Matthew W. Phillips

Thanks for this! I compared the two by having the first one as above and the second one bumped shadow saturation while desaturating the highlights (Lum vs. Sat) and here are the comparisons.

I have learned a bit about Resolve the last few months but I do not know how to check that % of saturation according to Rec709 standards...do you know how I can do this?

I personally love the look of intense color saturation. But I see a lot of footage on YT and Vimeo where people are not adding a lot of saturation. I realize some of this is stylistic but I cannot help but wonder if there is some metric (scientific or otherwise) that determines if an image is "too saturated". Although I enjoy saturated color, I don't want to turn others off of footage if I am going too extreme with it. Any colorists want to chime in? I will show you an example of a screenshot I grabbed from a clip I shot of my daughter on our porch. For what it is worth, this was the capture rig: Sony a6000 SELP18105G E PZ 18-105mm F4 Zoom (Sorry, cannot remember focal length or F-stop) ISO 100 ND4 filter Creative Style - Neutral (-3, -3, -3) I have posted my saturated grade and also the raw screen grab (in case someone wants to play or whatever.) Disclaimer: My daughter's initials are T.P. I don't want her to get upset that I put her face up here so, if you are reading this and your initials are "T.P.", I would prefer that you not cause a scene on my thread. Thanks. ?

Out of respect to David (not to you), I will refrain from personal attacks on you. He is a model you should seek to emulate. He has real industry cred but still shows respect to everyone. Part of being an expert or professional is knowing when to add your advice and when not to. I may be a Computer Scientist but I don't stand over people's shoulders in Best Buy telling them what computer they should purchase and which are garbage. We have a word for unsolicited opinions..."rude". As for "getting good results", I wouldn't be happy if I got results like yours either. I saw those screenshots you put up in my other thread and I wouldn't be pleased with those either. Maybe my standards are too high? Who knows. Like I said, I do it for fun. Sorry, David, if this post was inappropriate. I tried to be as gentle as I could considering this dude refuses to let it go even when you politely warn everyone.

I never asked anyone's opinion (professional or otherwise) of whether I should purchase LED lights or not. And I guess I will speak the elephant in the room: you fancy yourself some kind of "professional" but I looked you up and cannot find any evidence of anything significant you have done in the field either. And you disparage YouTubers while you ran a (failed) YouTube series that couldn't even get Patreon supporters. This is fine and nothing to be ashamed of except you disparage actual successful YouTubers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. As one of my old college professors once told the class "you aren't as special as you think you are." I know what and who I am. I am a hobbyist who enjoys doing this stuff. I am not a professional in any sense of the word. I am a professional software developer and educator. But you need to be honest with yourself about who you are. You aren't exactly some Academy Award nominated cinematographer up in here who graces everyone with your presence. You are just some guy in L.A. with an inflated sense of yourself and a few film cameras. Big deal. If I wanted to neglect my family and their needs, I could buy film cameras too. But adults learn a thing called "priorities."

That is the point...things don't "have to make sense" to you. Imagine that there is a whole world of people that each have their own ideas and opinions on things and that is okay. I would have thought the artistic community would understand this. I guess spending years in the academy has made me numb to diverse viewpoints and I don't realize that there are still places that do not encourage independent thought. Edit: I am seeing a lot of grumpiness from certain people who should be enjoying their job. Maybe the pandemic made people grouchy or something? Goodness..."why buy expensive LED lamps that look gross anyway? Just get some blonds and bounce them." Haha, because I choose to and it is my money so mind your own business.

Nice find, Uli! Enjoy your new "beast".

Wow, just wow. I think I will stop here before I say something that I know I will regret later. Good luck with your filmmaking career, Tyler, I truly wish you the best.

Because I choose to? Didn't know I needed you or anyone else's permission to do what I wish with my time and money. Interesting that you don't see how you come off to others. I re-read my old posts and cringe because I did this but I had some people have a "come to Jesus" speech with me about it and I started seeing my approach with others and it wasn't pretty. TL;DR: Stop speaking down to others like you are some global authority. You aren't and people can do what they wish whether it makes sense to you or not.

