[justforasingle]

Pretty interesting. If you look on netflix approved camera list[0] there are none from Nikon. Personally I think RED cameras are overhyped and are a major reason most netflix shows all look and feel the same. I don't think its the colour grading or lenses - its something about the camera itself that just feels shit and doesn't give me the same access to a scene the same way something like sony's HDVS from 30 years ago does.[1]

[0] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63flkf3S1bE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW26YMe8iUQ

[atoav]

Red cameras are overhyped, but picture quality is not the issue. It is very likely that what you describe is more due stylistic differences in lighting, color grading and editing than due to the camera itself — coming from someone who professionally had to match colors on films shot on multiple different cameras on more than one occasion.

Reliability is the main reason why Red cameras are overhyped, but you get good pictures and specs for the price, just like with black magic cameras but a notch higher. Most DOPs I know would go fo ARRI if given free choice.

[weebull]

Red were kinda the Tesla of the film camera world. New name, new tech, new price point, fashionable branding Vs existing long established players.

Thing is ARRI pivoted and covered the new tech pretty well, and had the existing business links into the rental market allowed them to continue unflustered. Red got the layman hype because they seemed to make high quality available to more people at an achievable (but still high) price point. The industry didn't really care though. They rent cameras, not buy them and they were already affording the old stuff.

[_fat_santa]

ARRI also has their own "picture style", at least the ARRI Alexa. I remember seeing video on YT where the guy bought a really old ARRI Alexa that was used in Hollywood back in 05 or 06. When they showed some of the footage they took with it, it looked exactly like an mid-2000's big screen movie, I honestly didn't realize those movies even had a "look" until I saw his video.

[hef19898]

As a photographer I know next to nothing about film, let alone cinema. Hence the question, is ARRI gear really as good as people say, and as expensive?

[julik]

This. RED cameras are overhyped for a few reasons:

- They were once the "hot startup" promising acceptable resolution (filmic 4K when nobody needed it, everything was 2K at most). But they oversold resolution at the cost of bizarrely slow-to-decompress proprietary RAW format and some loss to image quality, and stayed true to that. Arri came to market later and they did the right thing - picked convenience and stability over super-duper-extra-super-high-res. - Their cameras would routinely overheat - Cameras would have severe reliability issues with software updates - Some haptics/controls felt wanky at times - They wanted hard to sell you "just the body", for "cheap cheap cheap", but it meant that to have something usable you would need the whole loadout - which would ship in pieces, with periods of delay for availability, and the quality of some components would be meh. Want an EVF? Wait 2 years for one to ship. Want functioning grip? Separate. Want etc. etc.? Separate. I.e. they were very inviting to "now you, as a DOP, can finally own a camera", but owning "the camera and the kit required for it - sans lenses" would be a painful proposition.

This was certainly the case in 2006-2010s, dunno if it has gotten much better lately. It does seem that RED kept to the theme of severely overselling their users extreme picture resolutions, at the cost of having the files super-painful to process, proprietary codecs, and lackings in other areas such as dynamic range.

[Almondsetat]

Any RAW image that comes out of a modern digital sensor can be made to look like anything else, as Steve Yedlin thoroughly demonstrated. They look the same because they are lit, edited and color graded the same

[archerx]

> as Steve Yedlin thoroughly demonstrated

I'm interested in this, do you have a link?

[nazka]

Yep. This is the correct answer to OP.

[stephen_g]

No, why “everything looks the same” is 100% down to lens, lighting and grading choices.

Part of it is that modern lenses are incredibly accurate and much better technically than they used to be - a lot of the movies that people praise the photography of are now using vintage lenses that are 30-50 years old modified to modern lens mounts, since they have “visual character” instead of being so clean.

[sangnoir]

> a lot of the movies that people praise the photography of are now using vintage lenses that are 30-50 years old modified to modern lens mounts

Isn't this confounded by who chooses to buck the trend? IMO, it's the very skilled DPs who are not only skilled, have earned enough social capital to experiment and have excellent reasons for using old soviet lenses, or lenses designed for use on the moon or some other exotic origin story. This self-selecting bunch are likely to produce outstanding work regardless of the equipment.

[kthartic]

I don't know how old you are, but as a younger millennial these look pretty awful to me (no disrespect). I'm sure nostalgia plays a part. I feel the same way about videos/sci-fi shows from the 2000s - none of the modern stuff quite feels the same.

But as another commenter said, I don't think it's the camera itself - it's the stylistic changes in lighting, camera angles, direction, etc. Each decade has a distinct 'feel' - films/shows in the 80s don't feel like the 90s, or the 2000s like the 2010s, etc.

[seanw444]

It seems to be too much now to me. Overproduced maybe is the word? Too vibrant of coloration, too much lighting, too much movement. The best way I can put it is that new shows and movies feel "plastic" compared to older stuff.

[pixelesque]

That's because Nikon don't have a cinema line of cameras, and the cameras they do have have only very recently added support for higher-end video features like log and ProRes RAW support.

[kranke155]

The RED cameras are perfectly capable of delivering great picture quality and good color science. The "Netflix look" doesn't come from cameras, but from the fact that everything in their cheaper productions is rushed, including the color grading.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire for instance, was shot on RED cameras at 8K. And it's one of the most beautiful digital films ever made, IMO.

[saltminer]

I loved that movie! It truly is gorgeous, right up there with Blade Runner IMO. I just wish they'd release it in 4k, I'd re-buy it in a heartbeat.

