The Automatic Pretty Button

[Delorme Jean-Marie]

talking about colors

what do you think about :

 

sandi sissel's lab problems in the goldy "salaam bombey"

 

and night colors :

-"paris texas" DP Robbie muller

-"millenium mambo" DP mark lee ping bing (hong kong)

-"chuking express, in the mood foor love..." DP chris doyle (agfa320) (hong kong)

-"Topazu" DP Tadeshi aoki (japan)

-"a la verticale de l'ete"DP Mark lee

 

those films are a firework of marvells and it works good because they are "ambiance" film.

 

for desaturated chek "lucia y el sexo" it's a spanish film bleu tones and over exposed like 3 stops and it works great.

[John Sprung]

On the flip side, I'm also reminded of something Zeffirelli said to David Watkin when he was spending too much time getting something right: "Good is better than Perfect" -- i.e. don't ruin something that is already good trying to make it perfect

That reminds me of the old Russian saying, "Better is the enemy of good enough."

 

Back to saturation, I notice that I tend to set it just a tad bit low on my TV set. When adjusting chroma phase gets to a "best" place that still isn't quite right, it's less bad if there's less saturation. Technology can produce more saturation than exists in the real world, which for most stories is a place we'd all prefer to stay away from.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Alvin Pingol]

Back to saturation, I notice that I tend to set it just a tad bit low on my TV set.  When adjusting chroma phase gets to a "best" place that still isn't quite right, it's less bad if there's less saturation.  Technology can produce more saturation than exists in the real world

Speaking of which, I always set the saturation on my TV sets a little higher than "middle" (a little higher than factory preset) because I like vibrant, punchy color (I'm always sure not to boost it so high as to introduce chroma bleeding or excess noise). However, my CBS broadcast always comes through with "higher-than-standard" saturation on all of their programs, making people look orange.

 

All of the other channels look fine.

 

Shouldn't there be some sort of broadcast-saturation-standard for this?

[David Mullen ASC]

NTSC = Never Twice the Same Color

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Just to expound on the NTSC colour problem in case anyone's searching in the future:

 

NTSC was the first colour TV system; the alternatives are standing on its shoulders and are thus more refined. The colour information is encoded in what is otherwise a normal black and white picture (so it's backwards compatible to mono TVs) as a "subcarrier." Put most simply, this is a modulation of coloured areas at two slightly different frequencies, 90 degrees out of phase (exactly half out of step with one another, so they can be separated later using a comb filter.) This is where we get the YUV (or properly in NTSC, YIQ after some optimisation maths) notation, for the main Y luminance channel and the two colour subcarriers, which is where the whole 4:2:2 colour subsampling thing comes from in digital video. The two out-of-phase channels combine to produce a colour reference in hue-and-saturation space, which is where vectorscopes and trackball-based colour correction come in so you can look at a vector-based colour reference in a meaninful way. Compare the RGB (cubic cartesian space) and HSV (cylindrical vector space) colour pickers in your favourite graphics package to understand this better.

 

The problem with this situation is the way the critical phase alignment of the colour subcarrier works. In both PAL and NTSC, there's a reference colour burst of the subcarrier's frequency just before the start of the active line. This acts as both a frequency and phase reference for the colour on that line. However, cabling and transmission problems can easily distort this information, which has the effect of rotating the hue of the picture in the same way you can in Photoshop. NTSC images are stable in neither hue nor saturation.

 

PAL fixes this by comparing the colour phase of the previous line with that of the current one, originally allowing blurry CRTs and imperfect human vision to blur the two together for an average, but mostly now it's done electronically with a delay line to store the previous line's colour information and perform a subtraction in an amplifier. This works really, really well, and PAL images have stable hue (although not stable saturation.) The downside is that the vertical chroma resolution is halved compared to NTSC, since adjacent lines are effectively averaged.

