Interesting news from Blackmagic...

[Marc Wielage]

I guess what I mean to say is do you push the HDR look harder in certain scenes to exaggerate them, kind of like how 3D movies sometimes go in/out from being relatively shallow depth to extremely deep, to exaggerate certain things? The streaming service I was watching the scenes looked like they had serious highlight issues with clamped highlights being reduced to almost a greyish color. I assume it's for the 4K HDR presentation and their player doesn't work correctly online, but maybe I'm wrong on that.

It's a creative choice, like anything else. There are philosophical differences where some clients want the entire picture to look like it's "HDR" (i.e., much brighter). What Dolby tells you to do when you go through the Dolby Vision certification class is to keep the picture nominally the same but take advantage of not having to clip the highlights, and instead let the highlights go 300% or 400% or 500% higher. So you can use the HDR tools in a subtle way, not hitting the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer.

I just watched a terrific HDR show on Amazon, the superhero show The Boys color-timed by Siggy Ferstl over at CO3/Santa Monica, and to me a lot of it is actually very subtle and interesting. They do go to exaggerated highlights and super-bright colors and so on every so often, but the majority of the show looked very "normal" for the most part, albeit stylized. You could say that the additional dynamic range does give the picture more depth. I notice they tend to take more changes than I would in Rec709, where I'm constantly concerned about the illumination of the lead actors' faces: in an HDR show like this, they're willing to lead the lead actors fall off into shadow. No doubt, that's the DP and producers' choice.

Technicolor has offices all over the world, including Shanghai, Bangalore, London and many more. Last time I checked, Technicolor MPC in Shanghai has Baselights.

Technicolor/Hollywood has installed at least 3 Baselights that I know of, so you can say there's a trend to support different platforms. It's a strain on operations over there, because they have to support at least three different systems (Resolve, Lustre, and Baselight) for different projects. It's not like the old days where if a session was booked and there was a scheduling problem, or if you had some downtime, you could just slip into any other room. Not so simple now.

It's fair to say some companies are using Baselight as a sales tool, just to differentiate themselves from the "sliced bread" competitors using Resolve. I think that's perfectly valid, but I also think some fairly major filmmakers and producers don't give a crap what color corrector is being used as long as the results are good and the work is done on time and on budget. I've argued with Maxine Gervais (a huge Baselight fan and former trainer) that she could do great work on anything, because the results are because of her skills -- not because of the software.

BTW, I'm in 100% agreement with you that the color science behind Baselight is beyond compare -- they know the math backwards, forwards, and sideways. There are some little user interface things I find clumsy, but bear in mind I stopped using Baselight around 4.0, and that was also on a Baselight 4. I have no doubt that an 8GPU Baselight X running 5.0 would be stunning. If I had $300K, I'd buy one in a second.

 

[jake blackstone]

I've argued with Maxine Gervais (a huge Baselight fan and former trainer) that she could do great work on anything, because the results are because of her skills -- not because of the software.
BTW, I'm in 100% agreement with you that the color science behind Baselight is beyond compare -- they know the math backwards, forwards, and sideways. There are some little user interface things I find clumsy, but bear in mind I stopped using Baselight around 4.0, and that was also on a Baselight 4. I have no doubt that an 8GPU Baselight X running 5.0 would be stunning. If I had $300K, I'd buy one in a second.

I find it a bit dismissive of you "arguing" with Maxine about the choice of the platform. She used Baselight at Warner Brothers and when she moved to Technicolor, she asked and got Baselight for her (Baselight X) and another one for her assistant. She chooses Baselight because she finds it superior, as she personally told me at FilmLight get-together. I very much doubt, you'd be "arguing" with someone, like Mike Hatzer about his preference for the Lustre or Peter Doyle for choosing the Baselight.
Again, for the umpteenth time, when you start using Baselight, that is not 20 years old, then we can have a discussion about the quirks of the interface. Baselight interface is infinitely customizable and extremely flexible, unlike Resolve, which seems stuck in 1990s.
And you don't need to spend $300k on Baselight X to get the job done. Baselight 1 is still a very powerful platform, thanks to it's superior caching, that actually works in the background, unlike Resolve, that must rely on multiple GPUs to do anything, as it's caching is just a mess..
I just finished a 4k feature on Baselight 1 with just one GPU, no problem whatsoever...