...and there it is. "We are not all so fortunate in our friends as you." - King Theoden LOTR: The Two Towers

I said "This entire post shows how out of touch you are with the majority of indies in the scene." I still stand by this. You reply with a single instance of someone who you worked with who won distribution as though that is the "majority". Look at some of the people on YouTube who appeal to low/no budget indies. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers and they are buying and using the gear you consider to be "garbage." Your one anecdotal story does not discount the massive trend. And you need to re-read that other thread. I never said anything about making digital skin tones look like a 16mm example. I was referring to help grading film scans. I even said that I am decent with grading digital footage but not so good at grading my old film footage. I have been thinking about pulling the trigger on the Ursa 12k. I have the cash but want to be extra sure this is what I want because I cannot justify a fire sale and repurchase to the better half if it isn't what I had hoped. I have been downloading the samples the Blackmagic gives and playing around with those to get a feel for the post workflow. I already own Resolve Studio (which pisses me off because I paid retail and could have gotten it for free had I waited for the camera purchase) but such is life.

I recall a lot of that around the DVXUser/RedUser era. Truth be told, there was a lot of misunderstandings on both sides of the heated debates. Their perspective was a defensive one from feeling that some on the film side came off as "elitists" or like old men yelling at the clouds. The film side was trying to defend something that they loved and saw the inevitable decline of the global supremacy of film and fought hard. Film will always be with us but there is no denying that it will never be what it once was. I absolutely love the look of well shot film but I do not want the workflow anymore. I don't even believe that digital is the first decline of image quality we have seen. I think even film stock has declined in beauty since the technicolor films back in the "Golden Age". I will jump on any technology that one day gives us the ability to make films like "The Sound of Music", "The Ten Commandments" (Heston/Brenner version), etc. As a computer nerd, I look forward to the day of a digital cinema camera that has an open source interface that allows me to poke into raw sensor data and write my own codec and/or image processing. Not sure if anyone is even thinking about such a thing but I would save my pennies for such a platform.

I am not a "digital person", I am a real human being. I guess you need to stop and look at things from other people's perspectives instead of your own. It took me years to do this (which is why I stayed away for a long time because I used to be a jackass on this boards and am grateful that Tyler never banned me; Admin Tyler, not Purcell). People get into cinematography for a wide variety of reasons. For me, this isn't my livelihood; I do it as a side thing and mostly shoot my own projects (although I have done some low-no budget stuff for others). I am a Lecturer of Computer Science at Uni. by trade so most of my efforts to feed my family come from that perspective. I enjoy working on projects and I try to take a balanced approach to them. I could go on and on about how the film vs digital is humorous when many projects have subpar sound which is still the other half of the experience. Also talent, location, script, etc all are, in my opinion, far more important than if one shoots film or not. I have seen a few ultra low budget projects buy into the film hype and spend the lion's share of the budget to shoot it only to sacrifice the integrity of the entire project...for what? To get bragging rights for using film? If you watch YouTube and talk to Gen Z'ers growing up, most of them think film looks "degraded" or "flawed" and don't understand the love affair with it. Perhaps, we were all brainwashed from looking at it so long? Not much different than people in music production that are still obsessed with the Neve 1073 when much cheaper preamps will yield far lower noise and accurate sound reproduction. I shoot because it gives me down time to think about something other than primary work, students, and computational algorithms all of the time. I enjoy the socialness of a film set. I also love to edit and mess around in Davinci Resolve since I respect a solid software program (knowing how much work goes into making one.) Reducing the entirety of filmmaking down to whether one shoots digital or film seems like such a small argument anyway. I cannot believe this is still a thing in 2021 (I had to check my calendar and make sure this wasnt 2007 again and we were arguing about the Red One camera but this time I ended up on the other side.) Edit: Still waiting on that film budget to establish that film is affordable.

The arrogance of film purists. If I was ever like this, I apologize and recant my rude past. No one needs to justify anything to you or anyone else. To suggest otherwise is the pinnacle of hubris. I see why this place is a dying forum.

