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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Ask Mike Most Anything

Luis Otero said:
The best thing is to have your projector set to normal setting. Then profile it, and LUTs will take you to any colorspace you need (P3, Rec.709, sRGB, etc.).
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This isn't exactly accurate information Luis. In the case of some of the DILA projectors from JVC they aren't capable of hitting a P3 target just like some Plasma, LCD monitors aren't capable of hitting a P3 target accurately. Rec709 is no problem for most of them. But an SDI output LUT targeting DCI P3 going through a SDI - HDMI converter isn't really giving you an accurate P3 if the projector itself isn't capable of producing it.
 
That is not our experience, based on measured results by a certified lab. I am using what would be considered "low-end" projector as my reference image during grading (really sweet to see it in a 100" screen), and with LUTs my facility is qualified as WYSIWYG (+-3%) when compared with a film-out. So, I grade always using the DCI compliant LUT, then can render on any color space (again, +-3%) as requested by the client: Rec.709 for HDTV/broadcast, sRGB for internet, XYC for authoring a DCP, etc. Never have had a single problem. Even the "clamps" to be broadcast safe are build in on the required conversion LUT.

Just my 2 cents based on our results...
 
Luis Otero said:
That is not our experience, based on measured results by a certified lab. I am using what would be considered "low-end" projector as my reference image during grading (really sweet to see it in a 100" screen), and with LUTs my facility is qualified as WYSIWYG (+-3%) when compared with a film-out. So, I grade always using the DCI compliant LUT, then can render on any color space (again, +-3%) as requested by the client: Rec.709 for HDTV/broadcast, sRGB for internet, XYC for authoring a DCP, etc. Never have had a single problem. Even the "clamps" to be broadcast safe are build in on the required conversion LUT.
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I don't know how you've determined the degree of accuracy, but unless you have the capability of doing butterfly projection between the digital projection and the print, accuracy of the degree you're talking about cannot be guaranteed. I'm not saying you don't get good results, I'm sure you do. But unless you can really show that the kind of numbers you're quoting here are true - and short of butterfly projection I don't know of any way to do that - you shouldn't be claiming these kind of things.

Besides, the previous poster is correct. If you're using LUTs to view P3 on a projector that isn't physically capable of displaying the entire P3 gamut, you're looking at a gamut mapped simulation of certain colors, not an entirely accurate image. In many scenes you would never see the difference because you don't always have colors in the scene that are out of gamut. But if you happen to have an out of gamut LUT, you would undoubtedly become aware of the colors that your projector is not capable of displaying. That is not opinion, and it is not a dismissal of the use of LUT's, but it is physical fact. I'm not rejecting your approach, as I said, you undoubtedly get good results. But you can't display things that the display device is not capable of, no matter how close you think you're getting. The perceptual difference may be small if the gamut mapping the LUT is doing is well designed, but there is a difference. To deny that is to not be honest.
 
Luis Otero said:
See my reply on http://reduser.net/forum/showthread...low-with-RESOLVE&p=797245&posted=1#post797245 However, using the same logic you have outlined so well, the opposite is also impossible (grade on Rec.709 and out of such graded footage, try to have a clean, decent P3).
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We weren't talking about converting from one color space to another, we were talking about display accuracy. I understand you're very happy with the route you've gone, and I even understand your apparent need to evangelize it. But facts are facts. A projector that is not capable of displaying a particular color space is not going to be 100% accurate for that color space under any circumstances. Whether that is significant in the scheme of things depends on the expectations, the material being corrected, and client demands. But in response to your statement about it being "impossible" to create a "clean, decent P3" from a Rec709 grading environment, I would refer you to the makers of "The Social Network," which was done in a Rec709 grading environment and viewed by many on DCP's which were created by using transforms to get from Rec709 to P3 pretty successfully.

You keep saying your system has been "measured." I don't know exactly how one would go about doing that, but I'd really like to know what measurements were done that validate what you're claiming here. And, once again, without butterfly projection, I don't know how one can validate such claims.
 
