Photo to Cine

Benjamin Miller · October 12, 2010

As a photographer, I have gotten very good at using Lightroom's tools to edit my images to my liking.... Exposure/Recovery/Blacks/Tone Curves for overall tone... and WB/Tint/HSL/Split Toning for color balance.

However, when I started shooting video with the 5D2... and really got into grading, I have found it much harder to grade footage using the common video color tools (3-way color corrector). I know part of this is due to the image only being 8 bit compared to the 14bit CR2s I'm used to...but I generally find the tools within apple's Color... and other grading options much more difficult to use. Granted, the tools are a lot more specific and professional... and I understand how the are 'supposed' to work... its just that in practice I am finding it hard to get the image to look the way I want, especially in terms of color balance.

I just wanted to know if any one else had the same problem going from stills to footage, and if there was anything you did that helped you see color... and how to take it from point A to point B... using Color ( or similar programs)

I know it takes lots of practice, and don't expect to be a pro any time soon... and I am willing to put the time in. I was just curious if anybody else was in the same boat, and found the transition tricky.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks

Adrian Sierkowski · October 12, 2010

Most of it comes from the severely compressed images. . . If you were grading film originated footage, scanned up to a DPX file, let's say and trying to correct for minor things like WB and the like, it would be much easier.

James Compton · October 12, 2010

Benjamin,

You can keep using Lightroom for color correcting your Canon 5D footage. Use Quicktime to convert the video files to an image sequence. Once you are in Lightroom, once in the DEVELOP module - select - MATCH TOTAL EXPOSURES to adjust a group of images as one file. See here : http://bit.ly/9eQHQl .

Benjamin Miller · October 12, 2010

Most of it comes from the severely compressed images. . . If you were grading film originated footage, scanned up to a DPX file, let's say and trying to correct for minor things like WB and the like, it would be much easier.

Thanks Adrian, I would love to see what difference that makes. I am really surprised at how drastic a little change in 'brightness' can make on the footage.... while with photos it is very subtle. Guess I need to shoot film :) haha

Adrian Sierkowski · October 12, 2010

It's all in the codec my friend, the 5D is recording in a codec which is great for delivery and viewing; but it discards a lot of information, hence why it's hard to grade, -v- the stills which store as much information as possible.

Benjamin Miller · October 12, 2010

Benjamin,

You can keep using Lightroom for color correcting your Canon 5D footage. Use Quicktime to convert the video files to an image sequence. Once you are in Lightroom, once in the DEVELOP module - select - MATCH TOTAL EXPOSURES to adjust a group of images as one file. See here : http://bit.ly/9eQHQl .

James... Thanks for the info! I use AE a lot to turn an image sequence into a .mov... but I guess I never thought of going the other way around! I will have to try that out and see if it ends up being better in the long run. I am curious to see how the stills from the footage stacks up against the RAWs I'm used to. I think I'm in for a shock! haha

I love using Lightroom for the timelapse stuff I do shoot... I find it very nice being able to tweak the small RAWs I shoot to my liking and then taking those to AE.... but then eventually struggling with Gamma problems later on and it ends up looking nothing like I wanted in the first place!

I need to download some .R3D files and run them through RedCineX... maybe I would find that more along the lines of the raw editing I'm used to

Adrian Sierkowski · October 12, 2010

RED isn't really RAW in the same way a still photo is RAW. The REDRaw is a wavelette compression algorithm, so like the 5D it won't be as much information as a real stills RAW; though most certainly a lot more than h.264! As for the mov to image, you can't "make up" information not already within the file so you won't gain anything in it, aside from the familiarity of working in photoshop or the like.

Benjamin Miller · October 12, 2010

RED isn't really RAW in the same way a still photo is RAW. The REDRaw is a wavelette compression algorithm, so like the 5D it won't be as much information as a real stills RAW; though most certainly a lot more than h.264! As for the mov to image, you can't "make up" information not already within the file so you won't gain anything in it, aside from the familiarity of working in photoshop or the like.

Yeah.... I guess no RAW is truly raw.... there is compression with all of them. I knew I wouldn't be able to ADD anything to the stills from the footage... but it will be nice to know that the reason I can't make it look the way I wan't it is because there isn't the information there... and not just because I don't know how.

I just find it hard doing a simple white balance with the 3-way... the images never quite seem to end up the way I want them... even with a lot of tweaking of all the shadows/mids/highs... with both hue/saturation.

Can you grade .CR2s in Color??? Or a similar grading program? I guess that would be the way to go.... see how well I do grading those 14bit files.

If not the CR2s.... maybe I can convert those to TIFFs... and then to some other format that Color can work with????

Adrian Sierkowski · October 12, 2010

YOu can shoot them to TIff for sure, than bring that into an FCP timeline. Or, if you wanna get a taste of how video woudl work, bring the Tiffs into FCP and export them as ProResHQ 1920x1080 files (generally not super high quality, we work with Uncompressed a lot) but they'll act as files you can work with and play back etc.

Dylan Kress · October 17, 2010

Yea, I'm not too sure why the 5D is getting all the hype it is, but the truth is that it's not good for much more than posting decent looking videos to youtube (assuming you have some nice lenses to go with it). It's a great still picture camera but it really doesn't offer the control you need to really push your image to the max.

H.264 prides itself in offering the lowest bit rates possible for your images which is exactly the opposite of what you want when it comes to manipulating that image in any way. Less data = less information in the color space, data rate, bit-depth, etc...

Although it offers a nice image (for an somewhat affordable camera), it simply isn't built to shoot video for any other format than the web. That's my opinion anyways...