Born on The Fourth of July - Film

[kye]

9 hours ago, Eric Calabros said:

Its not simple as that. There are a lot of object color-background light combinations that affects depth perception. If someone really want to spend time on that, he or she better do it at the scene with LEDs and carefully selected objects in the background, instead of specific color grading in post. 

There are definitely things that are best done in production, but for those projects where they can't be done in prod (or weren't) then it's nice to understand what can be done in post.

I would expect that the field of colour psychology would be just as deep as any other, and worth studying regardless of if you're involved in pre, prod, or post.

[TomTheDP]

I honestly think it is more about lighting than film vs digital. 

Tarantino said that Roger Deakins likes digital because he is lazy, he doesn't want to light for film. 

S35mm Film requires a lot more light to get a clean image. Roger Deakins shot 1917 at 1600 iso and it was clean. 1600 iso film (there aren't even any 1600 iso motion picture stocks as far as I know) is super dirty. 

You can light way more naturalistically with film and get away with it. Lighting for 800 iso vs 100 iso looks completely different, especially at night. Lighting style has also changed. Partly due to how easy it is to monitor digitally. You can see exactly what you are getting. Old school method was using a light meter, exposing skin at proper values all the time.

Look at a movie like Jaws, they were blasting 20,000 wat light fixtures through fresnels right at actors faces to balance the light from full sun on a beach. Harder and more light used to be the norm. These days you'd just diffuse it or shoot naturally more likely. 

You can also fix digital easy in post. With film once you develop it you lose most of the dynamic range. You can't just go in resolve and turn down the highlights like you can with an Alexa or RED. 

Yes film texture and color is amazing but lighting was a huge part of it. I honestly hate the way modern films are lit and shot sometimes. The shallow DOF, shooting the shadow side, dark asf cinematography gets a little old. 

Another thing is LED's have a slightly different look. Anything prior to 2010 was HMI's and Hot lights. 

 

[hyalinejim]

4 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

With film once you develop it you lose most of the dynamic range

I don't think that's quite right. If you follow the manufacturer's recommendations for development then you should get what you see on the data sheet ie: 16 stops for Vision 3 or whatever amount it is they're claiming, I forget the number.

 

Do you mean the transfer from the neg to the print stock? The print stock would have a much lower dynamic range, because it's for projection, but so does your monitor. You compress the stops for the output device, in both cases.

[MrSMW]

This is the single most part of the whole filmmaking process that interests me right now.

It took me the best part of a decade to get the right combo of tools that would allow me to best shoot hybrid weddings. Hardly the epitomy of filmmaking I know, but for the one man band with bills to pay, what I do.

All that time, I was also working on my technique, lighting and the output, but have been somewhat hamstrung by the capture process due to continually juggling the tools for workflow purposes.

As a result, the reality has been some of the capture process was not what it could have been and that’s OK. There’s no manual for what I do so it has been a process of trial & error.

Now that I feel I have that working in my favour, I have been able to turn more attention to lighting, my big ‘thing’ for this year and that is going well so far but not quite where I want it to be. Again, it’s a bit of a juggling act as, as above, 1 man crew vs a 500 crew. Or even a 2 person crew, but the financials don’t work so it’s just me and the reality is one person shooting video and stills can only do so much in real time.

And this only leaves two areas for further exploration and development.

A: Pulling stills from video, initially in addition to shooting both, but perhaps potentially, only from shooting video. I think the latter is doable now due to the tech that is in a camera such as the Z9, but a different topic…

B: Which leaves the colour science/grade part of the equation. It’s the part of the process I have paid the least attention to and need to work on the most.

Once my season ends, it’s finally time to put myself into ‘grade’ school.

Thanks to @kye I have also subscribed to Cullen Kelly plus a few others. 

Thanks to @hyalinejim looks like there’s a good starting point for S5ii log now, so that is going to get a whirl.

Intrigued by raw, I think I am going to have to bite the bullet and get an external monitor and the paid Braw upgrade for my S5ii’s regardless of whether Lumix bring out a Z9 rivaling S2H before next season or just go Nikon. Either way, an external monitor and any kind of rigging other than a cage and side handle plus shotgun mic, is about as far as I would prefer to go.

I’m realistic about it at the same time. Will raw and Resolve and sheer time, effort, understanding and application, plus further improved capture and lighting technique make a difference? Sure, but it won’t make my 2024 wedding films look like Dune, but as the saying goes, shoot for the stars and you might just hit the moon.

My end goal is to be able to shoot a baked in look, min 6k 50p, 3:2 format that will then be my only source of video and stills from one roaming and one static camera.

I don’t think that is too far away and indeed, could be done today. Just not by me. Yet…

[hyalinejim]

1 hour ago, MrSMW said:

Thanks to @hyalinejim looks like there’s a good starting point for S5ii log now, so that is going to get a whirl.

That starting point I posted about in the S5II thread is designed to give reality-accurate colour, but for my own work I use a film emulation.

