Filming for telecine

[David Mullen ASC]

You are absolutely right in your case, David. But in the case of this thread, as I understand it, it was a case of a supervised transfer.

 

Really? I just looked thru Patrick Cooper's posts and didn't see that, but maybe I missed it. Yes, in the case of supervised transfers, you are basically there to tell the colorist what you want. Besides, you are more likely to be with an experienced colorist rather than a trainee doing dailies after midnight....

[Andy_Alderslade]

For someone who went to a pretty terrible filmschool, the issue of Greyscales was absolutly baffleing for myself and my piers.

 

We all kept wondering why when using coloured gels on lights or when underexposing slightly why the rushes would always come back totally neutral.

 

Of course we would shoot the greyscales under the gelled lights or under the exact same conditions as the scene.

 

 

When working for another student who was attending the NFTS he had always been taught never to shoot a greyscale, and just provide comprehensive notes. Infact his teacher Brian Tufano (and this isn't a quote, only hear say) felt that you would get a much better transfer as the colourist would look and judge by the scene and not by the greyscale.

 

Actually reading this discussion has helped clear up some remaining confusion.

[David Mullen ASC]

We all kept wondering why when using coloured gels on lights or when underexposing slightly why the rushes would always come back totally neutral.

 

Of course we would shoot the greyscales under the gelled lights or under the exact same conditions as the scene.

 

Which is why the dailies came back neutral... You shoot a grey scale under an orange light and the timer is likely to add enough blue to get it back to grey.

 

All of these methods -- notes, digital stills, grey scales, etc. -- are just methods of communication to a timer / colorist when you won't be there. The advantage of a grey scale is mainly that it is less susceptible to misinterpretation (although hardly foolproof) if you light it flatly and non-creatively, and correctly. It's even more useful if you are talking about printing the neg since you can compare the timing lights on the grey scale to what might get used in other scenes and have a good idea as to the density of the negative. If I have a scene printed to the grey scale and the scale looks correct in print dailies but the following scene looks too dark and will need to be printed at lower numbers to look correct, I know that I made a mistake in exposure, not that the lab timed it too dark. Conversely if the grey scale comes up too blue-ish and then the scene is also too blue-ish, I know that it wasn't my fault.

 

Sure, it's great when a colorist can make you look brilliant, but for your long term education, it's a good idea to have a sense of what you are recording onto the negative, especially if you ever plan on making a conventional photochemical print.

 

In fact, even on this TV show I am shooting for tape-to-tape finish, the post supervisor has been very complimentary on how dense and consistent my negatives have been, which I think is partly due to the fact that I learned to shoot for print, not telecine. He said that a lot of TV shows he has posted have had problems with overly thin negatives or inconsistent exposing because DP's rely too much on the transfer process to "save" them. It may have worked for NTSC/PAL finish, but now with HD mastering, mistakes are a little harder to hide.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Grey scales / grey cards with a black and white reference are more useful for telling the colorist what a "neutral" value should look like.

 

Kodak makes a grey card called the "Grey Card Plus" which has black and white reference chips on the sides of the 18% grey card - you can only order it by phone for some reason, and it's about $25. In telecine, the colorist can zoom in on each of these sections and quickly neutralize the color balance of the midtones, shadows, and highlights by looking at the RGB parade/waveform monitor. One colorist I know swears by it and says he dislikes the Macbeth because the color chips are so small.

 

Grey cards are especially usefully for determining when the lab or telecine house has made a mistake at your expense. I recently shot a grey card at the head of a 100' roll of 7218 exposed in front of a tungsten light gelled with 3/4 CTO - I wanted the print to be timed bluer. The lab totally disregarded my instructions to time to the grey card, and the minute I saw the orange card, I knew what had happened. The director was very unhappy with how the film looked, but felt better after realizing that the lab had screwed up (not me), and was willing to reprint the roll for free. Because I had shot the grey card and specified how the roll should be timed, I was able to ask for the reprint - otherwise, we'd be SOL. So it pays to cover your ass.

 

David, I've read your comments about shooting a grey scale (as opposed to a grey card) and was wondering which one you used, and what the advantages of a greyscale would be as opposed to a grey card.

[Sam Wells]

With one lab I worked with, I used to staple a clip of the gel(s) to the timing instructions & in big letters

DON'T TAKE THIS COLOR OUT !

 

-Sam

[David Mullen ASC]

David, I've read your comments about shooting a grey scale (as opposed to a grey card) and was wondering which one you used, and what the advantages of a greyscale would be as opposed to a grey card.

 

Either works fine, especially if the grey card has a black and a white reference chip.

[Bernhard Zitz]

Or conversely, if I shoot outdoors on tungsten stock and pull the 85 to gain more speed

 

never did that but always wondered how good the results are after grading, compared to daylightstock or tungstenstock with85?

[Stephen Williams]

never did that but always wondered how good the results are after grading, compared to daylightstock or tungstenstock with85?

 

Hi Bernhard,

 

Watch Barry Lyndon if you are worried!

 

Stephen

[David Mullen ASC]

When shooting outdoors on tungsten stock without the 85B filter, you basically are underexposing the red layer and overexposing the blue layer, and when timing to correct, you can pick up some slight color bias in the shadows. Faces can look more pastel as a result. John Alcott felt that it made greens look more intense (see "Barry Lyndon" and "Greystoke".) Ultimately though you will always have more flexibility in timing if you deliver balanced negative. When I leave out the 85 filter, it's often when I'm planning on leaving the image slightly blue-ish in the final timing anyway, not correcting back 100%.

 

I find that if you attempt to restore the color back 100%, the image can actually look brownish oddly enough, since you are basically adding orange to a slightly desaturated image to get the skintones back to normal.

 

The whole first third of "Akeelah and the Bee" was shot on 100T and Expression 500T without the 85 filter for a coolish, slightly pastel look.

[Hal Smith]

I find that if you attempt to restore the color back 100%, the image can actually look brownish oddly enough, since you are basically adding orange to a slightly desaturated image to get the skintones back to normal.

I suspect that underlying these sort of results is the CIE color triangle. When you mess with the color balance of a recording/reproduction system and/or inadvertantly reduce the CIE color space in some way then you can't get back to the original palette.

 

In film terms, you've lost latitude on one or more of the film's layers and possibly differentially changed the sensitometric curve of the layers with respect to each other. The result is you've crushed, blown out, or radically changed the "gamma" of one or more of your colors. So it might be possible to get something like your skin tone back in timing, but other color elements go wrong since you've reduced color space.

 

An afterthought: Has anyone else on the forum attended the Broadway Lighting Master Classes in NYC? Beverly Emmons does a lecture demonstration where she deliberately screws up the eye's color balance in real time. By the time she's done, she's got your eyes thinking magenta is white and white light is bright green.

[David Mullen ASC]

It reminds me a little of what Dave Stump was telling me about the Viper's green bias, in that the real world has a lot more green in it than what our eye sees, or film sees, but the Viper is more sensitive to -- basically there is nothing "wrong" with how green it sees reality, in some ways it sees it more accurately than we do. Of course, it looks "wrong" to our eyes if we don't correct the greenish-ness out of the Viper image.

[Patrick Cooper]

When presenting a grey scale or grey card to the lens, how many seconds of film do you usually roll on it?

[David Mullen ASC]

When presenting a grey scale or grey card to the lens, how many seconds of film do you usually roll on it?

 

Depends -- a telecine colorist can stop on a single frame and correct it, so he doesn't need much. But if you want to watch the chart in dailies at normal speed, you may want enough seconds for footage to really see the chart and judge it, at least 10 seconds.