This is one of those videos that we end up making almost entirely by accident.
Meet the Alexa 35 on Ari's website.
They brag that most big productions are shot on Ari.
I'm not gonna lie, I have a hard time figuring out exactly how this fits in Ari's lineup.
You've got the 35, which is a $70,000 camera,
and that's before you buy any kind of rig for it,
a follow focus, a flippin' lens, or a power distribution unit.
It costs $4,000 less than the Mini LF, which uses their old sensor technology,
but the Mini LF is not going away, and in fact may still continue to be used for years to come.
Yes, for a while, probably. Yeah, but why? Because Ari's sensors are still the best,
and they've been using basically the same sensor for 13 years.
Or sensors. So here's the thing, with the Alexa 35,
we get one of their brand new sensor, whose speeds and feeds include things like 17 stops
of dynamic range, which is basically the difference between the highest highlight and the lowest low light
that you can capture, and then recover detail from when you're working on your production.
It's Super 35, which is very standard for cinema cameras.
It's got a 4.6K sensor up from 3.4.
Netflix certification. Exactly, and it's got better color science
using the latest Ari reveal. And you can see on this chart that it has better red reproduction.
And that would be really important for things like skin tones, for example, because there's a lot of blood under skin.
We're very pink. None of which answers my questions about why we would continue to use the rest of Ari's lineup
when this has a higher resolution sensor with better dynamic range and better color science.
And that's where things get really tricky and magical.
So we brought along a mini LF.
This uses the old sensor. It costs $4,000 more,
and that's because it uses two of the old sensor.
So instead of being like this, they take it, they go like this, and they put two of them,
and their top tier camera actually uses... Three of them.
And that gives us the equivalent of, you were saying about IMAX?
Just a little bit less. So IMAX is 70 mil. This is 65, but it's even not really quite 65.
It's about 6K resolution. So who is this actually for then?
Because if I'm shooting a feature, I'm shooting on an Alexa 65,
with the three sensors, which is rental only, by the way. You cannot even buy them.
I can't quote you a price. But then if I'm shooting a documentary or something,
I want the compactness of the mini, especially because I've got two of those old sensors.
So the image quality should be like, pretty similar.
Are you asking why I would use the 35 over the mini? Yes.
The new sensor and better color science. Is the IO similar, or does it have...
Very, very similar. Okay, so you've got Ethernet,
which is for metadata for virtual productions. If you're shooting something like the Mandalorian,
you might want to get data off of the camera in real time while you're shooting.
They've got, okay, audio in.
You would not typically use the audio in on a camera like this other than maybe documentary.
Maybe documentary. Even then you'd have a sound guy. And you've got a baller documentary
if you're shooting on something like this. And yet you don't have a sound guy.
So scratch audio, essentially. Oh, it also has scratch audio mics in the front.
But hey, you brought up a really good point. You could be a hundred feet away from your subject
with a camera like this. Those aren't gonna do anything to help you sync up.
Speaking of syncing, you've got timecode as well as syncing.
So this works more on pulses. And timecode allows you to kind of like,
before the mission, you set your watches
and then ensure that all of your footage is perfectly synchronized for the editor.
You've got 12 volt power out. This is very, very limited.
Really, you're gonna want an add-on part like this. Yeah, just like red.
Remember that unboxing a while back when I bought the reds and then realized
that was like a third of the total cost of the ecosystem?
Ari's got you there, too. So this guy will do 24 volt out
to six different peripheral devices, whether it's that aforementioned audio module
or, I mean, what else would you run? External displays.
Oh, you can connect tons of displays to this thing. So you've got the built-in electronic viewfinder.
You've got the built-in display. And then you can do two more SDI displays
for all the various stakeholders who might wanna be watching what the operator is shooting.
This is cool. You've also have an SDI in.
So if I, the operator of this camera, wanted to have a little picture-in-picture
of what someone else is shooting on a B cam, I could totally do that, too.
And I guess if we were to summarize why this,
it comes down to versatility? When you hit this level of production,
resolution isn't king. It really comes down to, when I bring this-
Sackilage.
In fact, when you get to too high of a resolution, it can counter, is counterproductive
in terms of image quality. We experienced that with- Just like when you go over 24 frames per second.
Yeah, exactly. Please drop the frame rate of this video down to 24,
maybe 12. Are we shooting at 24? No, no.
