Sony DMPC Inaugurates F65 Training Workshop

Alec Shapiro, President of the Digital Motion Picture Center. Photo credit: Sony/Kelley Rich

Left to right, Sony DMPC Dean Curtis Clark, ASC, MTI Film Vice President of Product Development David McClure, and Sony DMPC Vice President Satoshi Kanemura

On Wednesday, June 6, the Sony Digital Motion Picture Center (DMPC), housed in Studio 7 on the Sony Pictures lot, held its first all-day workshop on the F65 camera and its workflow. "The camera is beautiful but it's also very much about the workflow," says Alec Shapiro, President of the Digital Motion Picture Center. "This is the only place under one roof where you can shoot 4K pictures, process them with a variety of post production tools and project them in 4K." Shapiro was just named president of Sony Professional Solutions of America, replacing Toshihiko Ohnishi, who is now deputy president of the Professional Solutions Group based in Japan.

Before June 6, the Sony Digital Motion Picture Center hosted a series of workshops for the International Cinematographers Guild Local 600. With yesterday's opening to the industry at large, the Sony DMPC will hold the weekly free Wednesday workshops for the next two years; contact information for registration is on the website. Members of Local 600 can contact Joanna Mousseau, ICG Events Coordinator at Joanna.Mousseau@ipgla.com. Anybody else in the industry can contact the Center directly at DMPC@am.sony.com.

Instructors include Sony DMPC Dean Curtis Clark, ASC, Sony DMPC Vice President Satoshi Kanemura, and Chief Engineer Dhanendra Patel. Director Rob Willox was there, as well as MTI Film Vice President of Product Development David McClure was also there to demonstrate the company's new Cortex family of products, Cortex::Capture, Cortex::Convey and Cortex::ControlDailies.

Curtis Clark, ASC has been involved since Sony's debut of the F35. "The Camera Assessment series in January 2009 was my personal epiphany," says Clark. "It was a revelation. Digital cameras were just emerging, and I was very cynical at the time about them being able to come close to matching everything film could do. I was taken with what the F35 did."

Curtis Clark, ASC (above and title image) has been involved since Sony's debut of the F35.

DMPC lighting and set

Since then, Clark has become a consultant to Sony, working with the company to bring the F65 to market. "There was an affinity," he says about the relationship with Sony. "They had magnificent engineering skills and were very responsive. At that point, I was also involved with the Academy's ACES project, so I saw the confluence."

Production designer Tom Walsh, who is also President of the Art Directors Guild, designed the set, with feedback from Clark. "I worked closely with him on the design," says Clark. "We had to have a set that had some visual interest and flexibility with angles of shooting but could also support shooting both wide dynamic range and fine resolution with the detail on the set." The set also supports the ability to shoot under various lighting conditions including neon.

"Also the color palette went from extremely saturated colors to the more subtle pastels, all in one environment," says Clark. One of the challenges was figuring out what to put outside the set's windows. "We knew a painted exterior would be too fake," he says. "We had long discussions with JC Backings over the interesting issue of how much resolution we'd need in a backing. All these issues are still under review."

After an overview of the camera and a hands-on look at its features and functions, the Sony DMPC team gives an overview of look management. The workshop attendees are divided into two groups to shoot the set from two different directions. Then the images they shoot are ingested as raw data into FilmLight Baselight. "Then we have a session where we look at the material and play around with the grading, analyzing the implications of how they did what they did," says Clark. The group then watches a screening of Clark's El Dorado, a short film shot in 4K and completed with a 16-bit workflow.

DMPC Screening Room

Dave McClure, left and right, with MTI Film group

To demonstrate the F65 workflow, Sony's DMPC partners are ASSIMILATE (with Scratch), Avid (with Symphony), Blackmagic Design (with Resolve), Codex Digital (with Vault), Colorfront (with ODS), Filmlight (with Truelight and Baselight), Fujifilm (with CCbox), MTI Film (with Cortex), and Yoyotta (with YoDailies).

"My mantra has always been to expand the possibilities of digital cameras as far as we could go," he says. "I knew we were going to 4K, even back in 2009. With the F65, Sony has arrived at a true, indisputable 4K camera.

"I think both Sony and Sony Pictures understand the importance of members of the industry learning how to use the F65 to get the best of what it can do," says Clark. "Like everything is today, the cameras are only as good as their workflow."