M Most said:
... and I even understand your apparent need to evangelize it..
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Mike,

I think that this forum is to be used as a platform to share ideas, not to shut down ideas and experiences of other people that have been successful in attaining good results not following your methods.

Also, I do not think there is a space to mischaracterize others since they do not share your opinion. I do not have time or vested interest to "evangelizise" others. I am just sharing what has worked for us, and it is my prerogative to express it cheerfully since the results have been so successful that the level of satisfaction among our clients is making them to comeback again and again.

But, I respectfully will try to avoid to post around this threads if I feel that by exchanging ideas are going to allow others to talk to me without a basic level of respect I would expect among professionals.


Respectfully,
 
Luis Otero said:
Mike,

I think that this forum is to be used as a platform to share ideas, not to shut down ideas and experiences of other people that have been successful in attaining good results not following your methods.

Also, I do not think there is a space to mischaracterize others since they do not share your opinion. I do not have time or vested interest to "evangelizise" others. I am just sharing what has worked for us, and it is my prerogative to express it cheerfully since the results have been so successful that the level of satisfaction among our clients is making them to comeback again and again.

But, I respectfully will try to avoid to post around this threads if I feel that by exchanging ideas are going to allow others to talk to me without a basic level of respect I would expect among professionals.
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Geez, Luis, I thought I was trying to be VERY respectful. I was careful to point out that you're obviously getting good results, and that I understood why you like your approach. But sharing ideas doesn't mean presenting things as fact that are not fact. And it doesn't mean not pointing out when a statement is incorrect, regardless of good intentions.

I didn't mischaracterize anything you were doing. I simply questioned how you determined what you're saying you've accomplished, because I honestly don't know of any way to come up with the numbers you're using. I said that I'd really like to know what methods were used to come up with those numbers because if there's a way of measuring that I don't know about, I'd like to be educated about it. I think that's pretty darned respectful. It has nothing to do with you sharing or not sharing any opinion I might or might not have. It has to do with possibly learning something I don't know. And quite frankly, there's a hell of a lot that I don't know.

You have posted about your use of Evangelos' LUTs numerous times here in numerous threads, so my use of the term "evangelism" has at least some basis in that. If you're going to take offense every time someone questions something you're saying, you might be in for a lot of hurt. I didn't belittle anything you said, I simply pointed out that some things you've said are factually inaccurate. And they are. But even when I said that, I also said that depending on the circumstances that may or may not be significant. So, in short, I don't think I showed any disrespect. If you do, that's certainly your right and I can't do anything about that. But when one makes statements, particularly statements that relate to specific claims, one needs to be able to back up those statements if they're going to be taken as truth. All I've done is invite you to do that, and help to educate me in the process. If you had said that your projector was "acceptably accurate" or "perceptually accurate", or that the accuracy to the prints was "very close" I wouldn't even be talking about any of this. But you didn't. Instead, you quoted actual percentage numbers, and you implied that your projector could display all P3 colors because of your use of a LUT, and those are things that I just have to question. I'm sorry if you take offense to that, but I don't think I said anything that is unreasonable or implied a lack of professional respect. So in short, I hope you stick around here, because I get the impression you're a good guy and have some good experience to contribute. But I'll still reserve the right to question things that I have some doubts about.....
 
Mike,

I do respect your knowledge and opinions. However, the fact that you do not accept Evangelos' lab capabilities and expertise in measuring the areas I am referring to, it will not allow me to use them to satisfy your curiosity of how we are claiming our results.

You have a plethora of knowledge and experience, so I propose to just leave the exchange of ideas there since I feel we are going in circles.

I just wanted to share my experience and successful workflow. However, I have work to do for my clients, and I really feel this exchange is not taking us us anywhere, so it is not being productive or adding value to this community. So, again, let's leave it there, please.

Respectfully,
 
Florian Stadler said:
Luis, the title of the thread is ask MIKE MOST anything, not Luis Otero. I have been enjoying Mikes musings quite a bit and I hope having to deal with some trolling won't stop him from further doing so.
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That is not in accordance with the spirit of reducer.net. Everyone can add their comment. However, that is why I am refraining from posting on this thread, as I already mentioned before.