 

SECAM is devilishly clever. Firstly it uses frequency rather than amplitude modulation for its colour subcarriers, meaning that the saturation of colour cannot easily be affected by transmission errors. SECAM therefore has stable saturation. Secondly, it send the U and V (properly, R-Y and B-Y) signals sequentially on alternate lines, storing the R-Y information from line 1 to reuse on line 2 using a delay line. This means that there is no cross colour pollution in SECAM and the hue is stable.

 

SECAM is technically far and away the best transmission system. Surprisingly, it predates PAL, being developed in France by very clever men with pencils in the 1950s. However, it's very difficult to handle technically, and practically all camera and studio equipment in SECAM countries is PAL, which can be transparently transcoded to SECAM from most formats.

 

Phil

[John Sprung]

NTSC = Never Twice the Same Color

That one's been very well established for a long time. But we don't have general agreement on what the new ATSC standard should be called. So we need some ideas. Here are a few to start with:

 

 

All This for Sit Coms

Abolish Those Sub Carriers

Anything That Sony Commands

Always Take the Stupid Choice

Anyone Tried Switching Channels?

A Temporary Stand-in for COFDM

Anything To Satisfy Congress

 

 

About five years ago there was a whole page of these going around, alas I can't find it any more.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

NTSC was the first colour TV system;

It was the first widely used color system.

 

As far back as the 1920's Baird and other mechanical scan types were experimenting with color. In 1950, the U.S. officially adopted the CBS field sequential (spinning filter disk) color system. Sarnoff fought it all the way to the supreme court, and lost. But by 1953 he was able to get NTSC II color developed and adopted by the FCC.

 

We'd be in a very different world today if we had kept field sequential color. It ran at a true 24.00 fps, 72 fields per second. There would be no 3-2 pulldown. There would be no "point nine something" frame and field rates. There would be no drop and non-drop time code. It even used the same 405 line scanning setup as the U.K.'s black and white system. Of course this alternate world wouldn't be without problems. They'd just be very different ones than we've had this past half century.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Pytlak RIP]

About five years ago there was a whole page of these going around, alas I can't find it any more.

 

I found it for you: :D

 

http://tig.colorist.org/archives/public/ol...8/msg00892.html

 

_________________________

John Sprung 18/06/98 3:37:

                                                                     

NTSC was known as "Never Twice the Same Color"                         

 

or alternately, "No Television System Cheaper"                         

 

Now we need to figure out what ATSC should be called.                   

 

                                                                         

 

I started a thread of ATSC acronym jokes over on Craig                 

 

Birkmaier's OpenDTV list, and here are the results:                     

 

                                                                         

 

                                                                         

 

A Table of Silly Compromises                                           

 

A Temporary Stand-in for COFDM                                         

 

A Totally Stupid Concept                                               

 

A Treasure for Snell's Converters                                       

 

A TV? Spend Cash                                                       

 

Abolish Those Sub-Carriers                                             

 

Absent Telecines Switchers & Cameras                                   

 

Absent Transmitters Switchers & Cameras                                 

 

Accumulation of Television Systems Comedy                               

 

Addled Testament to Superficial Consensus                               

 

Advanced Technologists Still Crying                                     

 

Advanced Television Says Congress                                       

 

Advanced Television Specified for Computers                             

 

Advanced Television Systems Committee                                   

 

Advantages To Specific Companies                                       

 

Aggressive Terrestrial Screws Cable                                     

 

Alex Trebek Sounds Clearer                                             

 

All Television Systems Cheaper                                         

 

All the Time Stuff Changes                                             

 

All These Standards Conflict                                           

 

All This for Sit-Coms?                                                 

 

All This poop Costs                                                     

 

All This'll Scare Consumers                                             

 

All Trouble for Satellite & Cable                                       

 

All Trouble Strife & Confusion                                         

 

Alliance for Terrestrial Spectrum Control                               

 

Almost The Same Color                                                   

 

Almost There, Still Changing                                           

 

Always Take the Second Choice                                           

 

Always The Same Color                                                   

 

Always Too Severely Compressed                                         

 

Always Truncated by Seven-o-nine Colorimetry                           

 

