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Technicolor Cine Style


Tania Freimuth

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Hello, I am new to this so forgive any newbee errors.....

 

Does any one have any tips for shooting with the Cine Style from Technicolor re: asa ratings? Can I trust my eye for exposure as I do with the other profile settings for DSLR (7d) or, is it back to the light meter?

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I haven't used CineStyle myself but have read a lot about it over on cml. It was designed to improve options for color correction. What you see is NOT what you want to get straight out of the camera, but an image more suitable for post-processing.

 

I personally prefer the approach of getting it in camera. The Canon Neutral and Faithful styles with HTP off and with minor tweaks to sharpness and saturation please my eye. I shot a lot of color reversal years ago and I'm perfectly comfortable working with a camera that requires tight control of lighting contrast and exposure. I think in terms of a zone system with six or seven stops of latitude with my 7D. I've used the camera's histogram some but my Pentax spotmeter and Spectra IV-A are my buddies.

 

Now if someone were to come up with a picture style that nailed the Kodachrome look, I'd be all over it!

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Why do you prefer to have highlight tone priority off? It provides an extra stop of highlight detail for no penalty.

 

I think the appeal of the technicolor style is for those who are grading in log and need similar flexibility for their b-camera. I don't know if it offers an advantage to "geurilla" shooters. Certainly I wouldn't use it without metering, whereas I do feel comfortable using the neutral mode without a meter since the LCDs on Canon's dSLRs correlate decently well with the final image. But with a low contrast picture style...it's too hard to judge exposure and ratios without a meter.

Edited by M Joel Wauhkonen
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I haven't used CineStyle myself but have read a lot about it over on cml. It was designed to improve options for color correction. What you see is NOT what you want to get straight out of the camera, but an image more suitable for post-processing.

 

I personally prefer the approach of getting it in camera. The Canon Neutral and Faithful styles with HTP off and with minor tweaks to sharpness and saturation please my eye. I shot a lot of color reversal years ago and I'm perfectly comfortable working with a camera that requires tight control of lighting contrast and exposure. I think in terms of a zone system with six or seven stops of latitude with my 7D. I've used the camera's histogram some but my Pentax spotmeter and Spectra IV-A are my buddies.

 

Now if someone were to come up with a picture style that nailed the Kodachrome look, I'd be all over it!

 

Hal, I found a custom Picture Style created by Sumit Agarwal which emulates Kodachrome 25. No guarantees that it's exactly what you're looking for but it's a start.

Here is the download link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11405569/Kodachrome%2025.pf2

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Hi Tania

 

I'll just share some of the conclusions i've made having tested a few Picture styles. This is purely a personal opinion and is based on a small series of tests. But it might help you. Have at look at my blog. It has a few reference stills grabbed from the footage I shot which might not give you a great idea because of the low resolution on the website, but it might be a start.

 

http://www.tammovanhoorn.com/blog.html

 

 

I was particularly impressed with the Cinestyle when grading back from an underexposed image. In certain conditions I would even be tempted to deliberately underexpose maybe 2 stops to contain the maximum highlight detail. It wasn't so great pulling back an overexposed image in my tests.

What I will say is that you need to grade all your Cinestyle footage. Generally I apply a Technicolor LUT in FCP and that works for me, but its time consuming. As M Joel Wauhkonen mentioned, if you're shooting to edit quickly try a non Log Picture Style. I quite like the Marvel Cinema Picture Style. It looks great straight out of the camera and has a pretty good latitude for adjustment. The tests I did with a couple of the Canon preset styles left me a bit surprised:

 

- Canon Standard - Very contrasty, over saturated colours and a nightmare to grade.

- Canon Neutral - Correcting an under or overexposed image softened the image somewhat.

 

I personally try and work as much as possible with the histogram as the LCD can be very misleading and I have often overexposed images. Personally, given the latitude i've seen possible in the grade, I tend to expose the histogram more to the left (under). But again that's just my own view.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi Tammo - just read your blog post and very impressed with the tests you did.