PS Plus you do not have the entire information about :

a. Background noise

b. Background about the establishing of this thread, even before it was started.

I cannot comment anything beyond this statement.

Over, and out...
 
Talking about display accuracy, how do you account for wild discrepancies in calibration of consumer displays? As the final consumption will most likely be on a horribly miscalibrated display with a flaky renderer? Especially with the advent of things "going cloud" - a heavily compressed file on 11.6" 6-bit TN panel laptop with constant gamma shifts is not exactly the best of viewing environments.
 
Subhadip Sen said:
Talking about display accuracy, how do you account for wild discrepancies in calibration of consumer displays? As the final consumption will most likely be on a horribly miscalibrated display with a flaky renderer? Especially with the advent of things "going cloud" - a heavily compressed file on 11.6" 6-bit TN panel laptop with constant gamma shifts is not exactly the best of viewing environments.
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I'll second this. Is the fact that work may end up everywhere from a thrice repaired CRT from the 70s, to a state of the Art home theatre projector, to laptops and tablets compensated for in any way during correction?
 
There's nothing you can do about people watching stuff on badly set-up displays. Nothing. But that doesn't excuse one from working towards a standard -- you don't want a to finish a project at a post house where it only looks correct at that post house, any more than you want to create a movie print that only looks correct at the lab that printed it. At least if there is a standard, there is the hope that display devices will move closer to that standard.

There have always been periods in display technology where it's the wild west, then standards emerge, and then later they are abandoned when a major change in technology happens, then new standards develop, etc. More and more people watch stuff on computer monitors and I think there is a movement towards more common display standards being driven by the content providers.

But ultimately you have to ignore the fact that some people are going to watch things improperly displayed or transmitted, you can't really take that into account unless there is a common and consistent form of misrepresentation. If that happens, then perhaps you can compensate for that -- for example, like in the 1960's when prints were adjusted for dim drive-in movie theater projection, and even lighting styles were affected by that trend.
 
Subhadip Sen said:
Talking about display accuracy, how do you account for wild discrepancies in calibration of consumer displays? As the final consumption will most likely be on a horribly miscalibrated display with a flaky renderer? Especially with the advent of things "going cloud" - a heavily compressed file on 11.6" 6-bit TN panel laptop with constant gamma shifts is not exactly the best of viewing environments.
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You can only control what you can control. Nobody can go into everyone's home and calibrate their displays, and that's always been the case. In fact, I find that modern flat screens are far more consistent than CRT's ever were, even with the automatic corrections that so many consumers seem to just leave on all the time. There are standards, even today, and that's what one has to use as a reference, even if it's only used by those of us who have to create this stuff. For better or worse, material that is targeted to video type distribution is corrected and QC'd on monitoring that is set up to Rec709 accepted practices for HD images, a standard that is basically based on CRT's but has been carried over to modern displays with some consistency. That's what gets delivered. What happens after that is not controllable by any of us, and one just has to accept that.

Incidentally, this is much worse within the industry than it is in the consumer world. You've got colorists working on proper calibrated monitoring in proper environments, but you've got DP's and directors looking at dailies on everything from laptop computers in bright sunlight, to iPads, to video village monitors, to tiny CRT's in the camera truck, to home TV's that are set up to who-knows-what. And you've got studio execs looking at digital dailies that have been compressed beyond recognition and are playing in postage stamp sized windows on a computer screen and blown up to full screen size. The whole thing would be funny if it wasn't so ridiculous.
 
technicalities aside... how do you guys "philosophically" deal with seeing/knowing your work will not be perceived exactly how you finished it (in some cases, ridiculously compressed/shifted/etc). sometimes i spend a lot of time getting a single color just right, and i just really like that color. but as soon as it starts shifting around, it doesn't look as great, and it's not what i intended. so practicalities aside, i need some wisdom to preserve my peacefulness in this area.
 
Drinking helps...

Joking aside, you just have to color-correct for the way you want it to look and accept that once it leaves the post house, it will often get displayed inaccurately. It's less of a problem if you are color-correcting for a DCP for theatrical release -- I notice that those versions tend to track well with how it looked in the D.I. theater.

