House of Cards season 6 - Helium

[Björn Benckert]

With Helium you expose differently than Dragon. Helium I tend to slightly „underexpose“, or expose to the left and don‘t worry about noise. You still get great DR, it is just distributed differently.

Yes, but to me the difference is huge when the car comes driving towards the camera in dark lit environment etc. Lots of scenery where helium has difficulty. Not always possible to expose so no highlight is close to clip and on helium those highlights simply does not look good. Or as good as Monstro or even Dragon or MX. Helium then color fringe in a digital way that Monstro or Alexa simply does not do.

Shoot a night scene with a couple of cars and a stop light. Or high nits colored leds in shot. Helium goes wack where monstro smoothly roll over to a white overexposed image.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Then i think there are some DOF issues, because i don't know what stop you shot at outside but there's something a bit off with the comp and fall off - like outside was one stop and inside was much wider. It could also be just comp edges then if they are comp'd normally. Or a lack of light intensity pushing the edges of hair and things.l

I don't think it would make sense for both the projected background plate and the foreground to be shot at a wide aperture unless for practical reasons -- it would make more sense for the background to have deeper, more "neutral" depth of field and then for the aperture on the lens used for the interior to provide the fall-off in focus, then the BG city lights in the plate would become blurry circles, etc. But perhaps you do have to factor in the distance from the lens to the LED screens versus a real city background that is farther away and therefore would be softer in real life if the focus was set near. But generally if you shoot an interior at T/2, for example, the screens out the window are pretty soft, focus-wise.

I did some LED backgrounds for the pilot of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" for a night cab scene and had to put a Half Soft Frost frame almost against the LED screens -- not because the depth of field looked incorrect, but because I had to use modern driving plates shot on a fairly empty street in Los Angeles to fake for 1958 NYC, so it seemed prudent to err on the side of blurring the view out the window.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Season 6 is a mess. The color grades are terrible, with major shifts between camera angles. There is a lot of noise, horizontal light bands, and lots of other issues. The frames in S6 are some of the worst I've seen in top television. Compositionally, S6 is every bit as magical as S1-S5, but the quality of the frames and the grades of those frames are very disappointing.

If there are noise problems, then why are people saying that the show is exposed brighter or that the Helium should be underexposed?

 

[Nick Gardner]

I’m most of the way through 6 watching on a 42” plasma. No noise, solid blacks, images look very similar to what I saw on set.

Nick

 

[Thai Christen]

Shoot a night scene with a couple of cars and a stop light. Or high nits colored leds in shot. Helium goes wack where monstro smoothly roll over to a white overexposed image.

I have heard about this issue with Helium many times. Unfortunately I haven‘t shot anything like this (never required to) so cannot comment. Also I shoot Helium with Skintone Highlight OLPF 99% of the time which helps a little bit in the highlights.

 

[paulcurtis]

I don't think it would make sense for both the projected background plate and the foreground to be shot at a wide aperture unless for practical reasons -- it would make more sense for the background to have deeper, more "neutral" depth of field and then for the aperture on the lens used for the interior to provide the fall-off in focus

Maybe it's because of my vfx background. When making 2.5D matte paintings i tend to be careful about different layers having different depths and bokeh properties. When driving and looking out the back of the window i think it's more apparent because you can see the depth going off from the near sides of road to the distance horizon - there's a large range of depth.

If the LED panels are shot with deep focus (which does make sense) then when the foreground is shot with a shallow DOF those LED background panels are all the same depth and it looks it (especially in motion). (I know HoC is comped though)

But i've got to say I also realise that 99% of people could care less and wouldn't notice it.

The still you shared was beautiful and the level of light in the car seems appropriate, the rain/dirt on the window helps as well i think. There is some natural halation from the bright source over the back seat - stuff that needs to be manually added in comp. I guess it depends what it's like moving. When you have little practical light in the car (as most cars don't have internal lighting) then the influence of the outside is pretty much the key. And that's partly what i was getting at in the HoC scenes. Turn off any studio lights and just see what those LED panels would do, i'd love to see that.

cheers
Paul

 

[Björn Benckert]

I’m most of the way through 6 watching on a 42” plasma. No noise, solid blacks, images look very similar to what I saw on set.

Nick

Im guessing your Plasma is HD and it also got quite high signal to noise ratio in the TV alone. Think it makes it difficult to see the differences.

I look at laser projected in 4k on a large screen then the differences in quality shines. Not only between the House of cards seasons but between all Netflix productions. Feels like some really aim for the HD scene and ad grain and use the DR to such extend so it looks good in HD, while other have large 4k in mind or atleast looked at such image when doing their tests and picture processing. I guess a lot of work is still done over quite small dolby 2k screens and simply its quite impossible to judge the images properly for 4k by doing so. Or that is atleast what I think is the reasoning behind rather high noise levels and added grain that is more noticeable than I ever could think the DP´s ever intended.

