3 strip

[Justin Anderson]

Or read that: http://www.digitalfilmtools.com/55mm/polarizer.htm . How on earth can you claim to have a polarizer in post? Biggest use of polarizers is to stop reflections, not to send the sky blue. Argh. These are all the same as the new Tiffen effects as pointed out earlier. We all know some filters need to be there in camera to make sense, and a lot of them are advertised here in post which without some kind of explanation is going to make people think that you can "do it all in post" when you can not.

well, whenever I mess up shots like that I just click "Turn off Reflections" in After Effects.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

And if the sky over-exposes we put on a grad ND, and amazingly it brings back to life the detail in those pixels that have saturated. Or not, because in reality it just makes them darker. Or an ultracontrast to help put light into shadows, which doesn't have the same effect in post either....

 

[Nick Shaw]

The Tiffen DFX filters seem to be pretty much exactly the same as the 55mm ones, right down to using the same images to demonstrate them (see http://www.tiffen.com/dfx.html). I guess Tiffen may have bought/licensed the 55mm filters for their software product.

There are of course plenty of filters which can be simulated perfectly adequately in post, and some (like polarizers and ND grads) which can't.

Adding post production filter simulation is often useful in the grading process, but there is nothing that these filters do which you can't build very easily yourself in eg Shake, and to some extent Color. They've just saved you the effort of working out some presets.

The Nattress plugins for FCP and Color can do a lot of this, and are much cheaper than either 55mm or Tiffen DFX.

 

[Jim Arthurs]

That restoration actually involved unsplicing the entire negative in order to replace deteriorated shots (the opticals done on CRI stock, basically those wipe transitions mostly) and add new shots.

Thanks David, I almost blew milk out of my nose when I read "CRI" in your post over my morning cheerios... I had hoped to go the rest of my life without hearing (or reading) about CRI again... some back story...

I did my first freelance as an optical printer operator in college, doing projects at Alexander Films in Colorado Springs. This was the twilight days of their lab operations (shooting and production were long gone... BTW, they were the biggest supplier of theatrical commercials in the world at one time... "Timex, takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'...").

CRI (or Color Reversal Internegative) was a one step process used to make a dupe negative from an original negative. You'd think that would be ideal, except, like most reversal products, it picked up contrast quickly and had other nasty characteristics like significant grain... and it was expensive stock, I remember that... so much so that in many cases it was preferable in terms of quality (and cheaper, believe it or not) to go through the process of making an interpositive (interpositive was/is extremely fine grained and slow... like one or two ASA, if memory serves) and then shooting the same stock from the interpositive to make a dupe negative.

Personally, I just remembered if I f'ed up a reel of CRI, everyone would shun me like a leper for days... believe me, my labor was cheapest part of the process in the world of CRI...

The only two advantages to CRI was that it was a quicker process (one step in lab and shooting to make a dupe neg) and you only had once chance to pick up dirt/scratches, etc. vrs. the two with interpositives. The vault guys hated it because it would start to stink and go bad within years... they had cans of footage shot in the late '70's that was already lost...

While I can agree with folks that have a connection and fondness for shooting original film, there is nothing, repeat NOTHING about the film POST process that would evoke the same emotions in a sane individual who has been exposed to the working man's side of that business... I mean, Alexander Film had BLAST DOORS for cryin' out loud... to protect the guys from nitrate stock exposions...

 

[Tom Lowe]

haha. Jim your posts are always great.