Am Tired of System Confusion                                           

 

America Trades Spectrum for Cash                                       

 

America's Television Systems Collide                                   

 

American Television System Cacophony                                   

 

Amish of Television Sectarian Constituencies, the                       

 

Anathema To Software Companies                                         

 

Another Totally Silly Committee?                                       

 

Anyone Think Sixpack Cares?                                             

 

Anyone Tried Selling Commercials?                                       

 

Anyone Tried Switching Channels?                                       

 

Anything That Satisfies Congress.                                       

 

Anything That Sony Commands                                             

 

Anything To Second-guess Congress                                       

 

Anything To Stifle Computers                                           

 

Assbackwards Technology Stupefies Congress                             

 

Avoid Taking Sides Completely                                           

 

Aw, Tough poop for Cable                                               

 

Aw, Tough poop for Compatibility                                       

 

Aw, Tough poop for Composition                                         

 

Aw, Tough poop for Computers                                           

 

Aw, Tough poop for Consumers                                           

 

                                                                         

 

                                                                         

 

-- J.S.                                                                 

 

-------

[Michael Nash]

Coming into this thread a bit late, but some thoughts. It's been a good discussion of the use of color in art, but in getting back to Phil's original questions about desaturation the other aspect of the look is the CONTRAST palette you end up using.

 

Color and contrast work hand-in-hand, and by desaturating color from the image you're forced to pay more attention to the contrast. I think part of the whole bleach-bypass fad isn't just for the loss of color, but for the INCREASE in contrast, especially in the blacks.

 

When choosing the design of a film it's hard for me to think of the color palette without also thinking of the contrast palette. If I want to use contrast to convey most of the drama, then I find ways to simplify the color palette so it doesn't compete (yet still works to my advantage). And when trying to exploit color for emotional or symbolic reasons, one usually ends up toning down the contrast for the same reason.

 

When faced with color in scene that may not work to your advantage you can "amp up" the contrast by shooting silhouettes; using negative fill; or adding splashes of highlight. I often do this when shooting ENG material to make stronger, more powerful compositions. If the colors just aren't working, then nothing gives a shot some "pop" like a big black shadow or bright zingy highlight.

 

My own theory about color and contrast is that contrast tends to convey the "energy" or drama of a scene the most, and color tends to convey the particular emotion. We've all heard the theories about which-colors-represent-what, and how to use them. While I don't agree with the extreme and complex theories of Storaro, I do think that there is a psychological foundation for the way people interpret colors, and there are certainly visual conventions you can fall back on. I think the same can be said for contrast; that a low-contrast scene tends to feel a little more calm (think of a foggy day), while high-contrast images are naturally more stimulating and create a feeling of energy or tension.

 

As filmmakers and artists we're able to use this basic visual vocabulary to express whatever we want. So maybe the question isn't, "is the bleach-bypass look just a fad"; maybe it should be, "are filmmakers really saying anything new if they're using the same vocabulary over and over?"

 

Personally I like it when artists can manage to use rich color AND high contrast effectively at the same time. Think of something like Ridley Scott's Black Rain which held over a lot of Blade Runner's modern-noir high contrast, but also added rich color to create a stimulating environment.

[David Mullen ASC]

Besides Storaro, another DP who combines color and contrast in interesting, dramatic ways is Juan Ruiz Anchia. The movie was so-so, but his work in "The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca" was great. He also used color quite strikingly in "The Corruptor" and "Confidence."

[Alvin Pingol]

Hi... Phil

Thanks for that great post Mr. Rhodes! I love reading about that stuff. And yeah, I rarely see any native SECAM gear. It's all either PAL or NTSC.

 

Now, back to colors...

[braker]

And yeah, I rarely see any native SECAM gear. It's all either PAL or NTSC.

 

SECAM is only a standard for broadcasting, not for recording. I believe the native standard for SECAM is PAL.

[John Sprung]

For professional purposes, PAL is used for production and post for SECAM broadcasting. Conversion from PAL to SECAM happens between playback and the transmitters.

