RED Komodo at ISO 250

Because of its higher contrast, noise is much more visible in HDR - a fact ignored by camera reviewers - and what may be acceptable in SDR might very well turn out to be unsatisfactory when mastering in PQ ST 2084. CVP shoots their B-roll with the Komodo set to ISO 250 for the cleanest... Continue Reading →

HEVC High Bitrate vs. ProRes 4444 XQ (HDR)

In this test, we compare HEVC bitrate 39,000 kbps (which ended up being 22.6 Mb/s), HEVC bitrate 80,000 kbps (which turned out to be 46.3Mb/s overall bitrate ) and ProRes 4444 XQ. To compare the clips yourself, open up the videos in three different tabs of your browser. As of today, we officially bid farewell... Continue Reading →

HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 vs. ProRes 4444 XQ to YT

If you don't mind the ginormous file sizes and waiting longer for YouTube to finish uploading and processing your video, ProRes 4444 XQ does offer benefits over HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 (using the standard bitrate for web publishing in Apple Compressor): more detail and improved contrast as well as richer color. In the sample clip, there... Continue Reading →

Create Textural Depth with Depth Map

Grain is one of the key components of the film look but few things are more distracting than seeing clumps of film grain dancing around on the talent's face. One solution is to use the HSL qualifier to isolate skin tones and use the keyer to de-emphasize the grain. An even easier way is to... Continue Reading →

Create Textural Depth II

The viewer’s eye can be drawn to the subject in a number of ways. Two of the techniques employed here are color separation, achieved through split-toning, and obscuring the surroundings using a mask and reducing brightness. Another approach is to create textural depth by accentuating the texture in cooler, darker backgrounds while de-emphasizing grain in... Continue Reading →

Projector Central Weighs in on 4:2:0

Over at Projector Central, Michael J. McNamara, former Executive Technology Editor of Popular Photography magazine and a renowned expert on digital capture, storage, and display technologies writes:  “Does using 4:2:0 subsampling significantly degrade image quality for movie viewing versus using 4:2:2? Not according to most viewers who've enjoyed any number of 4K UHD SDR and... Continue Reading →

Create Textural Depth!

During an appearance on Cullen Kelly’s Grade School, the brilliant colorist Jill Bogdanowicz revealed a secret to accenting texture without it looking over-processed. While working on Joker, the colorist used Live Grain - which separates out the red, green and blue channels, creating grain that resembles scanned film - to accentuate texture in the cooler,... Continue Reading →

Not A Grade Reveal!

A few caveats: first, the original footage was green and overexposed; secondly, we didn't use the recommended DaVinci Wide Gamut; and lastly, as we do all of our grading before the LUT, the original footage looked nuts when we removed the LUT for the grade reveal, so we normalized it for the video. https://youtu.be/3Bv3RUGbwEc

Massive LUTs Required for HDR

According to at least one study, in order to achieve a comparably error-free 3D-LUT to those used for SDR, a LUT size larger than 55x55x55 is required for 12-bit HDR (Rec.2020 ST2084). "In 10-bit SDR, in order to achieve unnoticeable interpolation errors using the trilinear interpolation method, a 3D-LUT larger than 41×41×41 is necessary. However,... Continue Reading →

ICtCp, or Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Here at the Daejeon Chronicles, we've tirelessly championed RAW for a long time now, for a multitude of reasons: it responds better to grading than heavily compressed, low bit rate chroma subsampled codecs and is less prone to banding; sharpening, noise reduction and white balance aren't baked into RAW files, giving more flexibility in post;... Continue Reading →

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