ curve on both these monitors is stunning. Nonetheless, using these monitors on set still comes with its set of intricacies that you need to be aware of before deploying HDR monitoring on set.
Metamerism & Metameric Failure
As closing act, Dirk Meier (renowned colorist and world-class teacher) treated us with a full blown magic trick that would play very well at a Las Vegas residency show. With the use of a white sheet stolen from the hotel, a tungsten light source, an LED light source and a bag filled with bell peppers, Dirk managed to explain a very abstract yet important facet of color science in an easy and convincing manner. The details of the experiment go a bit too deep for this writeup, but it boiled down to being a very convincing demonstration of everything that Philippe Ros and David Stump had warned for in their opening session, which brought the entire show full circle. I’m hopeful we will find a good place at a future NSC event to replicate this magic trick, as it is definitely worth seeing it in real life.
Combine all of the above with great conversations, German sized beers and Bavarian cuisine and it is easy to imagine that these were two very fruitful and educational days but equally exhausting.
Miga Bär