The Board of Advisors for the DMPC is comprised of Ray Feeney, AMPAS Chair of IIF (ACES) project; Michael Goi, President, American Society of Cinematographers; Tom Walsh, President, Art Directors Guild; Hawk Koch, President, Producers Guild of America; Elizabeth Daley, Dean of USC School of Cinematic Arts; Steven Poster, President, International Cinematographers Guild; Leon Silverman, President, Hollywood Post Alliance; and Gary Martin, President of Production Administration and Sony Pictures Studio Operations.

Committing to a free education about the F65 and its workflow is a canny move by Sony. Hundreds of film/TV industry professionals will gladly go to the Sony DMPC to get an up-close-and-personal look (and touch) at the new camera, and in the process feel that much more knowledgeable about a viable choice of digital camera for their next project.

But the move isn't entirely marketing driven; Sony, along with a handful of other companies in our industry, realizes that - as Curtis Clark, ASC said - "the camera is only as good as the workflow." You can expand that quote to include every production being only as good as its workflow. Anyone who helps demystify part of the process is sharing in the work of getting the big picture.

A report from the first Sony DMPC workshop

By Bill Megalos

I showed up at the Sony Pictures lot and to Studio 7 before the 9:30 AM start time, and immediately ran into Michael Peyser, the well-known producer who is also a professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, where I teach cinematography. I also ran into my friend Stephen Fierberg, ASC and cinematographer Lourdes Ambrose.

Satoshi Kanemura and Dhanendra Patel, with Curtis Clark, gave most of the training. They gave us a schedule and then kept to it remarkably well. I was very impressed with the PowerPoint presentation and the talking that went along with it. It was all specific, direct and useful. The first part was about the camera and its features and how the menus work. It was so comprehensive and intuitive that when we got a hold of the camera, we didn't have any questions.

I think one of Sony's goals was to make the camera and its menus simple and intuitive so that anyone with a reasonable experience of cine cameras could get right to work, and in this, they succeeded. Crucial items, like choosing between electronic and mechanical shutter were available on a hard button, rather than going into menus. The display has all essentials instantly and clearly readable. You know exactly what frame rate, shutter speed, shutter angle you're shooting at all times.

We had two sessions with the camera. In the first one, we were shown two different companies' solutions to on-set color management. The first one was FilmLight's Truelight and then the next was Fujifilm's CCBox by Fujifilm. Fujifilm had three or four people there, so it was easier to get questions answered, and there were a lot of "wows" about their CCBox. They told us they're rewriting the software several times a week, and there are 30 of them installed worldwide. They're using them in real-time for live broadcast TV in Japan. Fujifilm showed how to calibrate the monitor with it. Both the Filmlight and Fujifilm solutions have a hardware as well as software component.

In this portion of the workshop, we were able to look at the chip chart and see the wide latitude that the F65 has. Because you're using S-Log, the F65 allows you to identify what the image really looks like on the knee and shoulder and exposure extremes. That feature was intriguing and it was well-received.

After that, we were able to get our hands on the camera itself, divided into two groups with each group getting to handle one camera. Curtis had lit the set (which had a lot of texture) very well, and it looked excellent. He set up the lighting to show off the camera's dynamic range, for example, with huge amounts of light coming in through the set's windows and large, even extreme contrast ratios.

Before using the F65 on a shoot, you would do a lot more testing, but we did get to try it out and both teams put the camera through different tests. We then were able to look at our footage and a colorist from Sony Colorworks went through a lot of looks and we were able to see how much latitude was really there. I think we pretty much all were impressed at the flexibility in under- and over-exposing the image.

The last section was a screening of Curtis' film El Dorado. I had seen it at NAB and it was good to see it again. It was a useful film in that it showed off what the camera can do in terms of low light levels as well as very harsh daylight. The colors are good throughout and I felt that the night footage in Vegas looked spectacular. All the glass looked good and cut well together, the fast Fujinon 4K zoom and the Leica primes.

The day was very useful. My suggestion is that the hands-on portion be more structured. It would have been nice to get a map of the lighting plus some lights already cabled and standing by on stands so you feel more comfortable re-lighting.

I was also impressed with Sony's WiFi iPad controller solution, which they showed us. It's got a really nice interface and can control just about every parameter of the camera. You'll use it when it's mounted on a car or plane and you can't get to the camera. The camera has its own WiFi network, and one of the things we did with the first hands-on was set up an IP address; people would then log in with their iPhones.

Overall, I and everyone else were impressed at the menus and how easy and transparent the camera is to use. You didn't have to go deep into menus to change things. Practically anybody with film experience could walk up to this camera, start shooting and get great images. That's major. And that's the way the producers want it today.

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