I would just like to start by saying how truly heartened I am at your repeated and unbridled generosity with your time and effort. These pages would be a much duller place with out your regular inputs. Thanx.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. It?s an idea that has been fizzing around my head for quite a while now. I was in early discussion about this coming project and a couple of films shot by Darius Khondji were mentioned as initial visual references ? the producers were getting at the dark and lurksom characteristics of these films I think rather than specifically the desaturated high contrast nature of ENR and bleach by-pass. Never-the-less doing what Khondji does seemed like a good place to start.
Fiddling with the black gamma and master black was my first approach with the intention of taking the darkest areas back down to black during post. Intuitively though, fiddling with gamma curves in camera just to push it back the other way later seems a bit disingenuous and would really just increase noise in the way you mentioned. |It did work though I found that the blacks whilst less contrasty were becoming milky rather than less saturated. I then tried doing the exact same thing but with a varicon and whilst the results were similar there was a qualitative difference in the nature of the shadows. They seemed more tangible and honest if you?ll allow me to use such nebulous words.
As far as I can tell the theory holds true, pre-sensitizing the chip to it?s equivalent of the d-min. What I found I was getting was essentially an extra stop in the highlights as I was able to stop down as a result of the extra information in the shadows. I haven?t had a chance to view the results carefully enough to see if I am increasing noise in the shadows when I compensate for the low contrast in post (ie pushing the big button on the da vinci board that says ?make this look like ENR), a problem which I?m particularly worried about due to the low bit depth of the compressed data form the tape stock. More thorough testing would be the answer but I?m a bit worried about the extra expense of shipping out a Varicon just for a looks see as we don?t have all that much money to play with.
Still, mustn?t grumble.
Cheers!
