Really interesting article on Alexa colors. Is this something RED can emulate?

[Marcus Friedlander]

http://www.dvinfo.net/article/production/camgear/what-alexa-and-watercolors-have-in-common.html

The merging of additive and subtractive color characteristics is fascinating and it helps to explain why people say the Alexa has the "film look". Is this something RED can emulate in their color science? Or do they do this already? I honestly don't know enough about the ones and zeroes of this camera to answer that. I just like the way it looks

 

[Dean Butler]

Very interesting. They're definitely doing something special over there...

 

[Marc Wielage]

Yes, Glenn Kennel at Arri USA is a very bright man and knows color science better than anybody I've ever met. His early work on Cineon in the 1990s was groundbreaking, and he and his Alexa team have done very good work. Glenn's 2006 book, Color and Mastering for Digital Cinema, should be required reading for anybody in the business (though it's now quite a bit out of date).

 

[David Battistella]

It's a cool idea.

Ive vey stated somewhere before that there is, with DOPs and the public, a kind of "visual literacy" about film colors. Seeing them presented in theaters for so long tells the brain that this is "correct" or this is how "things should look". This familiarity and not deviating from the path of film colors is what I think is the subconscious signal telling people that Alex footage "looks better".

Of course this is all subjective, but it seems to me the Alexa at least partly presents a familiar image and that goes a long way. And I am not looking at this is a ones better than the other thing, just more like how the brain is trained to see things. This is why it's called color science, we know that the brain is a "pattern machine" the brains interpretation of color is based on familiar patterns.

In cinema, those of us of a certain age perhaps accept that pattern as correct because it is so familiar.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

It's a hard time for image lovers. There's a new generation grown up who might never have seen something shot and presented in 35mm and most people will get used to the digital presentation of colors the less 35mm is used and the more we use screens everywhere. So there's really no reason to get "the film look" really, it should be better to just manage and improve the digital way of capturing light. Subconsciously some of us feel that Alexa looks better but we are a dying breed of filmmakers so we struggle to get a look we feel is better when most new generations doesn't give a crap or think some digital formats look better.

It's the same with sharpness. There are many who soft their image, use mist filters or old glass so the image doesn't get too sharp. Many think the Sony F65 is too sharp and hate it, while I for one love it and love sharpness. I love clarity when watching movies. But at the same time I also love the film look.

So is there a way to get a color science in Red to handle colors in a similar way?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

"In this article I showed how Alexa limits color saturation in highlights and mid-tones, something that most video cameras either don’t do or don’t do as well. " - is a free gift in image processing and caused by the constraining shape of the RGB cube in that the brightest colour you can represent in RGB is white and necessarily all more saturated colours are darker. Turn that around the other way and it's obvious that brighter colours over the mid-way part of the RGB cube (think of standing the cube up such that black point is on the ground and the cube balances on end with white directly above black) are less saturated. If Sony are avoiding this and making brighter colours more saturated (in an attempt to limit the the RGB cube constraining effect) then they are inserting extra image processing to do this. This has nothing to do with additive or subtractive colour systems.

Graeme

 

[Martin Stevens]

"In this article I showed how Alexa limits color saturation in highlights and mid-tones, something that most video cameras either don’t do or don’t do as well. " - is a free gift in image processing and caused by the constraining shape of the RGB cube in that the brightest colour you can represent in RGB is white and necessarily all more saturated colours are darker. Turn that around the other way and it's obvious that brighter colours over the mid-way part of the RGB cube (think of standing the cube up such that black point is on the ground and the cube balances on end with white directly above black) are less saturated. If Sony are avoiding this and making brighter colours more saturated (in an attempt to limit the the RGB cube constraining effect) then they are inserting extra image processing to do this. This has nothing to do with additive or subtractive colour systems.

Graeme

Hello Graeme,

Does the Dragon color science also make sure that as colors go over a certain IRE, or level, that they do not get more saturated.... like film?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

All our cameras work this way. It's basically how simple image processing works unless you write a lot of code to specifically make it look otherwise (like the TV Look).

Graeme