does the film you print your film with decide the final look of the film?

[niulinfeng]

What decides the final look of the film? the film you shoot with or the film you print with? or both?

[Simon Wyss]

Very good question

 

With black and white, reproduction of tones comes from the cooperation of negative and positive. Maximum density is up to the positive alone. You can literally overflow a print with light in the cinema. Limitations to picture image quality are then the lens, the lamp-mirror-lens combination, and the screen.

 

Color films are more easily washed out with light due to dye clouds instead of silver wool.

 

Cinema illumination and optical conditions being standardized to some extent, you have standard density prints and differing ones. You want to discuss the look under the actual circumstances, I presume. In my eyes, you don’t have much room for plays, so it’s mostly fine tuning what people talk about. For a série-noire picture you might have a hard time finding a print stock that has enough silver on it for those deep shadows. Eventually it could be hard to find the lab where they go for more than log 3.5 max density while the stock actually could be at hand.

 

Film looks is a red rag for me.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Simon Wyss

[David Mullen ASC]

It's called a negative-positive process for a reason, since you can't really "look" at the negative (you can, but it certainly looks weird to the eye.) The process has been designed to work together to create the final look.

 

So the print stock "completes" the look so to speak, but in general it doesn't add a unique look unless you do some unique processing to it, since the whole process is somewhat standardized for consistency. Yes, there are some minor differences between the print stocks offered on the market.

 

The negative has a certain low-contrast design in order to allow making multiple generations from it and to allow making color-corrections to it, and it give it a lot of exposure latitude, but that contrast is too low to look correct when projected, so the print stock contrast is designed to "correct" the negative's contrast so that you get decent blacks and colors when you pound a bright projection lamp behind the print and project the image onto a white surface.

 

Now if you go through a digital intermediate process, the look can be altered quite radically before it gets recorded back to a film negative for printing.

 

But these days, sometimes a negative never sees print stock, it gets scanned to digital, finished digitally, and shown digitally. In general the standards for digital cinema projection and delivery files (DCP's) are meant to emulate the look of projected prints. So at some point in the digital intermediate process, after your film has been scanned to a 10-bit Cineon log file -- essentially the digital "negative" -- you have the choice of recording the color-corrected version of the log image onto film stock for printing, or converting it to P3 color space and gamma for digital projection, and also to Rec.709 for release for home video / broadcast TV.

[David Mullen ASC]

"niulinfeng" you should go to My Controls and adjust your User Name to be a first and last name per the forum rules. Maybe your name is Niu Lin Feng and just needs spaces added to look correct, but for now, it's hard to tell what your name is. Thanks.

[niulinfeng]

"niulinfeng" you should go to My Controls and adjust your User Name to be a first and last name per the forum rules. Maybe your name is Niu Lin Feng and just needs spaces added to look correct, but for now, it's hard to tell what your name is. Thanks.

Sorry for that ,sir, I am not sure if I can change it since I am using Facebook to sign in,

[niulinfeng]

 

 

But these days, sometimes a negative never sees print stock, it gets scanned to digital, finished digitally, and shown digitally. In general the standards for digital cinema projection and delivery files (DCP's) are meant to emulate the look of projected prints. So at some point in the digital intermediate process, after your film has been scanned to a 10-bit Cineon log file -- essentially the digital "negative" -- you have the choice of recording the color-corrected version of the log image onto film stock for printing, or converting it to P3 color space and gamma for digital projection, and also to Rec.709 for release for home video / broadcast TV.

 

 

 

Sir, could u tell me what is P3 color space? why people mention Rec.709 so often? is that kind of a industry standard ?

Edited October 19, 2013 by niulinfeng

[niulinfeng]

Very good question

 

With black and white, reproduction of tones comes from the cooperation of negative and positive. Maximum density is up to the positive alone. You can literally overflow a print with light in the cinema. Limitations to picture image quality are then the lens, the lamp-mirror-lens combination, and the screen.

 

Color films are more easily washed out with light due to dye clouds instead of silver wool.

 

Cinema illumination and optical conditions being standardized to some extent, you have standard density prints and differing ones. You want to discuss the look under the actual circumstances, I presume. In my eyes, you don’t have much room for plays, so it’s mostly fine tuning what people talk about. For a série-noire picture you might have a hard time finding a print stock that has enough silver on it for those deep shadows. Eventually it could be hard to find the lab where they go for more than log 3.5 max density while the stock actually could be at hand.

 

Film looks is a red rag for me.

 

THanks for the reply, sir. Could u please tell me what is "density prints "? and I am not familiar with the Cinema thing. where can i find those info about the standard Cinema illumination and optical conditions for watching a film?

[David Mullen ASC]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._709

http://www.noteloop.com/kit/display/color-space/dci-p3/

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=77241.0

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1369670/broadcast-tv-gamma

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?57539-DCP-from-Scratch-(-workflow-)

 

We tend to throw around the term "Rec.709" to refer to both the color space, display luminance range, and gamma for broadcast TV though technically I think gamma (contrast) is a separate ITU recommendation. The articles above say that Rec.709 should be corrected for 2.4 gamma but many people feel that that is too contrasty because many LCD screens can't reach that. Digital cinema projection is supposed to reach a gamma of 2.6.

 

P3 is the spec for digital cinema projection color space, which is slightly wider than Rec.709.

 

The simplest explanation of density in film is simply that whatever coats the base to create an image -- whether black silver (for b&w prints) or cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes (for color prints), the thicker the density of the silver or dye, the less light can pass through, so in a print, a pure black area would have the maximum density on the print. However, how dense the max density can get depends on a number of factors, such as the printer light used and the design of the print stock, the processing, etc.

 

http://www.rogerandfrances.com/photoschool/ps%20neg%20density.html

http://motion.kodak.com/motion/uploadedFiles/printing_density_1007.pdf