I keep hearing this argument but it just doesn't shake out at a certain level of the indie world. Look at a camera like the pocket 6k or even the Sony a7siii. What level of film shooting can you do that is going to work around that price point? And some of you may scoff and laugh at the images but there have been A/B tests between footage from cameras like this and cameras like the Red Komodo where people cannot tell the difference. Maybe YOU can tell the difference but the majority of people can't and wont care anyway. When I last looked into shooting 16mm film, it was near $200/ 400 ft for raw stock from Kodak. Add processing and that was another $150 (it might be more now; not sure.) We are already at $350 for 11 minutes of footage and we still cannot edit the footage digitally yet (if that is your goal which is reasonable in 2021). That is a bit over $30/minute. This doesn't count shipping, a camera body, lenses, support structure, anything else. You say "clients pay for film" but you have no clients when you are learning. And it doesn't feel right (at least to me) to learn everything on someone else's dime. I don't want to charge until I know what I am doing...at least somewhat. When learning, which way can learn faster and cheaper? 16mm film or BMPCC 6K or Sony a7siii? I would love for someone who says "film isn't any more expensive" to post an actual (realistic) budget of how film (even 16mm) can compete financially with even the Ursa 12k cost and workflow? Would love to see it because maybe I am missing something.

I am not "all pissed off" that I cant shoot film. I am completely fine with it. You seem to be the one that is ticked off that some of us want to emulate aspects of film in our work.

This entire post shows how out of touch you are with the majority of indies in the scene. I will just continue to use my "garbage" gear and "useless" LED lights. And here I thought Apurture lights were a nice idea. I am grateful to you, Tyler, for setting me straight.

What is wrong with keeping elements of film that are worth keeping? I am a guitar and bass player and I love tube amps; I really do. But I never disparage players who, for one reason or another, want to use solid state. There are "modeling" amplifiers now that attempt to model a tube sound. Does it sound just like a vacuum tube? Nope. Is it pretty good? Sure. It is awesome that people respect the past while trying to adjust to the future. The fact that people desire "aspects" of the film look is a high compliment to film. Not too many people want to model the less nice aspects.

Having shot film and digital, the only benefit of the film is the particular look of it. I defended film for over a decade (on this forum and others) but I am downright sick of the "diva" characteristics of shooting film. I don't miss huge camera rigs, massive tripods and gear to support said rigs, noisy motors to deal with when trying to record sound (never could afford an Arri 435), big and hot lights connected to mains power, massive dolly, etc, etc. I never could afford a camera good enough to get a rock solid image either; always had that "bobble". Digital workflow is simply so much better. I have a set of LED lights that are battery powered. Never in my life would I have imagined that we would reach a point where you can power a video light with batteries. And you can get 4k+ cameras that can be rigged up lighter than a Super 8 camera back in the day. The whole supporting structure can be done cheaper, safer, lighter, and more fun with digital. Film is a terrible workflow now that we know better. I don't miss shooting on it. I only miss the image (when things went correctly and I didn't have a hair in the gate or some registration problem.)

So you find it impossible to think that someone could appreciate the look of film but not have the money to practice a ton with it? Film is great but the workflow is slow and cumbersome for a newbie trying to learn. We don't all own labs or know someone that does.

I don't understand your logic here. Are you saying that people who want to learn filmmaking but are poor are "failed"? I am sorry if I am misquoting you but I am trying to understand what you are getting at.

This kind of attitude sounds great for a business to take. I am reminded of the Carl's Jr in Idiocracy.

As someone who has a personal collection of firearms (but hasn't worked with them on a set), I am a bit confused of the term "armorer" as someone who handles safety on set? In the firearms world, we tend to refer to an armorer as another term for "gunsmith" and the safety person would be a "DOJ Instructor". Are set armorers actually DOJ Certified Instructors? It seems to me that you would want both a safety instructor and a gunsmith (someone who can safely repair arms, clear jams, etc) on a set? But that is just one guys opinion. Please correct me if I am in error.

I have been spending the last 6 months obsessing over color grading in Davinci Resolve. I have worked a lot on my digital footage and gotten decent results once I started shooting color charts but my old film footage leaves a lot to be desired when I try to grade it. I found a beautiful 16mm clip on Vimeo and this is a screen shot of it. I really want to know what techniques the colorist used to get this look. Any help would be appreciated as I think I have been looking at footage too much lately and am losing perspective.

I shot the first part of a feature this way. The actors hated me and I still ended up getting maybe 3 minutes of footage for every 2 rolls of 16mm. I would not recommend doing things this way unless 1) you have an awesome storyboard and 2) your actors understand what they are getting into and are fine with it.