Now to some degree, maybe you could counteract any tendencies for nitpickiness with the realization that the subtleties you are obsessing over will get blunted, but on the other hand, most of what color-correcting involves is matching shot-to-shot in a sequence, and a shot that doesn't match will always not match, except perhaps on a TV set with the color turned down (unfortunately most people have it cranked the other way...) So you might as well get it right.

I think shot-to-shot matching trumps -- in some ways -- overall color & contrast because something that accidentally jumps out at you will jump out at you even if the image is shown with an overall incorrect bias. Maybe Mike disagrees with this assessment, I don't know. But I've seen some directors get worked up over overall black/gamma levels in micro levels of perception, which is perhaps the one thing that might change the most in various display technologies -- black in a print will be different than black on a DLP projector versus a Sony LCD projector versus a CRT versus an LCD. Black is even different in a Kodak Premier print versus a regular Kodak Vision print or a Fuji 3513 DI print or XD print or Agfa print!
 
Dear Mike

Thanks for the extremely thoughtful response to my last question. I also really enjoyed the ACES post you wrote on your blog. It explained things a heck of a lot better to me than the official site did (which is filled with things we're not allowed to access or download, even though I registered). I hope you'll do a follow-up soon.

I was wondering... what do you think is going to happen in terms of actual workflow?

1. ACES used behind the scenes - but everyone converts to P3 with log space when they actually want to grade, because ACES is a cumbersome color space to grade in and the grading software doesn't have its dials and knobs set up for linear light wide gamut work? (where we are now, right?)

2. ACES used while grading - but grading software hides most of this from us and presents us with a normal grading interface. Like Adobe Lightroom which uses ProPhoto behind the scenes - but you wouldn't know it from working with it.

3. ACES AND the whole "scene referred" thing takes off... people actually figure out the difference between an ODT and a RRT, folks make sure midpoint grey actually matches ACES standard values, etc. Meanwhile, we get laser projectors and color OLED tablets which vastly exceed P3 color gamut - but that's okay because they have built-in ODTs running in the video playback software - so we just deliver a 709 master, a P3 master and a wide-gamut master - and the wide-gamut playback systems actually do a decent job of realtime conversion.

I'd like it if the industry went to #3 because it has such enormous advantages for VFX. But ACES is being presented in a bit of a confusing way. I have no idea about white balance, for example... if you have a warm interior scene, are you supposed to calibrate it so that grey is always completely neutral, then use a RRT that brings the warmth back? Does the RRT = the bit where you do the creative color grade? They have a lot of acronyms. I'm worried that the complexity of ACES, plus all of the color transforms going on leaves a lot of places for people to mess things up. Not sure why they needed such a complex standard. Why not just:

Camera -> 3D input LUT -> scene in ACES space -> grade -> cool looking scene in ACES space -> 3D display LUT to transform from ACES space to desired output (709, P3, etc)

Or is that what they are proposing, just in a more confusing way? Are they avoiding the word LUT because they want something that can encapsulate both LUTs and other color transforms?

Also, do you have the time to consult on projects and do you give a Reduser discount? (maybe it'll be a Reduser penalty though because you gave us so much good advice for free and had to put up with so much yammering from us :)

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
I am LOVING this thread.. I don't have a worthy question yet, but between David and Mike, this is becoming on AMAZING online school.. And I love learning. Mike where is this blog my friend Bruce speaks of?

Jay
 
David Mullen ASC said:
I think shot-to-shot matching trumps -- in some ways -- overall color & contrast because something that accidentally jumps out at you will jump out at you even if the image is shown with an overall incorrect bias. Maybe Mike disagrees with this assessment, I don't know.
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No, I agree completely. More than completely. I've always striven for continuity above all else, and you are correct, most of my time is taken up by that. Once a scene look is established, I feel my job as a colorist is all about making the viewer think every shot in the scene was shot at exactly the same time, which to me is essential for narrative storytelling. Anything that breaks that illusion takes you out of the moment and out of the story.
 
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