 

[Björn Benckert]

It's a creative choice, like anything else. There are philosophical differences where some clients want the entire picture to look like it's "HDR" (i.e., much brighter). What Dolby tells you to do when you go through the Dolby Vision certification class is to keep the picture nominally the same but take advantage of not having to clip the highlights, and instead let the highlights go 300% or 400% or 500% higher. So you can use the HDR tools in a subtle way, not hitting the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer.

I just watched a terrific HDR show on Amazon, the superhero show The Boys color-timed by Siggy Ferstl over at CO3/Santa Monica, and to me a lot of it is actually very subtle and interesting. They do go to exaggerated highlights and super-bright colors and so on every so often, but the majority of the show looked very "normal" for the most part, albeit stylized. You could say that the additional dynamic range does give the picture more depth. I notice they tend to take more changes than I would in Rec709, where I'm constantly concerned about the illumination of the lead actors' faces: in an HDR show like this, they're willing to lead the lead actors fall off into shadow. No doubt, that's the DP and producers' choice.


Technicolor/Hollywood has installed at least 3 Baselights that I know of, so you can say there's a trend to support different platforms. It's a strain on operations over there, because they have to support at least three different systems (Resolve, Lustre, and Baselight) for different projects. It's not like the old days where if a session was booked and there was a scheduling problem, or if you had some downtime, you could just slip into any other room. Not so simple now.

It's fair to say some companies are using Baselight as a sales tool, just to differentiate themselves from the "sliced bread" competitors using Resolve. I think that's perfectly valid, but I also think some fairly major filmmakers and producers don't give a crap what color corrector is being used as long as the results are good and the work is done on time and on budget. I've argued with Maxine Gervais (a huge Baselight fan and former trainer) that she could do great work on anything, because the results are because of her skills -- not because of the software.

BTW, I'm in 100% agreement with you that the color science behind Baselight is beyond compare -- they know the math backwards, forwards, and sideways. There are some little user interface things I find clumsy, but bear in mind I stopped using Baselight around 4.0, and that was also on a Baselight 4. I have no doubt that an 8GPU Baselight X running 5.0 would be stunning. If I had $300K, I'd buy one in a second.

Also, guys take a look at the technicolor stock curve…

They lost 90% of their net worth in only the last 3 years. So possibly not the best of role model for success. I think better not try to be Technicolor.

Its important to understand what they are and where they are coming from. TC is an accent film developing company, and just as Kodak and many others from that era, they are struggling not just a little but a lot to adapt to a new world order where film postproduction have more and more difficulty to hide behind costly tech investments.

TC quite recently bought the Mill, my guess, a desperate attempt to become a more talent driven company. I don’t have much insight how that has paid off for them but I got plenty of friends that no longer work at the Mill.

Simply put, talent is a shit hard thing to invest in.

You buy the Mill and try to adopt it to your needs and then a lot of the good guys just decide to leave… And those that stay see their chance and quickly demand a salary increase etc. Such stuff works way different than it used to when you could tie down your money and staff in having a huge developing process, some costly arri laser recorders and film scanners.

And Jake, sure I very much know Stockholm/Sweden is not the epicenter for film or TV postproduction, far from it. But lets look at Stockholm as an example for whats going on outside of those high profile cities you mentioned in your post.

Here in town the big facilities are shutting down. One after the other. The big lab/post facility own by Egmont closed down shop 100 of employes had to go. The oldest Post house quit their operations just before summer. The biggest Stockholm based post house shut down a number of offices around the globe less than a year ago. Meanhile production companies starts to handle a lot of the work the post houses used to do. Lot of the major production companies now choose to do things like editing, grading sound mix and mastering inhouse and most of them do not buy into any high cost fancy applications. They go premiere instead of Avid etc.