 

For consumer use, SECAM is recorded on VHS tapes. I don't know if they do anything with DVD's in SECAM.

 

Back in the cold war days, SECAM was used by the communist countries to keep people from watching PAL TV from the west.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Alvin Pingol]

For professional purposes, PAL is used for production and post for SECAM broadcasting.  Conversion from PAL to SECAM happens between playback and the transmitters.

 

For consumer use, SECAM is recorded on VHS tapes.  I don't know if they do anything with DVD's in SECAM.

 

Back in the cold war days, SECAM was used by the communist countries to keep people from watching PAL TV from the west.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

Interesting! Thanks. B)

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> For consumer use, SECAM is recorded on VHS tapes

 

Well, anything that has composite colour encoding in it will use the native colour format. Outputs on games consoles, etc. There is literally no difference between SECAM component and PAL component, it's exactly the same format.

 

As a further side note, it is possible but difficult to make things like video mixers in SECAM. It's theoretically possible to mix composite, or at least Y/C PAL simply by superimposing the two synchronised signals, but this screws up SECAM horribly. Native SECAM video mixers tend to have to decode it to RGB and do everything three times. It's a technical nightmare, hence the use of "PAL" (although it's really all the same at that point) production gear.

 

Phil

[Adam Frisch FSF]

NTSC was the first colour TV system; the alternatives are standing on its shoulders and are thus more refined. The colour information is encoded in what is otherwise a normal black and white picture (so it's backwards compatible to mono TVs) as a "subcarrier." Put most simply, this is a modulation of coloured areas at two slightly different frequencies, 90 degrees out of phase (exactly half out of step with one another, so they can be separated later using a comb filter.) This is where we get the YUV (or properly in NTSC, YIQ after some optimisation maths) notation, for the main Y luminance channel and the two colour subcarriers, which is where the whole 4:2:2 colour subsampling thing comes from in digital video. The two out-of-phase channels combine to produce a colour reference in hue-and-saturation space, which is where vectorscopes and trackball-based colour correction come in so you can look at a vector-based colour reference in a meaninful way. Compare the RGB (cubic cartesian space) and HSV (cylindrical vector space) colour pickers in your favourite graphics package to understand this better.

 

The problem with this situation is the way the critical phase alignment of the colour subcarrier works. In both PAL and NTSC, there's a reference colour burst of the subcarrier's frequency just before the start of the active line. This acts as both a frequency and phase reference for the colour on that line. However, cabling and transmission problems can easily distort this information, which has the effect of rotating the hue of the picture in the same way you can in Photoshop. NTSC images are stable in neither hue nor saturation.

 

PAL fixes this by comparing the colour phase of the previous line with that of the current one, originally allowing blurry CRTs and imperfect human vision to blur the two together for an average, but mostly now it's done electronically with a delay line to store the previous line's colour information and perform a subtraction in an amplifier. This works really, really well, and PAL images have stable hue (although not stable saturation.) The downside is that the vertical chroma resolution is halved compared to NTSC, since adjacent lines are effectively averaged.

 

SECAM is devilishly clever. Firstly it uses frequency rather than amplitude modulation for its colour subcarriers, meaning that the saturation of colour cannot easily be affected by transmission errors. SECAM therefore has stable saturation. Secondly, it send the U and V (properly, R-Y and B-Y) signals sequentially on alternate lines, storing the R-Y information from line 1 to reuse on line 2 using a delay line. This means that there is no cross colour pollution in SECAM and the hue is stable.

 

SECAM is technically far and away the best transmission system. Surprisingly, it predates PAL, being developed in France by very clever men with pencils in the 1950s. However, it's very difficult to handle technically, and practically all camera and studio equipment in SECAM countries is PAL, which can be transparently transcoded to SECAM from most formats.

 

Phil

You sure you want to be a DP, Phil? ;)

[Adam Frisch FSF]

I'm clueless about these things obviously, but why couldn't you broadcast RGB? It doesn't seem to take up more channels or frequency, does it?