Over the last few years I've profiled around a dozen different films, both negative and slide film. The best of these for the commercial work that I do is Portra 400, which is kind of the world's favourite negative film anyway. Since the GH5, through the GH6 and now the S5II I've used this emulation for colour and contrast.

For me it's more convenient to slap on a LUT (a good one though!) rather than having to figure out how to grade each project, scene or clip from scratch. Then, the only grading I need to do is to make adjustments to brightness, contrast and colour balance before the LUT, perhaps saturation sometimes.

The engineers at Kodak spent years researching and improving their film stocks to give use a really nice colour palette. It takes a fair bit of time and effort for me to make an emulation that works well. But once it's made I can fly through the grading process in post, which is very useful when there's a deadline, and get great colour.

It's very rare that I would need to do intermediate or advanced grading techniques like adjusting individual hue ranges or isolating colours, although of course it's very useful to know how to do those things.

I think ever since the days of VisionColor (I might be misremembering the name), a picture profile for the 5DII, I really liked the idea of finding a colour transformation I like for the camera I use and sticking to it.

 

[MrSMW]

31 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

That starting point I posted about in the S5II thread is designed to give reality-accurate colour, but for my own work I use a film emulation.

I was thinking start with as a ‘correct’ as possible conversion LUT such as yours and then develop my own grade on top and then create my own conversion inc. grade LUT unique to me to export and then use either baked in in camera (preferred) or in post.

Currently working with the ‘Arri’ conversion LUT from Phantom and then the creative Kinetic LUTS from Gamut and to be honest, the combo is not far off…but I would prefer to develop something that is unique to me.

However, Phantom also do some film emulations from Kodak and Fuji (Eterna) that do look pretty good I have to say.

I do think I need to move away from Premiere and start learning and using Davinci.

But not mid season!

[kye]

20 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

That starting point I posted about in the S5II thread is designed to give reality-accurate colour, but for my own work I use a film emulation.

Over the last few years I've profiled around a dozen different films, both negative and slide film. The best of these for the commercial work that I do is Portra 400, which is kind of the world's favourite negative film anyway. Since the GH5, through the GH6 and now the S5II I've used this emulation for colour and contrast.

For me it's more convenient to slap on a LUT (a good one though!) rather than having to figure out how to grade each project, scene or clip from scratch. Then, the only grading I need to do is to make adjustments to brightness, contrast and colour balance before the LUT, perhaps saturation sometimes.

The engineers at Kodak spent years researching and improving their film stocks to give use a really nice colour palette. It takes a fair bit of time and effort for me to make an emulation that works well. But once it's made I can fly through the grading process in post, which is very useful when there's a deadline, and get great colour.

It's very rare that I would need to do intermediate or advanced grading techniques like adjusting individual hue ranges or isolating colours, although of course it's very useful to know how to do those things.

I think ever since the days of VisionColor (I might be misremembering the name), a picture profile for the 5DII, I really liked the idea of finding a colour transformation I like for the camera I use and sticking to it.

Good points and they strike me as mirroring the workflows of Cullen Kelly and Walter Volpatto, the only two professional colourists who I've heard break down their workflow.

The broad process for both of them seems to be:

1. Import footage and get things setup (or, in our cases, edit the footage!)
2. Setup the colour management correctly so everything is well behaved
3. Setup the global 'look'
4. If required, setup any specific looks for groups of shots
5. Then start reviewing the shots individually (in passes) to even things out, troubleshoot, and then to really polish things up

Of course, I tend to bounce between 1 and 2, because for me the colour and visual appeal of the shots matters in terms of which ones I choose.

This is in complete contrast to how all the people that play 'colourist' on YT do it - they spend 10 minutes on one shot, whereas pros often only get 1 minute per shot, or less, so would be screwed if they didn't start broad and narrow down.

I also particularly like Cullens approach, or at least the approach he's taken to his more professional LUT pack, which is that it's modular, so there are separate LUTs for contrast, saturations, hue rotations, split-toning, and other look adjustments, with there being several options in each of these categories.  He recommends mixing and matching and applying them and adjusting the opacity of each to taste.

For me, considering I tend to shoot and grade the same sort of material, I'm developing my own default node tree with everything all setup and ready to adjust as required.  On many projects it's just a matter of applying the overall look and then just going into the Lightbox mode which shows all your shots at once and then just adjusting any that stick-out and then exporting it and doing a final watch-through.  The BM grading panels are a bit of a clue as well, having Next Node and Previous Node buttons, but not buttons to create new nodes, on the smallest one at least, which implies to me a default node structure already applied to each shot.

I've been meaning to go back and re-watch the Walter Volpatto masterclass now that I've actually gotten my head around colour management etc.  Colour Management was the biggest breakthrough for me.  Shooting on cameras that didn't have profiles in ACES/RCM meant that I had a really hard time adjusting levels or WB without the mids and highlights/shadows moving in different ways, but convert to DWG and grade and convert to 709/2.4 and then grade in DWG and all the controls magically do what you'd want them to do.

