(upbeat music)
- This camera, the footage that this intro
was shot on, costs about $45,000.
And that's just for the body,
that's not without any screen or viewfinder,
no batteries, there's not autofocus in this camera.
It's terrible in low light, it weight a ton.
You have to buy the viewfinder for it separately.
And guess what, that costs over $7,000.
And then once you have that, there's no way
of mounting it to the camera.
You have to buy another mounting bracket
or a cage or something to put it on the camera.
And the viewfinder's not even that good.
You pay $7,000 and it's not really that good at all.
And get this, this is one of the cheapest Arri's there is.
They go all the way up to way over $100,000 for one camera.
Gene, how do you film with this thing?
(Gene laughs)
Oh my gosh.
Actually, this reminds me of the commercial days.
It's bringing back memories right now.
Standing like this for an hour filming a commercial.
You gotta keep filming until the director yells cut
and your muscles are starting to shake.
Have you ever had that?
- Yeah, all the time. - Your muscles are starting
to shake and you're just like,
you just start pushing it.
Keep it as stable as possible.
And as soon as they say cut, you're just like,
"Oh my gosh, thank goodness, thank goodness."
But you try to play it off cool, you're just like,
"Yeah, it's fine." - No worries.
- "Just gotta put this camera down for a second."
So, Gene, why do you think Hollywood uses this camera
so much? - Cause it's so huge
and it looks impressive.
Look at me right now. - Cause you look like a beast.
- Look.
I look like I'm really, really talented.
I look like I know what I'm doing.
- [Matti] I think it's just a flex actually, right?
- It is. - It's just a flex.
- Yes, both visually but also I'm constantly
flexing holding this thing. - Actual flexing.
- I'm like, "Ugh!" - It's a workout.
So why the heck are the Arri cameras
the most widely-used camera's in Hollywood,
even with all these things it's lacking
and how hard it is to use?
It's just not very usable when you first buy it.
You have to buy so many things
to just make this camera usable.
Why is Hollywood using these cameras?
Okay, so it does have some really great specs also.
It shoots ProRes and 4K and up to
200 frames per second in 1080.
It does raw video.
It's got some pretty good features,
but in the end, the one reason
why Hollywood uses this camera the most is the image.
And for those of you who don't know,
up until only about ten years ago,
Hollywood still only really used film cameras
for all of the Hollywood films,
pretty much, the majority of them.
And then about ten years ago, they started switching
into the digital realm of things.
And that was because film is so good.
The image that you get when you shoot
on film is really, really nice.
And that took a really long time
to replicate or to have a better image
in digital than the film image was.
It wasn't really until the Arri Alexas came out
that people were like, "Oh, okay,
"this is close, similar to film.
"Maybe even a little bit better than the film image."
Some people were still, "No no, film is the way to go."
But then others were like, "Oh, this digital image
"is actually, I like it better than the film image."
So once the Alexas came out, that's when Hollywood
and the very high-end, the most high-end of filmmaking
started to realize the potential in digital filmmaking.
So why is the Arri Alexa's image so good?
Why is this the camera of choice?
And first off, it's the color science.
It has, by far, out of all the cameras,
I'm slightly subjective but I think most people would agree,
it has the best color science out of any camera,
especially when it comes to skin tones.
It has just the most natural
and just good-looking skin tones.
If you thought Canons, like this camera,
have good skin tones, guess again.
The Alexas have way better skin tones than the Canons.
There's some sort of magic going on
with the image processing.
I have no idea what they're doing.
But the image just looks so good and detailed,
even though it's not overly sharp,
which is kind of a characteristic
of a cheaper digital camera, having that overly sharp look.
It almost looks kind of soft at times,
but when you look at it, there's just
so much detail in the image.
And a lot of the Alexas don't even shoot actual 4K,
I think it's 3.2K and then they just up-res it to 4K.
