13 LED Lights & 7 Cameras 2020

 

These evaluations were supervised by Adam Wilt and Geoff Boyle in February 2020 at the Netherlands Film Akademie studios in Amsterdam with the invaluable assistance of Camalot and Vocas.

Cinematographer Marina Kissopoulos AC/DIT Erik Weidenhof.

Mick Van Rossum NSC made everything work and has done an amazing job of handling all the organisation during my hospitalisation, the tests wouldn't have happened without Mick and the NFA.

All cameras were tested using a Cooke 5i 65mm and were set to Netflix recommended settings.

Cameras compared at tungsten in rec 709.

Scroll down for links to finished tests...

But first, the science..

CCT meter readingsTint variationsColour quality metricsNotes on colour measurements

All lights were set to their manufacturer’s preset values for 3200K and 5600K and, where the option was available, they were set to the appropriate camera.

Light level was set to 25FC measured in the middle of the Kodak Grey Scale card using the Sekonic C800 pointing directly at the camera.

The ISO of all cameras was set to 800, this is the base setting of all of the cameras.

The aperture was set to T2.8, this results in all cameras being exposed to a stop more than the manufacturer’s recommendation, this is normally the best balance between Dynamic Range and noise.

The film was exposed at 1&1/3rd over for the tungsten and 1/3rd stop over the rated ISO for the daylight stock and with daylight stock the lens was set to T2 rather than T2.8 as with all other tests.

The reference charts were courtesy of DSC Labs along with my personal Kodak and MacBeth.

In Resolve using ACEScct and manufacturers IDTs, we used offset only to match the luminance level only to the Kodak recommended level for exposure in rec709, this preserved the colour differences whilst nearly matching mid greys. The ODT was then changed to rec2020 ST2084 PQ1000 P3 D65 and the files rendered.

Files were rendered and uploaded to Vimeo in H265 all conversions to lower res and rec709 were done by Vimeo. The original files are available to download from Vimeo.

The raw camera files are available here and the C800 files are available from here in a zipped folder.

A zipped file of one frame per light as a UHD Tiff in ACEScct is available on each camera page.

If you find these tests useful then please use the support CML button at the bottom of the page!

The following links lead to pages which allow you to choose to see a particular camera with the full range of lights or to see a particular light with a full range of cameras.

 

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