Creating in-camera looks on-set

[Ben Scott]

Hi all,

Just wondering how people approach producing looks on-set for smaller productions with no video village or dedicated specialist DIT etc.

Do you tend to shoot with redgamma for clients and hope they get it, or take the time to apply a Redcine / LUT look to the material you are outputting for clients/Directors etc?

Do you shoot a quick test and use that to set a ballpark look in RCX which you then load into the camera?

Thanks.

 

[Curtis boggs]

My experience,, no one "gets it" w a raw file look.
Even pkayback in camera has to have a look applied .

Even if it's DC2/RG4 but it's gotta look good to the client

Hi all,

Just wondering how people approach producing looks on-set for smaller productions with no video village or dedicated specialist DIT etc.

Do you tend to shoot with redgamma for clients and hope they get it, or take the time to apply a Redcine / LUT look to the material you are outputting for clients/Directors etc?

Do you shoot a quick test and use that to set a ballpark look in RCX which you then load into the camera?

Thanks.

 

[Ben Scott]

My experience with clients in the past is I'd quickly show them something in RCX so they could understand how much freedom we'd have later but just record in redlogfilm or redgamma being piped to monitors. Similarly with other cameras such as Sonys I do the one sentence explanation of shooting log and show them one of my premade compensated LUTs I made on some footage shot that morning to set their mind at ease so I can then go work a bit faster.

But I'm intrigued to hear about fast ways of setting the look in camera that others have.

 

[Curtis boggs]

On my Scarlet-X or Epic-W I typically shoot in DC2/RG4 as a base "look" that looks good in playback and on Monitors.

Cheers,
C

My experience with clients in the past is I'd quickly show them something in RCX so they could understand how much freedom we'd have later but just record in redlogfilm or redgamma being piped to monitors. Similarly with other cameras such as Sonys I do the one sentence explanation of shooting log and show them one of my premade compensated LUTs I made on some footage shot that morning to set their mind at ease so I can then go work a bit faster.

But I'm intrigued to hear about fast ways of setting the look in camera that others have.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Curious to see how people will proceed with Helium. As I understand with RWGRGB and Log3g10 and the preview lut or any other in camera lut you only get the preview to be affected by the preview lut, Playback from camera is not affected so if shooting with such setting and going to playback, clients will then see the RWGRGB image. It would for sure be more optimal if the lut could be applied to the SDI out also when in playback mode but I guess there is some sort of built in limitation that makes it not possible, or? have I missed something, is it possible?

 

[Phil Holland]

For very quick and lower budget shoots you likely shouldn't be bothering much with creating a look in camera. It is sometimes wise to bring a Look or LUT with you if you know they are creatively leabibb towards something.

Overall, grading shouldn't occur in camera IMO, not enough pure control (with any camera really). It's better to have at a minimum a laptop on set and create a Look or LUT if that is what is desired and proceed from there.

 

[Curtis boggs]

Phil,

For my mid budget and quick shoots what do you think of my approach?
DC2/RG4 in camera, .. change and fully grade later.

Curtis

 

[Steve DiMaggio]

Phil,

For my mid budget and quick shoots what do you think of my approach?
DC2/RG4 in camera, .. change and fully grade later.

Curtis

this is what I would preffer also, I am probably going to switch back to this look in camera once it is possible not to have the lut on raw. Right now its a small trade off. I love showing my clients some slow motion at an even to boost their confidence ect.

steve

 

[Björn Benckert]

Phil,

For my mid budget and quick shoots what do you think of my approach?
DC2/RG4 in camera, .. change and fully grade later.

Curtis

I think if using helium you then run a risk of getting a few discussions going over in the client sofa... For cameras pre helium it works fine.

Helium with the out of gamut stuff to me kind of demands a different approach.

For very quick and lower budget shoots you likely shouldn't be bothering much with creating a look in camera. It is sometimes wise to bring a Look or LUT with you if you know they are creatively leabibb towards something.

