Late last year when Fujifilm announced that it was putting the sensor found in its GFX 100 II into a cinema camera, I was not clear on the value proposition. While huge, the slow sensor didn’t feel suited to movie-making. After spending some time with the camera yesterday, however, I’m starting to see the vision.
I spent about four hours with the GFX Eterna Cinema Camera yesterday during an invite-only, closed session at the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). Prior to this, my only experience with the GFX Eterna was seeing it behind glass at NAB. While the camera hardware seems close to complete, firmware is still being developed so the cameras weren’t fully unlocked and able to be played with. That said, there was still quite a bit to glean.
Fujifilm had a large number of cameras up and running in various rigs and with different lens options attached, which let me see how the GFX Eterna can handle different focal lengths, both spherical and anamorphic, and different image circles. Of the lenses I tested, I was most impressed with the Statera 75mm T2.2 1.5x anamorphic, which rendered an incredibly beautiful defocus area that will visually wrap around a subject when they’re about three feet away. Granted, you don’t need the GFX Eterna to enjoy this lens, but the larger sensor means that 75mm looks closer to 59mm, which opens up different framing opportunities especially when you consider the horizontal space that anamorphic provides.
GFX Eterna has the tallest digital sensor available for filmmaking, which the company strongly believes makes it flexible in ways no other system is.
This is one of the several advantages that Fujifilm is pointing to as to why a cinematographer would want to use the GFX Eterna. As announced yesterday, GFX Eterna users will be able to customize framing guides and save them across three user-selected options. That means filmmakers can place frame guides for their desired aspect ratio but still see top and bottom areas for the purposes of reframing. Not only is it very easy to mix and match spherical and anamorphic lenses, but Fujifilm is positioning the GFX Eterna to be able to work alongside any other cinema system thanks to the wealth of resolutions and aspect ratios. Some PetaPixel readers noted that including Super35 as an option on the GFX Eterna was odd since there are so many other options that would seemingly be better there, but that isn’t the point — the point is flexibility.
Unlike most photographers, high-end cinematographers are brand agnostic. They typically rent equipment and many lenses use a universal lens mount (PL) so that filmmakers can easily move between systems. Fujifilm’s GFX Eterna is, therefore, easily able to fit into setups that use other cinema cameras and adapt its frame of view and aspect ratio to match. The idea isn’t that a filmmaker would use the GFX Eterna just for Super35, but that it could crop down to that for use alongside an Alexa 35 if needed but also expand out to match the Sony Venice, too.
Fujifilm is placing emphasis on another advantage of the GFX Eterna: color accuracy and perfect tonality. In a reel shown to cinematographers and seen by PetaPixel, Fujifilm showcased footage shot of a dark-skinned model in a room filled with various earth tones — mainly dark oranges, browns, and greens. The claim was that the GFX didn’t just render green, it rendered each green exactly as the human eye sees it. Subtle differences were visible and that combined with the wide dynamic range meant that cinematographers could dial in a look to be exactly the way they want it. Beyond that, skin tone was retained despite its placement in a room where any color shift would typically badly skew the colors. Yet, to my eye, the model’s dark skin looked true to life.
Fujifilm wanted to make sure that it got every color in a complicated scene right and, from what I saw and from what ASC members were telling me, it appears to have succeeded.
Speaking of color, the inclusion of 3D LUTs built from Fujifilm’s film simulations was also announced yesterday and the company believes it can be extremely valuable to colorists and cinematographers. Not only can these 3D LUTs be added to footage as is, but they can be downloaded, tweaked, exported, and re-uploaded to the GFX Eterna so that cinematographers can effectively customize their own digital film looks.
As an added bonus, any camera that shoots in F-Log2 and F-Log2c (Fujifilm’s standard log profile versus its wide gamut log profile) will be able to take advantage of these LUTs, so it’s not just GFX Eterna filmmakers that will be able to leverage film simulations for motion pictures.
Fujifilm says that its history in cinematography is deeply steeped in film and it was critically important that it brought that legacy and knowledge into the digital age. The claim is that as a film and camera company — the only one left today that still makes both film and digital cameras — it is the only company capable of doing this kind of color work to this level of quality. It remains to be seen if these claims hold up and if they resonate with cinematographers, but that’s clearly an important emphasis for Fujifilm.
What I came away with from my time with the GFX Eterna is that Fujifilm sees its re-entry into movie-making hardware as a versatile tool that can be used across productions either for specific shots to achieve a certain look or as a primary camera that can adapt to a cinematographer’s vision on the fly.
This slow, deliberate pace with which Fujifilm has revealed the GFX Eterna is due to its desire to ensure it is creating a camera that filmmakers will want to use. Whether or not what it is creating ends up being desirable to cinematographers, what is clear is how seriously Fujifilm is taking its re-entry into major motion pictures since it stopped producing Eterna films more than a decade ago.
Image credits: Fujifilm
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