NAB 2024: A Light Chat With Cineflares

black magic design creating revolutionary solutions for film post production and television hi everyone and welcome back to our final interview of theend of the day yeah with our one of our favorite people that we get to see at all of the trade shows and parties and spent New Year's together this year with Julie and you it's Marcus ferer and cam M always Hi Marcus fer how are you doing hi nice to see thanks for Haley and Indiana thanks for coming by oh my God always I am stoked because it's always great to catch with Marcus cuz he's always doing some cool Pro uh projects and we just finished um uh constellation which you did episode one and two the most like important episodes uh because you go back to the First episodes when you finish it because you want to rewatch it and check everything out I won't spoil it too much but I am stoked you're here at neb not just cuz I get to see you but you're showing something that I think is really relevant to our audience so I'm going to give this to you yes please show it off yes thank you yeah so I'm a big I'm a lens fan and like right for we're testing always new cameras and lenses and cameras have become so good that it's not relevant anymore which camera you pick But the lens has such a big influence on the character of the images right how they render faces and but there's like you know hundreds of lenses out there and every other week There's a new lens coming out so people get lost and so I did for years testing in a very specific way and I sh like with motion control and I showed this to directors and other uh friends of the AC and like they were said like you have to publish this somehow right so in the last years we built an interface like it's on a website called C flayers and it's basically let me just run this it's basically a side by side player you can select your lenses that's the same selection of lenses on the left and right side you can choose your focal length your t- stop and when you hit play it's a motion control time code doing side by side player and the idea is that you can really compare lenses um and because it's just the flare you really see the character right like I feel like the flare is like the fingerprint or the DNA of a lens this is all shot with the exact same light source the exact same camera body the same specs and we're doing this for years because like we have 100 lens sets now it takes forever but so we just put this out there there's a small free version for people to play with and we're collecting feedback and for NAB now we launched there's a bigger version if people want to support that project um which is a small subscription and that helps us hopefully shooting more and and adding more features so we have a new browse feature we're showing for the first time at NAB um so for example this is like just the detail page has all the specs you can autogenerate a PDF file and send it to your rental house and so this is new browse feature for example if you want to see let's say show me all 35 mm lenses and you can specify anamorphic spherical or large format and then and it shows you the selection gives you at a glance a quick overview and you might say oh I really like this or this one looks too crazy yeah it just the starting point right and then I feel like with your directory collaborators you say like these two three lenses I like let's test them specifically to the project because I feel like you cannot test everything sometimes like you like get you know you get a requirement of like I have these directors this is my reference this is my and I'm like well they use these lenses but maybe like we expand that and we do a test of these and it's exhaust to always do a test and also it's correct like getting a standardized test on your own takes a lot of time it's a lot of effort you have to make sure the rental house has all of the stuff in House at the time on the Shelf so this is like incredible because DPS can go in there browse it and be like oh I hate that or oh I love that let's add it to the list and then you can do your own test still but at least you can check that out and that's amazing yeah yes so educate me is it common then for DPS to go in and test flares on a bunch of lenses and that is part of the selection process so this is really a timeing service yeah like usually right people some people choose they test charts some people test faces like I don't like test shots but the flare is a very Universal thing like there's no nothing distracting here uh but it shows you at the glance does this is this lens very neutral or does it have a crazy character and maybe it's too much sometimes people you know uh I think it shouldn't be just used as eye candy like you want to use a storytelling Stelling and you say maybe you want a lens that's very neutral for visual effects it don't want distract or you want some flashback sequence or a period film where you might want some warm golden flares and the flare even if you have a shot like just a portrait with no light source in it the flare is just an indicator how gentle the faces will be will the light react to the scene is there a standard way of testing the flare have you standardize that across all of these are you running you know horizontally across the frame with uh light or are you doing different

things for different types motion control so there's yeah there's no standard like we just I thought for a long time I actually started this in film school I had to do a technical degree and that's how that all started with a couple of friends so I thought it has to be mo motion control because usually you see like a camera assistant with a flashlight in test room in front of a test chart and it shows you something but how do you say everything looks great until somebody shows you something better so you have to compare a lens next to each other and every angle degree of a light hitting the lens makes a big difference that's why it's motion control and also every t- stop is different so we came up with that system to shoot at a very specific framing as the uh same speed okay yes okay so yeah it is and it's a special daylight balanced light source wow even I'm even like that's really cool I would love to just like compare all the different quite an thing but you it's a rabbit hole you can for hours compare lenses there's hundreds of op most DPS it's like lenses are the flavor and so you're like you have to be aware of the lenses and then there's so many that you get overwhelmed because you're like well I haven't heard of those maybe I should use those yeah my friend used them and like sometimes it doesn't fit the story and you need to know and it's nice because you can do process of elimination too before you even go in or process of what like adding on application addition Pro of addition I don't know of loving something and then wanting to try it in real life you know so I love that what a cool tool yeah thank you and actually we're also very uh interested right now we're focusing on there's a lot of new lenses coming out but there's also very old lenses so we're trying to capture the whole history of C lenses so some lenses are not available anymore they like Museum pieces so we have some in the AC uh Museum or some private collectors gave us their lenses to test so there we have the very first cinemascope lens you know people talk about scope they're talking about bom Cinema scope so there's some lenses there you wouldn't even find at a rental house but you can just compare them see how they react to light and be inspired or maybe if you want to create a special tuning you can talk to your lens Tech at a rental Housey can we do something like this fantastic just a fun resource to play with That's so exciting well we'll definitely have to get everyone on this and you can check it out by going to what c. com fantastic thank you so much Marcus thanks everybody bye