[audunw]

Maybe that's nostalgia.. I personally think the clips you shared look awful compared to any modern camera.

I seriously doubt the average person notices any difference between RED cameras and any other modern camera with roughly the same properties.

[jajko]

Not maybe, movies are simply shot in different ways, people expect different things. Nothing in this world is static.

Now its perfectly fine to dislike 'modern' approach, but in digital era that has absolutely nothing to do with some lens/sensor combo and everything how director decides given scene or whole movie should 'feel'.

[lightedman]

You can tell the difference between RED and other camera makers just by checking the black levels (because RED has horrid IR filtering and so you get a bit of picture greying.)

It's really noticeable when you fire off a DPSS LASER at 532nm. You can see both the IR beam and the converted visible light beam, making the LASER appear a weird green-purple color.

[com2kid]

For the 1990s, that Sony demo video looks amazing. The colors pop, skin pores are visible, brush strokes are visible! The colors and styles are very 90s, but it was the 90s so things are expected to look that way.

[gorkish]

I think you are mistaking stylistic choices for something technical.

Netflix shows look and feel the same because they are shovelware, produced to look and feel the same. This is part of why they have style guides and approved equipment lists, but as far as the sensors are concerned -- any modern sensor is up to the task.

There are no Nikon video cameras on the list because Nikon does not make video cameras, although I guess now they do.

[Applejinx]

Watching all that Sony stuff.

Part of what's giving you that effect is not the resolution, or color accuracy etc: it's that you're looking at what is really a very primitive system. It's the analog vs. digital all over again, but with video. More than that, it's compressed video, versus a more immediate but more primitive analog system. What I'm seeing of RED suggests it's all about sensor resolutions, but compression is always a point of contention and color space is an issue.

If you're digitally compressing data like this and running into an area where there are challenges, you're running into areas where the algorithms get twitchy: they're designed to optimize for certain things and you can throw pathological image sequences, pathological colors, at them.

Some of the challenges inherent in getting really high sensor resolution out of a RED are irrelevant to old Sony analog HD camera technology, apples and oranges.

[fngjdflmdflg]

Color grading always changes the colors in post anyway. Film movies often looks better than digital to my eyes but i think that is at least partly because color grading did not exist like it does now and there was no push to make every object "pop" by being oversaturated. To me, Film is more likely to give you a single scene in each frame while color graded digital movies often seem to be made of several disparate scenes cobbled together. Movies from the past used less greenscreening in favor of matte paintings which were often included in the scene they were used itself rather than edited in or they were the only shot in the scene. You can make digital film look however you want, even to look like film, but most Netflix shows apparently do not opt for that.

[tivert]

> Pretty interesting. If you look on netflix approved camera list[0] there are none from Nikon.

I looked at that list and did some Googling, and it looks like Nikon just doesn't make video cameras like the other vendors. All they make are DSLRs that do a little bit of video.

This Quora answer (https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-differences-between-...) bluntly states; "Nikon has never sold a dedicated camcorder of any format."

[sib]

Nikon also makes mirrorless cameras that do video a lot better than their DLSRs did (especially, for example, the Z9).

But, yes, they don't make dedicated camcorders...

[anigbrowl]

Agreed, I hate the way a lot of their stuff looks. It's OK for TV but a lot of their film stuff looks sterile to me. I think that's part of why the Arri digital camera has a lot of fans.

I got my first Nikon camera a few years ago after all previous ones being Canon. At first I was a little taken aback by how things looked slightly smeared when you zoomed into the individual pixels...but I rapidly came to love it. Perhaps their sensors/glass are less 'perfect' but I love more of the pictures I take with it.

[tiffanyh]

Nikon doesn't do video.

Referencing the Netflix approved vendor list is misleading, because they aren't in the cinematic video business.

[replwoacause]

Has anyone done an analysis into what gives Netflix shows that strange look? It is uncanny valley like for me, so I avoid them altogether. I assumed it must be a blend of camera choice, lighting, and post-processing, and its just awful.

[kranke155]

It’s the rushed post process. You can go on r/colourists and ask. You might be able to find some old posts from people who worked on these things explaining it.

It’s 100% not the camera. Portrait of a Lady on Fire was shot on RED. You can do virtually anything with digital cameras these days. Steve Yedlin proved he could make digital look like film beyond anyone’s ability to distinguish them.

Netflix just rushes everything so it’s all a similar level of not good.

[dfedbeef]

Netflix is the minor leagues. People who do well there don't tend to stay there.

[tomcam]

It appears to me they accept many RED cameras?

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

[m463]

I remember first watching 4k HDR films (I remember gemini man in particular) and it looked different from previous films and I had to adapt.

maybe too high res? Or maybe HDR eliminated artifacts like bloom or something that seemed to make it too perfect.

[oven9342]

When the camera pans. I find it unnerving. I don’t enjoy watching that pixelated panning. I blame it on the digital recordings.

It might probably look better if they recorded it on film but no producer seems to be addressing my whimsical preferences

[herdcall]

I think what you're seeing is due to bandwidth limitations: when the picture pans the info changes rapidly and places a bigger demand on the bandwidth, so streamed shows will suffer in quality and show pixelation. If this is what you're seeing, it has nothing to do with the content itself, it will be fine if you watch it directly from disk.

[kbf]

The Olympics are a live event, delaying the broadcast by days to cater to your niche nitpick about image quality would indeed be whimsical