[kye]

4 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

I was thinking start with as a ‘correct’ as possible conversion LUT such as yours and then develop my own grade on top and then create my own conversion inc. grade LUT unique to me to export and then use either baked in in camera (preferred) or in post.

Currently working with the ‘Arri’ conversion LUT from Phantom and then the creative Kinetic LUTS from Gamut and to be honest, the combo is not far off…but I would prefer to develop something that is unique to me.

However, Phantom also do some film emulations from Kodak and Fuji (Eterna) that do look pretty good I have to say.

I do think I need to move away from Premiere and start learning and using Davinci.

But not mid season!

Definitely not mid-season!

I suggest:

• Learn the interface and how to get around
• Learn where the basic tools are and what they do
• Learn Colour Management and how to set everything up correctly
• At that point you'll have the knowledge to start getting into all the fun stuff like playing with other colour spaces and splitting channels and using blending modes etc.

The journey in Resolve has three phases:

1. You can't yet swim, so you wade out a bit, but can't go far
2. You learn to swim and have fun swimming around a bit further from shore and grow your skills and confidence
3. You start to explore what's happening underneath the surface and you dive down and suddenly realise that you've only been exploring the surface and that there is no bottom.....

I've read posts on the colourist forum where someone makes a one sentence post and it took me 8+ hours over multiple days to work out what they said, how to do it myself, what it meant, and how I might use it.

[TomTheDP]

11 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

I don't think that's quite right. If you follow the manufacturer's recommendations for development then you should get what you see on the data sheet ie: 16 stops for Vision 3 or whatever amount it is they're claiming, I forget the number.

Do you mean the transfer from the neg to the print stock? The print stock would have a much lower dynamic range, because it's for projection, but so does your monitor. You compress the stops for the output device, in both cases.

I am talking latitude. If you want to change your exposure you have to push or pull the film in the developing stage. Or maybe I am missing something?

[hyalinejim]

@TomTheDP I think there is a "second exposure" when the negative is exposed to the print film. This is the origin, I seem to remember reading, of the term colour timing - you can control the brightness by adjusting the duration of the exposure. 

So if you had overexposed your scene to get cleaner shadows, let's say, you would now underexpose it to the print film, I imagine.

I guess it was also possible to introduce colour filtration at this stage to correct for "white balance".

I'm basing all this on half-recollections of things I read years ago, so take it with a pinch of salt. But certainly when you expose a negative to photographic paper, this is how it's done. I've done a bit of that and it's fun!

[hyalinejim]

Too late to add an edit, so here it is:

Yes, you're right, in development you can adjust the contrast and density (exposure) of the negative. But ECN-2 is a fixed process, there's a recipe to follow. Let's say you didn't have enough light and knew you underexposed the scene. You would have to send an instruction to the lab to push that whole reel 1 stop or whatever.

Now, bear in mind that this is my understanding. I could be talking out my ass here!

[TomTheDP]

43 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

Too late to add an edit, so here it is:

Yes, you're right, in development you can adjust the contrast and density (exposure) of the negative. But ECN-2 is a fixed process, there's a recipe to follow. Let's say you didn't have enough light and knew you underexposed the scene. You would have to send an instruction to the lab to push that whole reel 1 stop or whatever.

Now, bear in mind that this is my understanding. I could be talking out my ass here!

Yes at least this is how I shoot 35mm film stills. 

But what I was saying is once those decisions are made its kind of final. With digital its hard to mess up. 

[MrSMW]

Speaking of movies to be inspired by, the 3 that I am most looking forward to this year are:

Asteroid City

Openheimer

Dune 2

I guess I have a thing for deserts!

[kye]

5 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

@TomTheDP I think there is a "second exposure" when the negative is exposed to the print film. This is the origin, I seem to remember reading, of the term colour timing - you can control the brightness by adjusting the duration of the exposure. 

So if you had overexposed your scene to get cleaner shadows, let's say, you would now underexpose it to the print film, I imagine.

I guess it was also possible to introduce colour filtration at this stage to correct for "white balance".

I'm basing all this on half-recollections of things I read years ago, so take it with a pinch of salt. But certainly when you expose a negative to photographic paper, this is how it's done. I've done a bit of that and it's fun!

My understanding of it was that a colour timer would take the negative and make a positive print using a special machine where each frame of the film was exposed via a separate light for Red, Green and Blue, and the machine allowed the exposure time for each to be adjusted.  Thus the phrase "colour timing".

Adjusting all of them would raise/lower the overall exposure and adjusting them in relation to each other would adjust the WB.  The controls from that operation live on as the "printer lights" controls in Resolve and other software, as they literally adjusted the lights of the printer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading#Color_timing

[kaylee]

film color > digital color

[Ella Backler]

The tones very brought me into the story. I saw a couple of present day motion pictures after yesterday and was very much like wow that is computerized looking.