Single click from RSS feed to main article ... thank you Scott. I’ve wanted this and I like it.

Posted by Rob  on  07/21  at  01:17 PM

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Great article, it really helped me understand more about how the in camera processing works.
But… Could this also be applied on post production?
As in, is this possible with all camera’s? It seems to me this would be a great way to get more/better color out of any footage.
Or is that a general concept of grading I don’t know about?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  07/22  at  03:52 AM

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The RED ONE was the first camera that offered a “digital negative” at an affordable price point. Up till then, if you’d asked any established company if this was something they’d be wiling to offer, they’d have said “No; unless you want to shoot with an F35 in S-Log, or maybe a Varicam in Film Rec mode, no one wants that unless they have a lot of money.”

Traditionally video/HD has been the “affordable” medium. You could turn it around quickly as the image was baked in and ready to go—there was no need for pricey color grading. I spent many years working in the corporate and broadcast markets knowing that whatever I shot that day was never going to be touched again beyond basic editing.

RED proved that people do want a “digital negative” and are willing to jump through hoops to get it.

Even now, though, there are few cameras that will give you a “flat” image you can grade in post. Varicams offer “Film Rec” gamma which is reasonably flat for grading, but it also works brilliantly as a WYSIWYG adjustable gamma curve. I’ve used it many times and I’ve never graded any of that footage. Alexa will offer LogC; Sony offers S-Log but only on their highest-end cameras; and even DSLR’s, which you’d think would offer you some sort of raw imaging, don’t—probably because the compression is so high that they don’t want you to push the image around much in post as it wouldn’t hold up.

I think you’ll see more and more of this going forward, and I think Alexa will set the trend: you can record Rec 709 to ProRes and get WYSIWYG images, or you can record LogC and grade it later. Or you can watch Rec 709 on your monitor and record LogC elsewhere, or record Rec 709 to the CF cards for editing and then conform and grade the LogC files later…

I think Sony and Panasonic will be slow to adopt this attitude, as historically they’ve worked really hard to make their cameras beautiful right out of the box, but eventually every camera should work this way. There’s no reason for it not to. Meanwhile, unless you’re shooting with a RED, and Phantom or a really high-end Sony camera you’re probably stuck with images processed through a couple of baked-in matrices. This is mostly due to corporate culture that think the greatest benefit of video and HD is immediacy.

There have been, and always will be, people who want to see what they are getting as they get it and who don’t want to spend the money and time to grade it later.

When you get access to raw material you can learn an awful lot about how cameras work. Manufacturers don’t always want you to know what’s going on under the hood.

Posted by Art Adams  on  07/22  at  09:02 PM

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