Joshua Jackson

The First Five Years Productions, LLC has just finished and premiered the first season of the absurdist comedy, The First Five Years! The Series was shot with Magic Lantern Raw. The series utilizes several in-house proprietary LUTS, color transforms, and pipeline applications to supplement the Magic Lantern workflow. If there is enough interest, we'll post a case study on the workflow. I also welcome critical feedback as well! Either way, take a few moments to escape reality in the odd universe that is The First Five Years. The entire series can be found at the following link: http://jackandcarmen.com

These are a few stills and a link to the trailer of the latest film I was Director of Photography and Colorist for. Would love for some good critical feedback on lighting, tone and color! 24fps @ 1920x840 transferred to DCP 2K [2.39] for projection CAMERA: Canon T2i TRAILER: Lune Bateaux Pictures -- Muffet -Joshua

That's a great description of the application of the cosine law for use with a light meter! The reason I mentioned the screen gain is because things can get just a little more complicated when using silver screens, which aren't used very much except for circular/linear polarized light in 3D films anyway.

Actually, footcandles and lux are not units of Luminance, but rather units of Illuminance. There are four main measurements of photometry: -Lumens: Total Power of Light (weighed to human eye response) that a light gives off. [lumen] -Candelas: Total Intensity (Luminous Flux) given off PER solid angle. [cd or lumens/steradian] -Illuminance: Total Power Incident on the surface of a square meter. [lumens/m2 or LUX] -Luminance: Total Intensity per Solid Angle from a light with a given size. [cd/m2] Footcandles are the US (read non-metric) version of Illuminance, measured in lumens/ft2. Footlamberts are the US version of Luminance, IF the luminance is measured from a Lambertian (perfectly diffusing) Surface. This does not readily apply to screens with gain other than 1.0. Often cosine falloff adjustments are needed for the proper interpretation of the levels read. Incident Light Meters give you an exposure for a surface that would be a given percentage of the light incident. Often this percentage is erroneously called 18%, but to find the actual percentage you plug in this equation for the meter's calibration constants ( [K*PI/C] ). Sekonic gives you readings for 15.7% on the incident meter, for instance. What this translates into on your camera is dependent on the ISO speed and manufacturer's deviations, of course. Footcandles, Lux, Foot Lambert, and cd/m² are great for the reasons listed above and serve to give you "absolute values" of the scene, etc. EV, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and camera-centric values give you "relative values" to a given meter and camera calibration.

http://motion.kodak.com/motion/uploadedFiles/US_plugins_acrobat_en_motion_support_processing_h247_h2407.pdf The H247 manual at kodak specifies 1.0g of Sodium Hydroxide to PreBath PB-2 for use to aid in the removal of remjet for ECN-2 Processing. Alternate Prebath PB-C1 doesn't require NaOH, however.

"Medium" grey is what your eyes perceive as medium grey. In the linear world, it is 18% reflectance. You need an accurately printed Grey Card to get an exact readout (and even then, it could be +/- 5%). In what context are you needing a medium grey?

My sophomoric response to the original post: Personally, I'm not interested in an approx. 25% budget increase on film stock to shoot at 30fps as opposed to 24fps. I have a gut feeling not many studios are going to be all that interested in that kind of increase either. So, no. I highly doubt 24fps will become outdated anytime soon. I think Karl's right...that pretty much just leaves a film vs. digital debate.

A cheesy comedic spoof on the reality series Intervention. Attempted to wrangle the gritty, reality look which was surprisingly more difficult than I initially thought. As always, Youtube compresses what was initially a somewhat decent H.264 compression.

Well, odds are that your computer monitoring profile is in sRGB. So, in short, unless you set up your post workflow to accomodate this wider gamut, then you won't be able to tell the difference in a way that matters for end product gamut mapping. On top of that, you'll need the correct signalling profile (i.e. HDMI Cat. 2, for instance) to carry it through the workflow. Really, it depends on where the end product will be going.

18% grey cards should fall at exactly 46%/46.2 IRE/328mV on your waveform monitor IF you have it set on a normal gamma (if you're not sure what gamma is, then assume it's normal). ALL video cameras (consumer, professional, HD, SD, RED, etc.) initially captures light linearly (i.e. an 18% grey card is captured as .18, with "white" normalized to 1). It's where the linearly captured light is mapped that makes them different. Video cameras without a "gamma" setting applied or those that don't map to a Log space, will set to a gamma of .45. 18% (.18) raised to the power of .45 gives us... 46.2%. Now, shooting in something like PanaLog will map that grey card closer to 30%.

Excellent. Thank you both. That answers it perfectly.

17.6%, to be more precise. If you divide 0% black (In reality, around 3% black) to 100% white into a "zone" system (Ansel Adams), 17.6% will give you the exact medium between the two. 3.12% (-5), 4.4% (-4), 6.25% (-3), 8.84% (-2), 12.5% (-1), 17.67% (0), 25% (+1 stop), 35.35% (+2), 50% (+3), 70.71% (+4), 100% (+5). These values are per an 11 zone scale. This "zone" scale readily applies how we see light to how the medium sees light when measured against "stops." It's a nice middle man. If you notice, 12% is roughly a full stop under 18%. So balance to 12% grey if you want to overexpose your image by a little more than a stop. People get into heavy debates over %'s of "middle grey," but most of the time the confusion comes from calibration constants in individual meters. It's like this: REGARDLESS of what your meter tells you, you as a cinematographer will have the ultimate say "where" your "medium" tone will fall and what will and will not be picked up with detail. If you run your tests all the way through (setting printer points for black level to finding your ideal rating), you'll know whether or not that 18% grey card falls dead in the "perceptually" medium point...or not. Remember, it's called "calibrating" for a reason. Just another tool in creative control.

17.67% (0), 25% (+1 stop), 35.35% (+2), 50% (+3), 70.71% (+4), 100% (+5) 12.5% (-1), 8.84% (-2), 6.25% (-3), 4.4% (-4), 3.12% (-5) It's logarithmically mapped. Mapping to an 11 zone system. Of course, 100% is only "white," while real-world elements push far beyond this, upwards to 600% on a film's shoulder. Sometimes more.

I'm attempting to learn more about digital color correction and I'm currently mastering my images in linear and vid spaces. I've had success converting vid spaces to linear and have had good results in color mastering, but I'm having difficulty finding out what "floating point" means exactly. Any clarity on this would be appreciated.

Thank you very much, David.