It wouldn't even surprise me with you guys. Back to why resolution can actually be detrimental
to image quality. When you think about it, the higher resolution, the smaller each photo site is.
Right, because there's a limit to how big you can make the sensor. Exactly.
Theoretically, you could manufacture a sensor that's this big, and your yields might be
one out of every 100,000 that you try to fab.
And there would be no lenses made for that size. So that's actually one of the reasons
you would choose the 35 over the mini, is this is a larger sensor,
so lens compatibility is less good. There's a ton of lenses that can work at this,
but if you go back decades, Super 35 is much more standard.
Right, so there's more to lens compatibility than just the mount.
I guess this is a good opportunity for us to talk about the LPL lens mount.
Now, I have never taken off
or put on a PL lens before. Oh, oh, okay, you need support, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. These are heavy lenses, you don't want to just like. This is a $20,000 lens, so I don't want to mess it up.
Okay, $28,000 lens, it doesn't even zoom.
It has no features. Where's my features?
Okay, so I just rip it out now? Well, have you undone it?
I think so. It is moving, okay, I'll just move it. Okay. Oh, jeez.
Oh, okay, okay, so you got an alignment line.
Looks a little something like that. You've got the do not get dirty part.
You've got the especially super duper do not get dirty part.
And then you basically put the line on the thing. There's a little arrow.
It's right there, right? Yeah, but are you, you're.
Well, wait, what the, well, where does the line go? The line goes top.
That's stupid. Why wouldn't the line align with the arrow?
Because you know that top is top. I don't know.
Well, why is there an arrow? This is an RE lens on an RE camera. There's no excuse.
You did it. You're a first AC now.
Okay, I mean, yeah, I guess that feels really secure.
It's very secure. A lot of PL lenses are very, very heavy.
And so the kind of mounting that's on, you know, an EF or E especially, it would just rip it off.
So that's, you could potentially put rods and lens support, but this is a much more robust system.
And it's more robust, because RE doesn't use
a regular PL mount. They actually use an LPL or a large PL mount.
So in order to mount a PL mount lens, you actually have to adapt this bigger one
to this smaller one. So you've got a PL in your PL,
so you can put a PL lens in your expensive camera.
Yeah, and they do make adapters for EF and L lenses.
And so you do have choices, which is really nice. And theoretically, you could do EF to E
if you really wanted to. But if you're using these cameras,
please use good lenses. This seems like a lot of yik-yak
without actually turning the thing on. Wait, we're supposed to use these?
I'm not. I don't want to break it or anything, but because of course they do,
RE uses their own proprietary media that they confusingly call Codex.
Oh, that's- Really? I didn't even think about that. That's so confusing.
That is so stupid. Codex has a meaning.
It's the plural of codec, which is the format in which the media is encoded.
There is RE raw internally, but there is no compressed raw.
Red has a stranglehold on that. So what is it? Like a patent thing?
It's a patent thing. So you can do internal raw, but it has to be uncompressed.
And then there's pro res, a bunch of different formats that are compressed pro res.
But you would never shoot compressed in a camera like this, would you?
Really? Because pro res still has a ton of latitude. If you're doing like a feature
and it's a big budget thing, no. You're doing raw and you have a dit and you're offloading the footage
and then maybe compressing it in post. Because you can do it there.
Explain what you mean by latitude. Latitude is basically everything that extends
beyond what you can see in the image. Got it. So when you're shooting an image,
something might look overexposed, but on a camera like this,
everything above that line can actually be recovered. And if I shoot in raw,
I might have more headroom there to recover something that was either overexposed
or underexposed. Exactly, it's storing more information whereas a compressed format would compress that format
and lose some of that information to play with. But pro res is still pretty good.
That's why people were so excited when Apple added the ability to record pro res internally on the iPhone.
Okay, I did actually want to put some media in it at some point here,
but one of the features that really jumped off the page to me was the ability to digitally add film noise.
In the shot. Yeah? So that basically you're ruining the cleaness
of your image right from the get go. How does that make any sense?
Please, please explain that to me. Essentially, you will always have grain and noise
in your image. No matter how good your sensor is, no matter how much light there is, there's gonna be some level of grain.
What always allowing you to do with their textures feature
is choose the characteristics of the grain. So you can choose something that's a little coarser,
something that's a little softer. You can actually look on their website
and see like they have 20 different. I hate it. It's, I hear what you're saying,
but it's actually kind of cool because it's part of the image processing pipeline.