Sure high profile productions are likely to do it else place and differently but the big blockbuster productions are possibly not what to look at to tell the future, thats all I'm saying.

 

[Misha Engel]

Simply put, talent is a shit hard thing to invest in.

BMD does it with the free Resolve version.

Meanhile production companies starts to handle a lot of the work the post houses used to do. Lot of the major production companies now choose to do things like editing, grading sound mix and mastering inhouse and most of them do not buy into any high cost fancy applications. They go premiere instead of Avid etc.

Sure high profile productions are likely to do it else place and differently but the big blockbuster productions are possibly not what to look at to tell the future, thats all I'm saying.

We see the same trend in BeNeLux and Germany.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

I just finished a 4k feature on Baselight 1 with just one GPU, no problem whatsoever...

Just finishing a 4K feature using just one GPU on Resolve. No problems whatsoever.

In spare time left from media managing, syncing, metadata managing, QCing & multiple delivering from xxxx cards out of xx cameras. On Resolve. Using just one GPU.

What's your point ?

 

[jake blackstone]

Just finishing a 4K feature using just one GPU on Resolve. No problems whatsoever.

In spare time left from media managing, syncing, metadata managing, QCing & multiple delivering from xxxx cards out of xx cameras. On Resolve. Using just one GPU.

What's your point ?

Read the whole thread, then may be you'll understand.

 

[Björn Benckert]

BMD does it with the free Resolve version.



We see the same trend in BeNeLux and Germany.

Yes they for sure stack up on users. Just as in most industries that has shown to be of great value. Facebook, youtube, Spotify, Netflix etc.

As long as BM can remain updating resolve in this pace and not charge for it I cant really see how the others will be able to keep up.

That goes for compositing apps, editing, grading and sound. When you can provide them all in one package and for free and then the level of each part does not need to be top of class the one app and price benefit equals it out.

If you want to start a vfx facility with 100 artists. Its quite a chunk of of money you need to hatch out each year for updates if you are using nuke for example. The amount of propietary code you can get writen for fusion for that kind of money worth looking into. The benefit to share app with the colorists, edit and sound is also quite a thing.

So if BM can remain doing what they do they will very much change the industry. And yes I though it would end when capture cards where no longer needed. I thought that would be the end for BM but they survieved. Then I thought they would die when computers got color acurate 12bit HDR screening... We are not there yet but its around the next corner Im sure. But with this 6k camera and BMraw I avtually think they will do better than ever. Every kid and his skateboard friend will get a 6k pocket and a resolve studio dongle. And yes how do you compete with that.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Read the whole thread, then may be you'll understand.

Ok. Let's give it a go:

"This tool positioned at top market segment, which I AM USING is so much superior than that other one which you can get for peanuts now".


Close ?

 

[jake blackstone]

Also, guys take a look at the technicolor stock curve…
They lost 90% of their net worth in only the last 3 years. So possibly not the best of role model for success. I think better not try to be Technicolor.
And Jake, sure I very much know Stockholm/Sweden is not the epicenter for film or TV postproduction, far from it.
Sure high profile productions are likely to do it else place and differently but the big blockbuster productions are possibly not what to look at to tell the future, thats all I'm saying.

