At this time the words “Approved by Netflix” bounce around for the umpteenth time as an excuse to buy the new camera or to justify one’s choice of camera.
All the fault of yet another advertising video by Netflix itself where it makes people believe that they try them out, test them thoroughly, because technical quality is important to them (it’s true of course), but their guidelines are funny… too bad people don’t understand the irony of the choices.
Let’s start with a basic absurdity, the approved cameras are the ones used during official NetFlix Original productions, so billion-dollar productions where the camera is the least of the economic problems, owning a NetFlix-approved camera does not mean you can sell them imams, work or products.
If you produce something, with cameras that are not among those approved, still it can be sold to NetFlix, as a no NetFlix Original product, so much so that in their catalog there are products made with all kinds of chambers.
In the Italian catalog there was for some time also an Italian product “Across the river” made in miniDv, acquired for the catalog because it had won several festivals.
Their requirements are related to resolution (Min 4k), dynamic range (at least 9), color sampling quality, for which masterpieces shot in Imax film are not suitable as quality, because film has a dynamic range between 6 and 9 stops. At the same time much of the products made in recent years with the best Arri cameras, not having 4k as a basic resolution (sensor in 3.5k opengate) are technically to be discarded…
I agree that minimum production limits are set to maintain very high quality standards, but at the same time there should be a practical discourse of result use, it is possible to put an exceptional camera in the hands of a neophyte and bring out horrible footage, and take a basic camera and put it in the hands of a professional bring out good quality footage.