SIMMOD Aria Black Mist Filter Tests

My colleague Ron from SIMMOD sent me these early pre-production samples of the ARIA Black Mist filters and I’ve finally gotten around to trying them out.

The Aria Black Mist filter to the eye seems to be a kind of cross between a Tiffen Black Pro Mist and Tiffen Glimmer Glass.

After shooting with it in a few scenarios, it’s really more to my eye it’s like a more subtle version of a Tiffen Black Pro Mist. It does diffuse and lower contrast a little, and it also halates quite nicely, not in such an overt way in my view as a ProMist.

These filters are made by SIMMOD, who are better known for making excellent cine-mod kits and custom lans caps. They are available as a 3 piece kit in 82mm or 72mm screw size for $159 and the larger 4 x 5.76″ size which is what I tested with sells for $525 for the kit. They come in a lovely custom pouch as well.

These tests were shot using with the assistance of two wonderful colleagues, Jessica Clarke-Nash SOC and the very patient and fantastic DP Meg White as a model. She told me should happily model for me as long as she could finish a knitting project she was working on deadline towards!

I’ve tried a few shooting scenarios, a night interior, a dusk exterior and day exterior. All this test footage was shot using the Blackmagic design Ursa Mini Pro 12K with Zeiss Supreme lenses. The interior lighting was key’d using a light that’s new to me, and one that appears to be a true Parabolic lamp, the Parabolix. It’s a very impressive very high TLCI unit that actually can be focused like a true parabolic lamp. I also had some of my regular ruby lights as a warm fill.

This footage is straight out of camera, shot using the default “extended video” look. One of the takes during the day setup had some cloud, but otherwise it was pretty consistent shooting conditions.

Thanks to my good friends at Digital Pigeon who specialise in ultra fast large file transfer, I’m able to share some of the camera original files if you want to look for yourself. Feel free to download and check it out.

• NOTE ! Also I just noticed that for the next few weeks they seem to be running a site wide 25% holiday sale, so they’re even less expensive for this Thanksgiving 2022

Laowa 12mm

A quick example with the 12K UMP

I just received my Laowa 12mm T2.9 PL mount lens. It’s official name is actually…

Laowa 12mm T2.9 Zero-D Cine

This is a really interesting lens, as it’s very small, very wide and still quite fast and yet covers up to 135 format (full frame).

On top of all that, it’s very inexpensive! The PL version is only $1500. It’s kind of a no brainer, as long as it looks good right?

I was able to go to Joshua Tree and shoot with my colleague and excellent DP in her own right, Meg White. And here’s a little edit of the results, straight from camera, no grade with only “extended video” applied.

The lens itself is small. More like tiny. Considering it covers up to 135 / Full Frame that’s quite an achievement, especially when it is also quite fast at T2.9. Distortion is minimal, again impressive for a lens at this price point. Minimum focus is quite good at 7″.

It looks really good! It certainly gets a little softer at the edges but overall it’s a strong performing lens. Considering the nearest equivalent in terms of specifications is multiple times the cost of this lens, you certainly are getting something with tremendous value. The UMP 12K is a Super 35 sensor, so it would be interesting to try it out on a larger format sensor and see how the edge softness prints, but so far, I can easily imagine using this in the future.

I’ve also included some 12k BRAW camera original files to download, thanks to my fiends at Digital Pigeon, who offer hyper fast large video file sharing solutions for creatives like me!

Download 12GB of BRAW files HERE

And for those that prefer YouTube

Not all ND’s are created created equal

It’s one of the easiest things to test, and yet I rarely see it being done.

I’ve always tried to test the actual ND filters I’m using or might be using every time on every new show. The combination of camera / sensor and lens not to mention shooting circumstance can mean an ND filter you might be happy with previously, might not work the way you expect.

The more I do these kinds of test, the more I also realise how much VARIATION there can be even from the same manufacturer. Both in colour AND in density. More often than not when you get to 6 stops there can often be a 1/2 stop variation.

Typically you also see more variation at the deeper filter factor filters, like the 1.8 or 2.1 because that’s where it’s much harder to be consistent.

Anyhow, here is one of my latest ND filter tests. I’m testing here on an Arri Alexa Mini ahead of the feature film “Taurus” and you can see there’s a huge difference between these two brands of ND filter.

How fast can you shoot 12K?

It’s been a few weeks since Blackmagic Design announced their radical new sensor design packaged in the form of the Ursa Mini Pro 12K camera.

I’m in pre-production on a film shooting on northern Ontario Canada.  In the story weather plays a big part and I’ve started gathering shots of weather and sunsets to use in the film.

There are some pretty spectacular sunsets in the town I’m based in, North Bay and I thought this might be a good example to show you the great look this sensor can do with colour in the natural environment and into low light.   I want to share with you all the spectacular images and colour the 12K sensor is capable of doing.

But then I also realised it’s also a pretty cool case study or example of just how fast the BMD 12k RAW workflow can be.

A lot of the comments I’ve seen online have been scoffing at the need for 12K and making comments about needing a massive super computer to work with the files and insane amounts of storage.

Let me blow those misconceptions entirely out of the water.

I spent about 2 hours shooting this one sunset. My 150Wh AB battery still was at 30% when I wrapped.

Shooting 12K @ Q3 I shot about 57 mins of footage and that footage took up about 227Gb across two old 128 Gb CFAST cards that I have.

I copied those files onto a 2TB T5 SSD in about 12 mins, and I started cutting on my 2017 MacBook Pro. After about 3 hours I had this cut that’s about 5 mins. The shots are shown in the same order they are shot. I was able to cut this before my battery from the shoot finished recharging.

If you want to see some spectacular colour, then skip to about 2 mins in.

Here’s another thing. These aren’t graded. This is what came out of camera with “extended video” applied to them in the RAW tab. No other grade.

It took about 1 hour to render the 4K H264 file from Resolve. And then my slow internet to upload it.

Let’s recap.

2 hours shooting, for 57 mins footage totally 220Gb in 12K Q3 using a single battery.

Edited on a 3 year old MacBook and with the default grade applied.

So yeah. No huge hard drives, no massive computer required. If you can edit 4K now, you can also edit 12K BRAW.

Shot with Zeiss Compact Primes.

So remember, this is cut in the same order that it was shot.  If 5 mins of sunset isn’t too interesting to you, then the sun sets at about 2 mins and the colour starts to get really interesting at about the 4 min mark.

On with the show.

OH.  Also, related to the same film, but unrelated footage for anyone looking for some more RAW files, here you go.

Short 12K clips