Bjorn.
I hate going on tangents, so I'll try to get this train back on it's tracks.
The original point was, for biggest box office movies, only the biggest companies can do the job, mainly Technicolor and Delux.
Just take a look at Technicolor- https://www.technicolor.com/create/picture-post-production
It's very impressive collection of talent. There talent is provided with the tools they feel most comfortable with, which means, they have everything, price is no object.
Stockholm, Mexico, Bangalore and many other places don't come to mind, when big tentpole movies need finish. One of the main reasons, why those movies are finished in Hollywood, regardless of where they were shot is the geographical location. Majority of directors, producers, film companies home offices, stars, post talent and biggest post facilities are still in located Hollywood. It's one thing to go on location to shoot a movie, where everyone can do the reviews the next day on their computers and it's a completely different process when it comes to the editing, sound, VFX consolidation and the color. Often color is done at the absolute last minute and for that centralized location is of utmost importance. I know you don't care about talent and you'd like to pay them (and probably do) as little as you can get away with. Luckily, there is still a free market for talent and top talent is still paid quite well. And that talent gets to choose the tools they prefer to use, regardless of price.
Incidentally, I just checked the top six box office movies so far for 2019, with each earning over $1B and 2 were done by Delux, 3 by Technicolor and Toy Story was done in-house at Pixar...

 

[jake blackstone]

Ok. Let's give it a go:

"This tool positioned at top market segment, which I AM USING is so much superior than that other one which you can get for free now".


Close ?

Not even close. Read the WHOLE post I was answering to and don't try to grab only the parts that may justify your biased narrative.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Jake how many of us here do you think work with tentpole productions? Not too many is my guess. How many do you think ever even work in north america, or on a film where english is spoken? Sure La and those places you mention are great places but making films is very much a global thing. Whats used in LA might not be the world trend.

And also tentpole filmpost, vfx especially, Im sure you know are being subcontracted out all over the world, but sure LA is a major hub.

But i might have missed somthing I thought this was a Resolve / Baselight discussion. And then my comment was somthing about the industry now leaning towards being more talent driven. Those that can gather enough talent can easily buy out a company like baselight and start to give it away for free we seen that happen before. BM is gathering a lot of talent by being able to provide resolve at such low cost. Thats all Im saying. That will change the industry big time if they can keep it up.

And stop that shit writing that I do not care about talent. You dont know me, you never meet me, you never worked with me, you have no clue who I am. I worked with the same crew for 22 years. Pure talent, you say I dont care for them? F you.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Not even close. Read the WHOLE thread and don't try to grab only the parts that may justify your biased narrative.

In that case I may have formulated the wrong impression by the same rhetoric repeated over the years.

 

[jake blackstone]

In that case I may have formulated the wrong impression by the same rhetoric repeated over the years.



Yes you do.




Over here you are attempting to use your
interpretation as a premise, on which you formulate question in a way to belittle something and someone in the start.



Over here you are using obviously faked politeness in asking me to invest effort in the attempt, under the assumption of perceived relevance of its result and right after manifesting the attitude which makes the attempt futile.

So > innacurate assumption and a paradox in the same sentence.

What the hell are you talking about???

 

[jake blackstone]

And stop that shit writing that I do not care about talent. You dont know me, you never meet me, you never worked with me, you have no clue who I am. I worked with the same crew for 22 years. Pure talent, you say I dont care for them? F you.

It must be the famous Swedish hospitality to use such language
Anyone can easily google your past posting about your perceived worth of the talent. You literally said, that soon no one will need colorists))
As much as you'd like to change the history, it is there for everyone to see.
In the past, you clearly stated, that anyone working for you will have to provide not just the fruit of the labor, as normally expected, but also the the methods and tools, that are necessary to recreate their work. I'm paraphrasing here "If changes needs to be done, I'm not going to waste my time tracking down the colorist who had done the work. If needed, I will reverse engineer his work and use it to bill the client. In other words, I'm stealing the work, unless it is provided to me on a voluntarily basis." Sounds familiar? Of coarse it is, we have this recurring conversation over and over, but you remain unapologetic in your disdain for talent.
And I sure hope, for Hrvoje's sake, that none of his "Primers" are used in the work performed for your company, because according to you, his LUTs must be included as well. And if you get your hands on those LUTs, what's to prevent your from releasing them, as you had done in the past with Autodesk's Kodak LUTs without a permission and at the the time you even told, that you made them yourself Anyone can Google this and see for themselves or just search this site about 6-7 years back, but there is no need, you know it happened and still, you never apologized for your behavior...
But to answer your original question, because you clearly still don't get it, it's ALL about creating the most nurturing environment for talent. Companies I mentioned, yes, the big companies employing that wonderful talent, provide the tools talent prefers in order to be it most creative. Instead, you advocate the push for talent to use whatever YOU want them to use. Yes, that cost money, sometimes quite a bit, but if you give talent a choice, they will be much more creative and productive instead of being just an interchangeable hired hands...