 

Can I ask if you had HTP turned on or off for these comparisons? I've heard many conflicting reports, some say (as did Joel above) leave it on as it give you more latitude whereas others say to turn it off as it can effect the quality of your footage when it comes time to grade?

 

I just installed the latest magic lantern today along with the cinestyle profile. Have to say ML blows me away with the functionality it adds. Im itching to jump in and grade what I shot today as it looks amazing so far (but man you have to pay attention when focusing).

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When using the screen as an exposure reference on the 5D I normally go one stop under for the standard pucture style and 1 stop over with cine style. This has given me the safest playground for grading. I would only advise to use the extra latitude of cine style if you really want to use it, as i have crushed blacks and blown highlights and it doesnt look as nice as getting it in the camera with the standard style.

Not to stear off topic, but for people that do use the 5D screen as a picture reference and manually set w/b, i have found it atleast 800k too warm when reviewing rushes on a variety of monitors. If i dont have a monitor on set now, i always compensate for this and so far have been happy with the results.

 

Haridas

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  • 1 month later...

I've found that I need to under expose CineStyle at least a stop or so but I always turn on the histogram and set the final exposure to sit nearest to the middle that I can (depending on the scene/subject brightness).

 

This is actually some test footage captured using the Marvel's Cine Picture Profile. It was probably underexposed about a stop but as you can see, the shadows are still quite detailed. It's not until I graded it in FCPX that the blacks were crushed a little (not a problem for this image personally).

 

 

AWknunICQAEqE80.jpg

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I think the whole point of CineStyle is to allow you cram in as much dynamic range as possible into the small latitude of compressed H.264 and this typically means you need to under expose the image until you're satisfied you're capturing the "data" you want, not seeing the image you expect after a grade. CineStyle is all about ensuring you get the right data needed to do a quality grade on the footage (among other things).

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I'm never all that convinced by very low con picture styles. From what I hear from Technicolor, their style is really just intended to make the image usable in a log workflow - I don't think there's any intention to promote it as the right way to go for everything.

 

There's so much compression that all you're really doing by pumping the contrast back up in post is exacerbating noise and compression artefacts.

 

P

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There's so much compression that all you're really doing by pumping the contrast back up in post is exacerbating noise and compression artefacts.

 

Shooting a fixed bitrate H.264 file will always have it's limitation I suppose. TechniColor is just one solution in getting the most out of it.

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But I'm not sure it is.

 

It doesn't increase the dynamic range of the camera. All you're doing is pushing the contrast down in camera, then pushing it back up in the grade. This does absolutely nothing except increase compression artifacts.

 

All the Technicolor style is designed to do is to produce a log-ish output that sits somewhat easily with other material, such as s-log HDCAM-SR from a Sony F-series camera.

 

The fact that it's "like Sony pictures" doesn't make it "good", it's just designed to be a workflow convenience if you are already doing a log workflow. If you aren't, it just increases artifacts.

 

P

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It doesn't increase the dynamic range of the camera.

 

Well, one point of TechniColor CineStyle is to stop the camera from crushing shadows and blowing highlights which you might otherwise have wanted to keep until it's time to grade the footage.

 

It's not increasing the dynamic range of the camera, it's increasing the dynamic range captured into the H.264 video. It's merely so you can get the most information out of the compressed, lower bit-depth H.264 codec.

 

From what I can tell, it works very well for many people.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Hi Friends,

 

Can we set Cine Style picture setting in Nikon D3100, I have shot following video with my D3100 but want it to be look more like a Movie. I have really no idea whats missing, your suggestion are required.

 

 

 

thanks,

Edited by Arun Vashist
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  • 3 weeks later...

Art Adams - DoP, LA, USA - is one of the biggest users of Light Illusion's various Gamma Curves, and in the following links talks about a number of recent Canon EOS 5D shot projects:

 

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams/story/canon_5d_shoots_kids_for_t-mobile/

"As usual I used Steve Shaw’s Light Illusion gamma curves for the 5D and 7D. I much prefer these curves to any of the looks I get out of the 5D’s built-in curves. Those work in a pinch, but Steve’s curves really make the camera look its best."