 

I'm just amazed at humanity's utter ability to complicate stuff that really doesn't need

complication at all. Life would be so easy without bureaucrats or Sony (BTW, anybody heard about their latest bastard child; Segmented Frame?)....

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

What d'you mean broadcast RGB? Sure, you could do that if you were willing to take up three times the black and white channel space and just use three adjacent channels. As it is you're broadcasting just under a third the amount of information.

 

> You sure you want to be a DP, Phil?

 

Eh?

 

Phil

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Your expertise in all forms of image processing, color spacing, video standards would be

completely wasted behind a an old rusty film camera, no? :rolleyes:

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Name me one field in which the pile of worthless junk with which I have somehow managed to fill my head will pay a living wage, and I'm there...

 

Phil "Jack of all trades, master of none" Rhodes

[David Mullen ASC]

You'd think in the digital age, we could abandon any pretense to NTSC specs in terms of being compatible with b&w analog TV sets, etc. On the other hand, broadcasting 4:4:4 is probably overkill. Question is, in the quest to reduce data rates, would you be happier with higher compression in all three colors equally, or subsampling red and blue and having a lower compression rate?

 

Sort of like the question I ask various people about the HDCAM-SR specs, which can record 4:2:2 HD with no compression or 4:4:4 HD with mild compression. Which is better?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

It depends what the content of the scene is and how the compression works, particularly if it is non intra-frame compression (such as MPEG1/2/4). Practically all camera formats are intra-frame, so the motion of the scene doesn't change things at all. However, typically recording something critical like bluescreen will allow the codec to compress heavily in screen areas, then use the data space it saves there to provide sharper imaging in complex transition areas. DVCAM and HDCAM work this way, although both are heavily subsampled which is not contingent on image content. Assuming HDCAM-SR is at least a DCT algorithm (and not Huffman like Digibeta, which it may well be) it will also work this way. If it is Huffman, which I don't know, then it's all a big fib anyway and you can treat it as effectively uncompressed.

 

Phil

[John Sprung]

You'd think in the digital age, we could abandon any pretense to NTSC specs in terms of being compatible with b&w analog TV sets, etc.  On the other hand, broadcasting 4:4:4 is probably overkill.  Question is, in the quest to reduce data rates, would you be happier with higher compression in all three colors equally, or subsampling red and blue and having a lower compression rate?

 

Sort of like the question I ask various people about the HDCAM-SR specs, which can record 4:2:2 HD with no compression or 4:4:4 HD with mild compression.  Which is better?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

It depends on how you're going to use the video. If you're just going to cut it and show it, 4:2:2 has a real advantage because it matches what the human visual system needs. But if you're going to work on it in post, especially if you're going to use color information to make mattes, 4:4:4 is better.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Guest fstop]

Wow! I just read this thread from page 1 to 4- cover to cover if you will- would make an INCREDIBLE film school program!

 

I must admit, I'm totally out of my depth with most of this video stuff- I think it's amazing how much Phil and Mike Nash know on the subject- I really need to learn up on all of these broadcast quality jargon arguments, perhaps we should do a video extreme technicals crash-course for the layman thread?

 

David- I found your comments on Ruaz-Anchia very similar to my own in terms of bold and original use of colour- my greatest fear is that he may end up doing a Bruckheimer film with his stark saturated colourschemed contrast! Glengary Gless Ross and Confidence were spectacular looking- I also thought Steve Barron's Pinocchio evidenced Juan's knack for warmer, naturalistic tones and the ability to simulate natural light intercut with available light sequences (and expert meteorology judgement).

 

A great read, people- let's just find a publisher now! ;)

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> perhaps we should do a video extreme technicals crash-course for the layman

> thread?

 

Well, ask relevant questions and one will arise by default.

 

> my greatest fear is that he may end up doing a Bruckheimer film with his stark

> saturated colourschemed contrast!

 

And there's something wrong with that?

 

Phil