 

[jake blackstone]

Jake,
If I need to hire lets say 20 compositors I can choose to find flame talent and then rent 20x500€ month for flame licences. Now over here I will not find 20 flame talents. They dont exist I would not even find 20 less talanted people that ever even worked in flame, there are simply les 20 flame guys around in this whole country. I would need to fly them in get hotel rooms etc. Now swedish film budgets dont allw such costs, far from it.

If the project can be done using fusion instead there is plenty of talent, maybe not as good and experienced but as resolve is now used in pretty much all schools here there are a base of users out there that can do comp work in fusion.

Same with Grading. If I bought a baselight I would need to fly people in to do grading. If using resolve there is plenty of colorists in town that are available.

When you make movies for a population of less than 10 milion people even speaking the language no matter how nice it would be to allow creative freedom and choose tools freely. But things are done on a string and very few films here break

And what you write above is not right.

I do think colorists are needed.
I have full respect that sold luts should not be shared. Even though its sometimes difficult to draw a line where they can be used and not.

I am shocked and pleasantly surprised, really. This is the first time you posted a reasonable response and for that I thank you. Let's try to keep it civil
There are plenty of very high quality talent in LA, that can make good living here, but even in LA, there is an acute shortage of Baselight and Flame artists. On the other hand, there are plenty of After Effects and Resolve artists. So, it only makes sense, that many creative shops still use AE, Maya, Resolve and usually Flame for final assembly. Just to be clear, there also plenty of shops in LA, not even particularly big ones, that are all Flame/Nuke or all Baselight.
But all that is neither really new nor is it controversial. It's just the reality.
I just wanted to answer the original question posted by Andree about comparing Baselight and Resolve.
IMHO, as someone who has the luxury to be able to use either platform on a daily basis, I much prefer Baselight for reasons I already stated. All this talk about the prohibitive cost of Baselight is what took us so far off the original discussion...

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

What the hell are you talking about???

Over here you are acting dumb after re-editing the initial post, while the attitude causing the problematics has been left on Version_01.

And stop that shit writing that I do not care about talent. You dont know me, you never meet me, you never worked with me, you have no clue who I am. I worked with the same crew for 22 years. Pure talent, you say I dont care for them? F you.

It is easy to appreciate the known and not uncommon to undervalue else. You did it multiple times on this forum, especially towards the craft of colour grading and the same impression is likely shared by others, not just by the colourful Jake.

My favourite one was something along the lines of "I just use this and this and copy your grade mr. top dollar colorist". Btw your passion and appreciation of your craft and team is visible in your work.


There, Jake. See we are on the same side.
Let's hug now and fight Björn, thus releasing the acccumulated from the production workflow. Marc can slam him on the head with a dusty Tektronix, I can snatch his money through some shitty LUTZ and you can navigate the action over Blackboard.

( :

 

[jake blackstone]

Over here you are acting dumb after re-editing the initial post, while the attitude causing the problematics has been left on Version_01.

I edited my original post not even 5 minutes later, after the initial posting as I though it was a bit over the line, but you decided to continue with your attacks even after my edit...

It is easy to appreciate the known and not uncommon to undervalue else. You did it multiple times on this forum, especially towards the craft of colour grading and the same impression is likely shared by others, not just by the colourful Jake.

My favourite one was something along the lines of "I just use this and this and copy your grade mr. top dollar colorist". Btw your passion and appreciation of your craft and team is visible in your work.