Overall, grading shouldn't occur in camera IMO, not enough pure control (with any camera really). It's better to have at a minimum a laptop on set and create a Look or LUT if that is what is desired and proceed from there.

to me it's not really about grading but actually be able to see the image without the artifacts that the old color processing brings onto helium footage. Now for playback there is not really any other option then using RWGRGB and then use lut boxes for video village etc. Or record proxies off camera and have video assist playback from those. But then the slo-mo shots come looking all pale...

For that reason I really wish there was a way to playback with lut applied.

 

[Marc Wielage]

For very quick and lower budget shoots you likely shouldn't be bothering much with creating a look in camera. It is sometimes wise to bring a Look or LUT with you if you know they are creatively leabibb towards something. Overall, grading shouldn't occur in camera IMO, not enough pure control (with any camera really). It's better to have at a minimum a laptop on set and create a Look or LUT if that is what is desired and proceed from there.

I agree 100% with Phil here. I think you can start making yourself crazy on set, where the clock is ticking, when all you need to do is simply ensure that you have a reasonable look that will give you all the room you need to change later on in post.

Michael Cioni of Light Iron did a good lecture on this a couple of years ago, and he basically said the danger is that you can easily start losing an hour or two a day being overly concerned with making relatively small tweaks in color on set. I think what might be reasonable (on a production with sufficient budget) would be to set up a mobile truck or a room down the hall where an on-set colorist was getting shots, and maybe twice a day the DP and director could bop over there and just try a few simple tests. I wouldn't be worrying about it constantly on the set, because it's going to be a distraction that will eat up time that would be better be spent lighting and worrying about composition and so on.

I would also add it's all for nothing if the monitor you're looking at isn't color-managed, calibrated, and in an environment that allows you to make good judgement (completely free of stray reflections and unnecessary light).

 

[Ben Scott]

For very quick and lower budget shoots you likely shouldn't be bothering much with creating a look in camera. It is sometimes wise to bring a Look or LUT with you if you know they are creatively leabibb towards something.

Overall, grading shouldn't occur in camera IMO, not enough pure control (with any camera really). It's better to have at a minimum a laptop on set and create a Look or LUT if that is what is desired and proceed from there.

Fair enough. Not a million miles away from how I used to do it then. Cheers.

By the way just listened to your interview on the Cinematographer's Insight podcast. Very interesting

 

[Ben Scott]

For that reason I really wish there was a way to playback with lut applied.

A little smallhd 502 or 702 with the lut applied?

 

[Ben Scott]

I agree 100% with Phil here. I think you can start making yourself crazy on set, where the clock is ticking, when all you need to do is simply ensure that you have a reasonable look that will give you all the room you need to change later on in post.

Michael Cioni of Light Iron did a good lecture on this a couple of years ago, and he basically said the danger is that you can easily start losing an hour or two a day being overly concerned with making relatively small tweaks in color on set. I think what might be reasonable (on a production with sufficient budget) would be to set up a mobile truck or a room down the hall where an on-set colorist was getting shots, and maybe twice a day the DP and director could bop over there and just try a few simple tests. I wouldn't be worrying about it constantly on the set, because it's going to be a distraction that will eat up time that would be better be spent lighting and worrying about composition and so on.

I would also add it's all for nothing if the monitor you're looking at isn't color-managed, calibrated, and in an environment that allows you to make good judgement (completely free of stray reflections and unnecessary light).

I think that's all completely valid and in a dreamworld that idea of doing a Soderburgh on The Knick and having no DIT or video village but just having a million redmags and doing all transfers etc off set for the sake of speed sounds like heaven. Sadly it's a workflow born of trust after extensive pressure testing of the workflow and without 85 'creatives' standing around asking questions and needing to be appeased that this is not how it will look in the final piece.

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

only fools...

only fools...

RED cameras have all the tools integrated to set and monitor your image with a "preview" look...

Most people will shoot with default values then rely on applying an 'external' LUT on set, or just grade later on the computer instead of going thru the import an .RMD file created in RCX via SSD.

But it is very easy and fast to dial and adjust a look directly on camera using a wireless connection and the RCP protocol.

