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 →
Why RED 2
With his latest sensational video, where he responds to critics of RED’s color science, dynamic range and resolution, Mark Toia has incredibly surpassed all of his earlier endorsements for RED and created a remarkably powerful showreel all at once. https://youtu.be/_WoTZ-DnlmM
The Daejeon Chronicles 