Google is in talks with manufacturers seeking royalty-free alternatives to Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. TV manufacturers must currently pay licensing fees ranging from $2.00-$3.00 per device for Dolby Vision. Meanwhile, Samsung’s own alternative to Dolby Vision, HDR10+, has not gained much traction. In addition to greater bit depth (12 bits vs. 10 bits), higher... Continue Reading →
Screen Uniformity MacBook Pro 16″ (2021)
Not so great - brightness falls off a cliff away from the center of the screen.
Paycheck Stops and Gravy Stops
A decade ago, Arri lens specialist Art Adams coined the terms paycheck stops and gravy stops. Paycheck stops are values that you can bet your paycheck on. They’ll appear in the image with enough contrast and detail that objects exposed at that value will be easily discernible. Gravy stops are the values that lie beyond paycheck stops:... Continue Reading →
Adobe to Drop Color Management by Default. Alister Chapman Responds
"Log was never, ever supposed to look flat. It has been the incorrect handling of log for over a decade that has led to the notion that log content is flat," Alister Chapman writes in the comments section to his blog post Adobe to Drop Colour Management by Default, where he doesn't mince words when it comes... Continue Reading →
That Explains It!
It was a year ago almost to the very day - at the decisive moment when we were about to make the perilous switch over to P3-D65 (Google warns against it on their YouTube help page) - that tech evangelist and calibration guru Tyler Pruitt revealed over at the liftgammagain forums that it was entirely... Continue Reading →
Former Atomos CEO Alleges Securities Fraud
Atomos claims they let CEO Estelle McGechie go for refusing to move to Australia, but her lawsuit paints a very different picture: a corporate culture of gender discrimination, allegations of securities fraud, accusations that the company knowingly shipped defective/inoperable equipment to boost sales figures and sexual misconduct at the workplace. According to papers filed with... Continue Reading →
RED Komodo Noise Comparison
Just a quick comparison between 6K and 6K on a 4K timeline, ISO 640. You'll probably have to crank up the brightness and inspect in a darkened room.
Digitization of Photochemical Film
In an earlier post, RAW: an often overlooked advantage, we explained how future updates to the demosaicing process in post can yield major improvements in image quality, even to footage shot years before. A similar principle holds true for analog photochemical film, for which better methods of scanning with more accurate color rendition are continuously... Continue Reading →
Is The Canon DP-V2730 A Grade 1A HDR Reference Monitor?
https://youtu.be/qg2XZlnraS4?t=98 Because no displays can currently exhibit the entire color gamut and brightness up to 10,000 cd/m2 specified in ITU-R BT.2100 PQ, two variants of Type 1 HDR monitors were settled upon by the EBU: Grade 1A HDR – the preferred specification - and Grade 1B HDR – a reduced gamut and/or limited brightness specification.... Continue Reading →
Dynamic Range of Early Digital Cinema Cameras
The Arri Alexa 35 set a new benchmark for dynamic range in 2022, measuring just over 15 stops according to Xyla/Imatest. How does this compare to cinema cameras of yesteryear? In High Dynamic Range Video: Concepts, Technologies and Applications, (2017) the authors published the results of various cameras, including the Arri Alexa Classic, the RED Epic,... Continue Reading →
Ravengrade Film Emulations, Looks & Tools Plugin
The list of HDR WCG compatible film emulation LUTs and plugins is steadily growing, the most notable recent entry being Ravengrade from Lowepost, a DaVinci Resolve plugin created by an impressive roster of color scientists and colorists, including Mitch Bogdanowicz, Juan I. Cabrera, John Daro, Douglas Delaney, Florian Utsi Martin, Mark Todd Osborne and Bianca... Continue Reading →
Blackmagic Gen 5 Color Science
At around 2’18” into the video, you can see the difference between how Blackmagic Gen 4 and Gen 5 color scence handle the bright, saturated reds we mentioned in an earlier post (which can make things like tail lights and the lights on police cars & emergency vehicles look so obnoxious), something the latest Arri... Continue Reading →
HDR4EU
This document published by the HDR4EU project, a group of representatives from ARRI (camera manufacturer), Filmlight (post-production software developer), Smoke & Mirrors (post-production company), Brainstorm (broadcast software developer), Barco (display manufacturer), and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (computer graphics and image processing academic group) who got together to come up with guidelines for HDR production, has some... Continue Reading →
The Ideal Cinema Camera
What are the minimum requirements when it comes to choosing a cinema camera? When asked why he chose the Ursa 12K to make realistic fake window videos, Tim Pan (content creator for Media Storm), cited resolution, dynamic range, color science and the ability to record RAW as paramount. We'd add another requirement: the ability to... Continue Reading →
RED Komodo: ISO 250 vs. ISO 800
Shooting at ISO 250 with RED results in more visible shades (stops of latitude) in the shadows and less noise (though we're hard-pressed to see the difference in the screenshots), but also considerably less highlight protection. Both screen grabs are from clips that have been exposed as much as possible without highlight clipping. You can... Continue Reading →
Footnote to RED Komodo: Returning to ETTR!
In ‘Cinematography: Theory & Practice’ Blain Brown writes, “RAW, in this context, is an absolute scale based on the output of the sensor. It is not necessarily related to the viewing image in terms of brightness values. […] This is, of course, the basic concept of shooting RAW vs. shooting video that is more or... Continue Reading →
RED Komodo: Returning to ETTR!
After going back and forth, we've finally decided to stick with ETTR once and for all. No more false color overlays, just the histogram and traffic lights (increasing exposure until the lights turn on, then dialing back until they just turn off). As long as the traffic lights are off, there won't be any clipping... Continue Reading →
SmallHD Rolls Out PageOS 5
SmallHD’s PageOS 5 firmware update adds some seriously impressive features, among them a much more useful exposure tool and tetrahedral LUT interpolation. Ed Lachman’s EL Zone All SmallHD monitors running PageOS 5 will be the first in the industry to offer EL Zone as an intuitive means of quickly assessing exposure via a false color... Continue Reading →
Depth Map in DaVinci Resolve Studio 18
A few days ago, over at our facebook group, I had some pretty harsh criticism for a DP teaching a painfully obvious way to use power windows in DaVinci Resolve to create a halo effect around the subject's head in order to make them stand out. A better way - particularly if you've got a... Continue Reading →
Kolari Pro 3-Stop ND Filter Test
We just finished doing a quick & dirty test of the Kolari Pro 3-Stop ND screw-on filter. Screenshot #1 was auto white balanced with no filter; #2 is the same white balance, only with the Kolari ND3 filter; #3 was white balanced with the ND3 filter in place. While all land directly on the skin... Continue Reading →
The Daejeon Chronicles 