It would just be baked in there. And it is baked in on every camera ever.
There's always grain, but now you get to choose the details of that grain.
Let's pull it apart. I kind of want to. I don't think Ari would be very happy.
Pretty much guarantee you. It's just a basic ass SSD in an enclosure.
How easily would it come apart? Oh, look at that.
The answer is pretty easily. There's an Ari rep somewhere that's just like sweating bullets now.
They're like... Well, they knew who they sent it to. They loaned us these, by the way,
just to kind of play around with. I don't think they realistically thought
we were ever going to switch to them for our workflow. We learned our lesson. Well, one of the things that's really interesting
is that Ari's had such a stranglehold on the high end market,
but when Sony introduced the Venice, they started to be much more competitive.
There's a lot more shows that are starting to use Sony. Their big strength is that you don't need as much lights.
Their low light performance is incredible.
I mean, there was a big budget sci-fi movie. The creator shot on an FX3.
They use other cameras too. It's not just FX3. But Sony's, that's not even their best sensor.
The Venice has a better sensor. The FX9 has a better sensor. And the FX3 costs like a tenth of what this costs.
So what is Ari trying to sort of dip their toe
into the budget creator space, kind of get some attention?
Or what was the point of this? I think they're just trying to maybe kind of catch
the eyes of people like us, but maybe focus more on cinematic qualities
in their videos. And they're trying to grow their market
to people that have previously not seen
Ari cameras as accessible. Well, they are still not accessible.
Got some work to do, boys. In all seriousness though, the difference in performance is very noticeable.
And our team prepared some test footage for us to compare the Ari picture to what you can get off of.
Even a very expensive, this is a professional camera.
That's an FX6. That is for professionals.
Okay. Don't worry, I got this.
Sup, Glenn? How you doing, buddy? Good, how are you?
Nice camera, poor man. Okay, well, this is cool.
Actually, can you stand right in front of that light?
Because that is wild. Even without me having any idea how to use this at all,
I can shoot straight into our lights
and see every little detail in the ripple of the diffusion layer.
And again, without adjustment, I can see a ton of detail
and even the shadows under his ARM by his like weightlifter belt thing here.
That is fricking crazy. Yeah, I think even talking about the UI,
I really appreciate a camera that has a well-designed touchscreen interface.
There's a lot that, you know, it's all knobs and stuff and I still want that kind of control.
But when I first used this camera, it was pretty easy to figure out where everything was.
We've used red, we've used black magic.
And this is significantly better than the red interface, that interface.
Oh, it's got a little readout here so you can see exactly what everything's set to
when you are just using this to look at what the heck you're doing.
I don't know what this does. Oh, delete? You can delete shutter angles?
I doubt you can delete some of the main ones. Let's, do you want to try?
I deleted 180 degrees. We're never going back, it's never coming back.
I can add it. I always appreciate that there's a focus magnification
and a false color button here as well. Oh yeah, you should explain what false color is.
Basically what false color does is it takes different exposures in the image
and assigns it a color to show you how bright or how dark it is.
It'll tell you, and this camera even includes that nice little cheat sheet
because it's hard to remember the exact colors all the time in my brain.
But it'll inform you when you're approaching,
you know, crushing your whites and blacks, which is something you generally don't want to do
when you're shooting. When you're in post and you're color correcting, you might, you know, crush the blacks a little bit,
but you want to get all the information into the camera, into that footage so you can play with it.
Leave that to the editor. Yes. Don't be making that decision in the camera,
if you can avoid it. Starting at the bottom, we have our purple, which is our noise floor.
Anything in the purple is just going to be crushed, ugly, just noise.
Once you hit blue, then we're at the edge of shadow detail.
So that's the absolute bottom of the exposure that you want to play around with.
Then we get green, which is at 18% gray.
And then you can go past that, it'll show you how exposed something is as you're approaching clipping.
And again, you just want to make sure that you're not clipping your image because then they can't recover it,
even though it would be really hard to clip on this camera, you'd kind of have to try.
So they use B-mount batteries, which are better because they're harder
to accidentally pop off, basically. Yeah, V-mount is the most common as the lock wears.
It's not uncommon that as you rest on your shoulder, just kind of pops out.
And that can be catastrophic in the middle of a shot. Okay, let's look at the footage.
Oh, it's a blind test. Yeah, we do. I was going to ask if we could do a blind test.
