If you have been following me on Facebook, you’ll know that I have been in Dubai running an F65 and SRMaster workshop. Quite a few people have asked for a sample file to take a look at. The Jpeg shown on this page does not do the DPX file justice. It has incredible dynamic range, while the Jpeg looks over exposed, if you take a look at the DPX you’ll see that it’s no where near overexposed. So I have uploaded a sample file for you to play with. It is a 16 Bit 4K DPX frame. Unless you grade it, it will look mostly black, thats the nature of a correctly exposed 16 Bit Linear Raw image. You will find the file here for you to download. The file is a zipped up 4K DPX and it’s 35Mb. Make sure you can open 16 Bit DPX files before you download it. Premiere can only handle 10 bit DPX, but Resolve should open it.
Several people have commented that the image looks very un natural. I would largely agree with that, but you must consider this: If you start with an extremely high resolution, unsharpened image with massive dynamic range and colour gamut, in post production you can then choose your desired contrast range and soften or sharpen the image to meet your needs.
An easy mistake to make with the F65 is to take advantage of it’s huge latitude when shooting without considering what the end viewer will see. In this test shot we were actively trying to show off the cameras dynamic range. Again I refer you to the DPX file, you will see that the raw image is not clipped. But, modern displays, even OLED cannot show more than about 10 stops. So if you start with 14+ stops, something has to give when you try to show that on an 8 stop LCD screen. So, even though you can capture a massive dynamic range, it is not necessarily desirable to do so. By that I mean that if you can keep your dynamic range lower (through lighting or re-framing) then the pictures the end viewer sees will often look better.
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