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
johnbrawley 