Several big shows (House of Cards, Narcos, Mr Robot...) and small productions around the world happily create color metadata look on set ... using precise white balance setting, curve shaping, saturation, shadow or LGG values adjustments to preview an 'approaching' look for the DP / director monitors

Using presets it is super easy to store and recall various looks instantly ... and once settled it gets embedded into the raw file metadata, creating a reference look ready to be refined in post.

Helium's IPP2 will offer a new set of tools and will remove some of the legacy / obsolete stuff to offer an even easier, better, HDR ready / ACES / CDL based / future proof in-camera color management system.

...


Narcos 2 (foolcontrol mac version also works with tangent panels to grade using physical knobs)

foolcontrol Lift Gamma Gain page on iPad

 

[Ben Scott]

I think that is a wonderful use of the tech. Look forward to playing with it once the new camera arrives

 

[Björn Benckert]

I agree 100% with Phil here. I think you can start making yourself crazy on set, where the clock is ticking, when all you need to do is simply ensure that you have a reasonable look that will give you all the room you need to change later on in post.

Michael Cioni of Light Iron did a good lecture on this a couple of years ago, and he basically said the danger is that you can easily start losing an hour or two a day being overly concerned with making relatively small tweaks in color on set. I think what might be reasonable (on a production with sufficient budget) would be to set up a mobile truck or a room down the hall where an on-set colorist was getting shots, and maybe twice a day the DP and director could bop over there and just try a few simple tests. I wouldn't be worrying about it constantly on the set, because it's going to be a distraction that will eat up time that would be better be spent lighting and worrying about composition and so on.

I would also add it's all for nothing if the monitor you're looking at isn't color-managed, calibrated, and in an environment that allows you to make good judgement (completely free of stray reflections and unnecessary light).

Same guy is now building a camera with multiple built in lut boxes...

Im stressing this matter not because of creative decissions. On dragon, MX and redone all was fine... Helium is simply a different beast that can not really function without a lut in camera as the old color processing settings puts colors out of gamut and looks seriously wrong. So how to deal with that?

1. We can try to just explain to, directors, producers, clients, dit's etc that this 8k camera can not playback what it just recorded. and simply use rwgrgb and a preview lut and all will look good but not when doing playback. In large production this is normal then video Village has its own playback and can simply record the video tap / preview. Small productions don't always have someone that records video feed externally and one can argue it´s a bit of old fashion and comes from the age of film when that was the only way to review what was shot. Now with the nice playback features on camera it for sure comes handy to have playback from camera. Even though it´s for sure better to have both.

2. We can set up outboxes on the sdi chain with rwgrgb to rec709 and have the sdi fed with clean rwgrgb. then all monitors exept touch and vewfinder can have same lut on both record record and playback from camera, but this approach leaves the touch screens out, they will display the image without the lut that everyone else is watching... Possibly thats fine. But again DP´s, directors, clients and others will for sure ask why is that so...

3. run with normal redgamma like we used to with mx, dragon etc. This approach i think dps producers and clients will have some comments about. And the question is if you loose more time having clients looking at out of gamut stuff than trying to provide them with a somewhat right image. DIT´s, alexa fanatics and others will for sure toss some comments about red image qualities even though it´s just the preview that looks odd and the actual r3d could be the best thing ever, does not matter they simply care most for what they see on their monitors on set, if it looks bad on their new sony oled ref screen they usually claim its no good. Sure we can preview with the lut and see it´s all right but seeing something else when in playback is something people will comment about.

I think all these approches are just hacks to get around the fact that the lut in camera only is a preview lut. Maybe it can not be more than that with the current camera builds. But then I think it would be vice if red makes a "lut touch screen" or "IPP2 touch" simply a touch screen just as they are now but with ssd memory slot of some sort that can have luts applied in monitor affecting the screen for both playback and record. Ot possibly such functionality can be feed from camera so we don't need new screens. But I can only assume thats not the case or Red would have done so all ready. Many also make some good lut boxes together with teranex or such that can be used on sdi out feed over by the monitors or a loop trough module on camera. SDI in SDI out with power supplied from camera

Possibly there is way smarter ways to solve this but ignoring this issue I think does not take us further but backwards.