That's why a lot of Netflix shows
aren't shot on the Arri Alexas
because Netflix has this policy of no,
it has to be true 4K, it can't be this up-resed thing.
So yeah, that's kind of interesting.
But I think Arri, with all their testing,
found that this was the best kind of,
the most optimal image they could get.
Instead of doing true 4K and having so many pixels,
they decided to go with a little bit less
and have a better image.
So I guess quality over quantity.
And then probably the biggest reason why the Arri Alexa
has such a nice image is the dynamic range.
And I've explained this before,
it's basically the difference between the brightest parts
of your image and the darkest parts.
So for example, my shirt is pretty dark here,
and then this part is pretty bright.
So how much of a difference in light can the camera capture.
And the Arri Alexas have the biggest dynamic range
out of any camera on the market right now.
Yes, you can argue that, because there's not really
a scientific standard that camera companies are going by.
So some companies claim they have 14 stops,
just like the Arri Alexa claims,
and it is not the same at all.
So there isn't really a scientific way
of comparing the numbers, because every camera company
kinda does it a little bit differently.
But the Arri Alexa has the most dynamic range
and that really gives its film-like look.
Film has a ton of dynamic range,
and this is probably the biggest thing
that digital sensors struggled with
was getting that same amount of dynamic range.
And not just the dynamic range, but the way things roll off.
So on a cheaper digital camera,
when you have something that overexposes,
it's like, we have detail, we have detail,
and then it just goes nuclear instantly.
There isn't a nice roll off.
Whereas on the Alexa, it would be like,
we're good, we're good, we're good, we're good,
we're going into overexposed,
overexposed, and now we're overexposed.
It slowly rolls off into that overexposed area.
And that looks really nice, it's really pleasing to the eye.
Instead of having that quick roll off
into that nuclear overexposed zone.
It's unlike any camera out there right now.
The Reds are pretty close I think
but the Arri Alexas are still way more widely used
in the highest high-end commercials and movies.
The Arri Alexas are still the most popular for most DPs.
So why would Hollywood use a crazy,
crazy expensive camera that doesn't even have
all the features of a cheaper DSLR camera?
Well, because they want the absolute best image.
They have, essentially, an unlimited budget.
They have as much money as they want to use on films.
So they want the absolute best image.
What's the best image they can get?
That's what they're gonna pay for.
They don't care about convenience
or how easy it is to use or the specs, necessarily.
They just want the best image.
And the further you go in your career,
the less you're gonna start caring about specs,
and the more you're gonna care about the actual image,
what does your footage look like at the end of the day.
Image becomes the highest priority by far.
The further you go in your career,
the higher budget the commercial or TV show or movie is,
the image is the main thing, not how easy it is to use.
Or price for that matter.
And that's why Hollywood consistently, right now,
is using the Arri Alexa the most.
For their highest-end biggest productions,
of course they're gonna choose the camera
with the absolute best image, in their opinion.
No but actually, what do you think?
What are some of the reasons?
- I think even just the camera
you're shooting on right now, the A7 III,
they're great cameras and they have a lot of power,
but they're definitely designed,
the designers have the consumer in mind.
Someone that just wants to pick up a camera,
have very convenient features.
This is very much designed with an entire crew in mind.
- [Matti] Zero convenience.
- Exactly.
No convenience.
No smart features, nothing that makes it easy to shoot on.
As a matter of fact, just me shooting right here
with this by myself is reminding me
how much this camera is not designed for solo operation.
I'm dying.
I was like (grumbles).
Matti's like, "Get that shot over there."
I'm like, "Ah!" - Yeah, just keep going G.
- "Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah." - Just a little bit more!
- You know, one thing-- (wind wooshes)
Ah! Blowing away! - The wind's gonna take you.
I hope the sound is amazing right now.
- Okay, one example is size and weight.
You want a small, compact camera
if you're making a vlog camera for an everyday user.
You actually kind of want this weight.