There, Jake. See we are on the same side.
Let's hug now and fight Björn, thus releasing the acccumulated from the production workflow. Marc can slam him on the head with a dusty Tektronix, I can snatch his money through some shitty LUTZ and you can navigate the action over Blackboard.

Bjorn already expressed his regret on the subject and I'm satisfied...

Correction.
Actually, I just saw, that Bjorn changed the original post and now I'm NOT satisfied again.
You should have left the original post unchanged Bjorn, sorry.
So, once more, you had posted Lustre's Kodak LUTs here on RU for everyone to use. Anyone can look it up when that happened. Everyone loved that LUT collection and everyone was thanking you for creating them, as you initially indicated, that you were the original creator. Then I started questioning origins of those LUTs. At the time I was an active Lustre user and anyone who were using Lustre had seen those LUTs. Initially when I questioned you about LUTs origins you didn't respond, but then when some users publicly stated, they weren't aware, that those LUTs were Autodesk IP, months later, magically you had obtained a permission from Autodesk to distribute those. Do you mind telling us even though you claim you obtained permission to distribute, why did you think it was OK to release them when initially, when you definitely didn't have the permission? And was Autodesk OK with you taking their IP and creating a Cube version? Can I take Hrvoje's LUTs, make Cube versions and distribute those as mine?
After your initial post for a brief moment I actually thought you were regretful, but now I can clearly see, that you are not...

 

[Samir Patel]

Reduser has certainly become more fun and useful... anyone... anyone? Bueller?

And funny how this thread started 10 pages ago discussing a new camera but that's the Internet folks... sigh

 

[Björn Benckert]

Sorry jake, saw that. Was not my intention I hit post by mistake midtrough while writing my post. Then I hit edit and continued writing. So yes I see your reply was to half of it. I now delete it, no problem, what ever makes you less pissed.
Edit:
Regarding the luts you call ”luster luts” I asked Stephane Labrie he is or/was (dont know what he does now) head developer of luster and I think flame. He gave me premission trough a private discusion over I think Facebook pm or mail. Dont remember honestly I chat with him from time to time since way back on learned to know him on the Fire beta team like 25 years back.

And Im not sure of this, please correct me if Im wrong. Those are not Autodesk, luster or flame luts. Those are kodak luts. Kodak gave those out with their filmstocks back in the cineon / kodak genesis days. Basically its preview luts kodak made to show how thier stocks would look when printed back on a positive. And I think those then where ”for all man kind” kind of thing as way back then I doubt kodak thought anyone would use them as anything else than preview luts for monitors. So they made sure to spread them out as their primary goal was not to sell luts but filmrolls. Now yes, argubly its then a bit unetical to use them for anything else than previewin stuff before printing to film. I have not got kodaks premision to share them but I did not think that was needed. The autodesk version of those are converted cineon luts to 3dl luts more of a format conversion than enything else. All I did was converting them to cube luts. And sure I could have been more clear about their origin but we always called them kodak luts as thats where I thouth they came from originaly. Again I can be wrong but was there not the exact same set of luts within the cineon as in Solerare, Konga, arri laser recorder etc. Kodak spread them to unify the industry and set standards, No?

But maybe PM or make an evil Björn thread or such and reply there so we can we let this thread be about BM stuff now?

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

I edited my original post not even 5 minutes later, after the initial posting as I though it was a bit over the line, but you decided to continue with your attacks even after my edit...

There were no attacks. I focused on your errors in logic in the initial version of the post simply due to needless defensive jab, pulling in the topic something I do with a negative connotation.

I am interested in and welcome your tools/workflow critics in general, critical thinking is prerequisite for development. It's just that some of the stuff seemed repetitive and pointing the obvious, hence "what's your point" question.

Obviously, product positioned and priced at top of the market is likely to have some unique features and advantages over the one pushed for mass market. I have a whole list of what could be improved in Resolve.

I saw that you edited much later. Mine would have been edited also, having seen you re-considered, but then I also noticed the following one.

Cleaned out now. There is one more of yours following.