 

[Nick Gardner]

You are correct, and probably right. I am an old curmudgeon who thinks HD is just fine, and still looks better than going to most theaters. I am of the opinion that if it looks good on a 42" display in HD, then that is damn well better than almost all technology that came before it. Sounds to me like if you get a 7 hectare screen in Ultamobob k all you see are flaws ;-) But I'm old and grumpy.

Nick

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Maybe it's because of my vfx background. When making 2.5D matte paintings i tend to be careful about different layers having different depths and bokeh properties. When driving and looking out the back of the window i think it's more apparent because you can see the depth going off from the near sides of road to the distance horizon - there's a large range of depth.

If the LED panels are shot with deep focus (which does make sense) then when the foreground is shot with a shallow DOF those LED background panels are all the same depth and it looks it (especially in motion). (I know HoC is comped though)

But i've got to say I also realise that 99% of people could care less and wouldn't notice it.

The still you shared was beautiful and the level of light in the car seems appropriate, the rain/dirt on the window helps as well i think. There is some natural halation from the bright source over the back seat - stuff that needs to be manually added in comp. I guess it depends what it's like moving. When you have little practical light in the car (as most cars don't have internal lighting) then the influence of the outside is pretty much the key. And that's partly what i was getting at in the HoC scenes. Turn off any studio lights and just see what those LED panels would do, i'd love to see that.

cheers
Paul

I agree with a lot of that -- if I were shooting plates for green screen car work, then I'd argue that it would be nice to shoot the plates with the focus set closer to where the foreground would technically be because de-focusing a sharp plate does not look the same as shooting the plate with the focus pulled near, because optically defocusing gives you those big circular bokeh effects. But often they want the plates sharp because they don't know how they will be used, perhaps the director will want a rack-focus from the foreground to the background, or maybe the plate can be used as a POV shot, etc.

 

[Bill Totolo]

...

I did some LED backgrounds for the pilot of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" for a night cab scene and had to put a Half Soft Frost frame almost against the LED screens -- not because the depth of field looked incorrect, but because I had to use modern driving plates shot on a fairly empty street in Los Angeles to fake for 1958 NYC, so it seemed prudent to err on the side of blurring the view out the window.

Nice trick, Dave. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Rob Anderson]

Im guessing your Plasma is HD and it also got quite high signal to noise ratio in the TV alone. Think it makes it difficult to see the differences.

I look at laser projected in 4k on a large screen then the differences in quality shines. Not only between the House of cards seasons but between all Netflix productions. Feels like some really aim for the HD scene and ad grain and use the DR to such extend so it looks good in HD, while other have large 4k in mind or atleast looked at such image when doing their tests and picture processing. I guess a lot of work is still done over quite small dolby 2k screens and simply its quite impossible to judge the images properly for 4k by doing so. Or that is atleast what I think is the reasoning behind rather high noise levels and added grain that is more noticeable than I ever could think the DP´s ever intended.

Bingo. I agree with this.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Is Fincher still doing his post trick of de-noising everything and then adding a consistent level of noise/grain back over everything, to be visually consistent?

 

[Marc Wielage]

Is Fincher still doing his post trick of de-noising everything and then adding a consistent level of noise/grain back over everything, to be visually consistent?

That was a technique used by Lowry Digital (which actually won a technical Oscar), and they did several of Fincher's movies in the 2000s. There are advantages to doing it this way, but the NR is very source-dependent, so it has to be done very carefully.

 

[Brendan H. Banks]

This thread motivated me to flip on this season (been an avid viewer of all prior seasons) and it didn't quite have the same feeling, from a visual standpoint. There seem to be some "out of the box" characteristics I associate with the Helium sensor that I don't love (a green dominance of certain scenes, skintone colors, etc). I also feel as though the ratios of light within the scene are much more even - prior I felt like the practicals in terms of spot and reflected light had a lot more contrast in them and kept my eye focused on what was intended. Maybe the first episode lives predominately in high-key daylight scenes, but I think the overall look has changed. It does make some sense if Frank represented the darker underworld and Claire is trying to get herself and her administration more above board on things, but I have found their approach to that (if it was the intent) to lack the type of texture I love.

Now let me also just quickly say I'm a bit of a champion of the Helium sensor, I own one and am a huge fan...but I think it requires a little extra love in tuning to taste for it to become your own. I also am excited to see Robin Wright take first billing on this season as I've found her performances to be really interesting to watch over the prior 5 seasons.

 

[Chris McKechnie]

I agree. Thought it was the worst looking season ever shot on RED. Watching on a 135” projection screen with a 4K laser projector. The noise is horrifically bad. Vertical lines. Skin tones all over the place. Yea...not a fan at all of the look. All other seeasons looked fantastic.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

This season is shot like a soap opera compared to the previous ones. Too lit, bright, flat. Previous ones all had significant Fincheresque contrast ratios, camera compositions and camera movement. Maybe the tight schedule changes created this, but it feels generic compared to the cinematic quality of earlier seasons.

 

[DJ Meyer]

I tried to watch it purely for research purposes but the writing was so bad this season I couldn't stomach it.