 

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams/story/anatomy_of_a_spot_t-mobile/

"I used one of Steve Shaw’s Light Illusion gamma curves, probably #1. (Light Illusion curve #1 is great for low contrast situations as it adds a bit more “crunch” to the look. Curve #2 is better for high contrast situations as it flattens things out a bit. I haven’t found a use for curve #3. You can get all three, plus a new flatter log curve, for a very reasonable price at the Light Illusion website.)"

 

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams/story/blue_nile_shines_thanks_to_the_canon_5d_and_apple_color/

"I should point out that the reason I was able to push the footage around as much as I did has much to do with Steve Shaw’s excellent Canon 5D gamma curves."

 

For info on the actual Light Illusion curves see here: http://www.lightillusion.com/canoncurves.htm

 

Cheers,

 

Steve

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  • 2 weeks later...

But I'm not sure it is.

 

It doesn't increase the dynamic range of the camera. All you're doing is pushing the contrast down in camera, then pushing it back up in the grade. This does absolutely nothing except increase compression artifacts.

 

All the Technicolor style is designed to do is to produce a log-ish output that sits somewhat easily with other material, such as s-log HDCAM-SR from a Sony F-series camera.

 

The fact that it's "like Sony pictures" doesn't make it "good", it's just designed to be a workflow convenience if you are already doing a log workflow. If you aren't, it just increases artifacts.

 

P

 

i totally agree on this.

 

apart from circumstances in which it is useful to include the 5d mkii footage into a log workflow - for instance, when it is used as a b camera - technicolor cinestyle offers very little gain - not to say nothing at all - to what can already be achieved in camera, by the standard picture styles.

 

as a matter of fact, putting the standard H.264 REC709 color space into a log color space cannot really improve the technical limitations of the same h264 of the 5d mkII: the 4-2-0 long gop color sampling (not to forget the line skipping determined by the scaling, and the aliasing).

 

there are technical limitations that cannot be improved by any firmware and/or application: this should be clear to anyone shooting with current d-slrs.

 

it doesnt mean that wonderful images cannot be achieved, it simply means that it is the cinematographer, not the camera, who makes the difference: correct exposure, proper iso, creative/practical choice of the lenses and dof (for instance, reducing the sharp area means that there's less details for the codec to compress = less work = better quality of the final image, less noise and aliasing).

 

as for the picture style, i see no point in applying something, like the technicolor cine style, that can already be done with the normal picture style by pushing down the contrast level.

 

but what's the point of doing that? then you'll have to increase the contrast back in color correction. the trade off is contrast/details in the shadows, but who does really want a superflat image as a final outcome?

 

whatever you gain in the shadow, you lose it in the midtones. personally the thing i like the most about shooting with the 5d mkII is that most of the work has to be achieved in camera.

no matter how you call yourself - but let's admit that videographer is just too awful of a neologism - i believe it is essential that nowadays shooters bear in mind that cinematography is the key, by doing in camera, on set, most of the work.

 

color correction is complementary to shooting, not the opposite.

Edited by Vincenzo Condorelli
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no matter how you call yourself - but let's admit that videographer is just too awful of a neologism - i believe it is essential that nowadays shooters bear in mind that cinematography is the key, by doing in camera, on set, most of the work.

 

As it has always been.

 

The current generation of "fix it in post" film-makers think that the image capture stage is the easy one, they've been spoiled rotten by just how good film and digital technologies are now. As a result they off-load creative decisions to post...and then wonder why they blew their budget paying someone in a darkened room to fix what they could have shot correctly in the first place.

 

Personally I shoot with my 7D pretending that I've loaded it up with 5285. For some reason I get good pictures the first time and don't have to suffer trying to push things around in post and fighting H.264 artifacts. Go figure!

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