Heck yeah, we can. Okay. You can think Hoffman for that. I think that one's the Alexa.
This one? The one that's not totally messed up color? Yeah, that one's bad. It's not, we're not on the right test right now.
Okay, cool. Is that an Alexa shot though? This is an Alexa shot.
Okay, good. So you can tell, we should switch over to Aria.
That's not what I said. You heard it here first, folks. That's not what I said. I'm actually blind as well.
I don't know which one is which. Back to what David was saying about there being
more to perceived image quality than the number of pixels.
One of the things that stands out about this is just how sharp the image is.
And that's going to come down to the combination of the sensor and also the lens.
I'm assuming we didn't use the same lens on each of the cameras.
And you can just see there's no aberration.
There's just so much detail in these edges here.
There's just absolutely no way that this is the Sony. It is my belief that this is the Aria.
I mean, even look, you can see in the black swatch, there's just so much more detail.
See, I'm interested in the way that the highlight roll off
is happening in this. I maintain this as the Aria.
I'm going to say it's really hard. The focus is a little bit off on this, so it's hard to know.
I'm going to go say that the softer one is the Aria
based on the highlights. Really? Yeah. Okay.
But I do like the way the color is on the second one.
You know what? Shoot, David, I think you're right. They both look very good.
No, you're right, you're right. You've got to be right.
Because this was set at the same exposure, same T-stop, because I was even using a cine lens
on the Sony. Okay, yeah, you're probably right.
So which one is Aria? This one is Sony.
Oh, okay, so I was right. Wait.
That's Aria? Yes, sir. Second is Aria. Okay, you were right.
Okay, one. Yeah, we might want to do that. Oh, this is the Aria though.
Come on, there's no question. Oh, look at the shadows.
Look at the shadows on his neck. Look at the detail in the shirt.
It's not even close. And okay, yeah, it's a little fuzzier or whatever.
That is not the difference here. No, I don't think so.
Yeah, we don't even need the slider. We don't need it at all.
Yeah, that looks a lot better. Especially this dramatic shot with the shading on it.
You can see that better red sensitivity. Yeah.
In the, cause Andy, he's rosy.
He's a rosy boy. What? That's the Sony?
A lot of it comes down to grading too. Like you're going to have an artistic vision
and you're going to do what you do with it and you can have a great image come out
of a pretty basic camera and you can have a pretty crap image come out
of even the finest of cameras. If you don't know what you're doing.
This is not a very scientific test. This was rough and tumble, very dirty.
And so while the settings are matched, it's not a perfect example of what we would get.
That's a Sony, okay. Okay, all right, all right, all right. This seems like we should be able to get it.
I'm going to let you go first this time. It's really hard. Yeah, go for it.
I have very little confidence in whatever answer I am going to give.
I like the look of the first one more, but I think it does come down to settings
and lighting in this case.
I'm going to guess that the second is the RE, but I have basically zero confidence.
I think you're right. I'm just going with David's guess. Is that right?
That is correct. That's right, okay. So this one's a test of how the bokeh looks.
I think the Sony is the second one. This is a more true red versus this having a bit
of an orangey cast, but the noise is more pleasing on the second one.
And I know that Sony's low light performance is outstanding.
I think that the second one's the RE, but I'm not sure.
Yes, you're right. Second one's RE. Dang it, I got it wrong. Okay, balls.
I think this just reinforces our point about the image out of the camera being very difficult
to tell and that's not necessarily the selling point of an RE.
It's the latitude you get in correcting the image after.
So why don't we take a look at the timeline where we can play around with just the footage
and see what you can recover, see what you can play with. Wow.
So you can see, we've got everything down there,
but you'd never really know that based on the original shot. We shot a bunch of demo footage on these cameras.
By the way, we'll link some of it below, but the real purpose of all of this,
and again, thanks to RE for loaning us these cameras,
was to shoot some high definition and HDR demo footage
for us to put on TVs and on iPads and stuff like that, that is our own,
that we don't have to license from someone else and yet have it be at peak cinematic quality.
Pun intended, you know, peak brightness to test video. I like it, that's good, that's good.
Anyway, okay, so then what can we get back near that sun?
We can actually see the circle of the sun.
That's crazy. That is crazy to have that.
And also, you know, everything in here,
you know, everything in here and in all this subtle detail
in his jacket that is directly backlit in his face,
we're not getting one. Not even after this test?
No, not even after people subscribe to ShortCircuit.