Because right now, I'm not running
through any sort of stabilization.
Nothing in the lens, nothing in the camera.
But the weight of this itself, it makes it stable.
And we are handheld right now,
so we are still kind of getting a little bit of shake.
But it's not jittery shake,
it's more like cinematic movement.
- Yeah, people don't realize that the heavier the camera is,
the smoother especially the handheld look is.
When you have a small camera,
your hands are shaking so much.
When you have a big, heavy camera,
just because of the weight, you end up keeping it
a lot more stable and it looks a lot nicer,
especially for the handheld look.
It's not so convenient when you're trying
to put it on a gimbal or something like that.
- 100%
And another example, IBIS is something that's great
to have in a small camera to kind of counter that.
And IBIS is great to have 90% of the time,
it makes the shot look smoother.
But 10% of the time, sometimes
it might do something kind of weird.
This is a different approach.
They just want it to work 100% of the time
exactly how they want it to.
If you get a super expensive shot
and then you see all this wobble from IBIS,
then they're gonna be like, "That's unusable."
You don't want any smart features trying to
just assume that you want to do this.
There's a lot of smart features--
- No auto-extension. - Exactly
- [Matti] Nothing auto, nothing convenient.
You gotta do it all yourself.
- Exactly. - The right way.
- I think the image is something
that's really hard to explain also.
It just looks really, really good, right?
Yeah, this camera's great,
but this camera image is so much nicer.
But if you put them side-by-side,
it's kind of hard to say exactly why it looks better.
It's so subjective, but at the same time not subjective.
I'd say pretty much everybody would say
that that's a better image.
But you can't say exactly why.
- Yeah, image quality is one of those things
that's really hard to define.
Because in the consumer world,
everyone's always just like, "We want more resolution,
"We want better sharpness." - We want 8K!
- Exactly.
The thing is, what gives it a cinematic look,
it's really hard to describe.
Because pixels and stuff, the number of pixels,
you can count that.
It's something you can explain, it's easy to comprehend.
The cinematic look is very hard to explain.
If you watch a Hollywood movie
on your iPhone in standard definition,
you look at it and you go, "That looks really good.
"I'm watching in 360p but it looks fantastic."
So it's one of those things, it's kind of hard to explain
what gives Arri and Red cameras that cinematic look.
But as soon as you look through
this viewfinder, you immediately see it.
You're like, "Wow, everything looks nice and creamy."
Skin tones look so good.
I don't know if it's dynamic range,
if it's color science or whatever.
But there's some magic voodoo in here.
Something's going on.
- So the short answer is, it's magic.
- Yeah, exactly. - It's just magic in a box.
Now, am I gonna start using an Alexa
for all my YouTube videos?
No, it doesn't make sense for me.
It doesn't work, well, at least not yet.
It just doesn't work for my filmmaking,
the things that I am making.
It makes sense for Hollywood,
but it's not gonna make sense for a lot of you guys.
Until you're in that range of you've got massive budgets,
and the most important thing, the absolute
most important thing is the image.
Not how long it takes to use that camera,
how easy it is to use that camera,
how much it costs to use that camera.
When only the image matters in the end,
that's when you should start looking
at cameras like the Alexas.
Cause they're pretty dang heavy and hard to use
and very, very, very expensive.
One camera is pretty much worth
more than all of the gear that I own.
All the cameras, all my lenses, everything.
It just doesn't fit my needs right now,
but it does fit Hollywood's needs.
What a beast of a camera, though.
Just an insane camera.
Okay, I'm gonna go back to using my mirrorless cameras.
See ya, guys.
Thanks Gene for showing me this beast
of a Hollywood cinema camera.
(both laugh)
And thanks for carrying it around, too.
- Yeah I know, I'm like okay, can we trade?
Let's trade.
- Nah, I'll keep this camera.
I can carry your EOS R, it's fine.
I got two cameras, you carry the one.
It's fair.
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