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RED as a FILM LOOK

Sanjin Jukic

Sanjin Jukic

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RED as a FILM LOOK

I just saw IRON MAN trailers and found out that an old grainy film look from 80's is very IN at the moment.

Here below is a little example when I want to achieve a simulation of film grainy look in my RED shots.

For that mostly I use Shake with Filmlight's plug-in TrueLight Kodak Vision Premier and then add Film Grain filter in this case option of Kodak Eastman 5293nc.

And you can use other apps like FCP, Color, AE, Premiere or... with Sapphire plug-ins, etc... to generate a film look with RED shots.

EspanaH264720p.jpg


A SHORT VIDEO EXAMPLE 720p 55.1 MB>>

The best viewed as a LOOP.
 
MORE EXAMPLES FROM OTHER RED USERS WOULD BE APPRECIATE HERE :construction: .
 
Grain and compression issues

Grain and compression issues

The Third Man said:
RED as a FILM LOOK

I just saw IRON MAN trailers and found out that an old grainy film look from 80's is very IN at the moment.

Here below is a little example when I want to achieve a simulation of film grainy look in my RED shots.

For that mostly I use Shake with Filmlight's plug-in TrueLight Kodak Vision Premier and then add Film Grain filter in this case option of Kodak Eastman 5293nc.

And you can use other apps like FCP, Color, AE, Premiere or... with Sapphire plug-ins, etc...
Click to expand...

Just a note to point out that although "grain" may look useful in a film out projected 24fps uncompressed, it can be a problem making a DVD, BluRay or compressed cable and broadcast.

To do interframe compression parts of the frame are only updated maybe 4fps to 8fps so the grain will stand still in those parts of the frame. Also grain increases the bandwith used in "blank" parts of the frame, so the parts that should have detail may suffer loss of bandwidth because of competition with the grain.

To reduce bandwidth the compressor may filter the "grain" down, but it may do so unevenly so that parts of the frame that move may show more grain than parts of the frame that stand "still" making for a distracting effect where patches of grain are sharp then fuzzy short of blinking at about 4Hz.

Adding "grain" in digital form can be a bigger issue than film grain, since film grain is from 8 to 16 pixels in area at 4K or larger, digital grain tends to have sharper edges since it is computer generated and not opticaly imaged. The sharper the grain the more it will interact with peaking in the TV or projector, and the more it will be at the detail threshold of the compressor grain/noise filters.

Also, resizing the 4K or 2K images down to HD or SD/DVD in hardware or software can make grain change, and make the images look noisier. Since you do not know where your images are going, adding noise can introduce problems later in the compressed and resized formats, and you cannot go back and re-do everything without cost to fix the messed up results.

I have noticed that the best DVDs seem to run the images through a edge softening filter of some kind, maybe to reduce bandwidth and blocking. Adding grain would have the opposite i.e. using more bandwidth and increasing blocking (and reducing the time you can store on the DVD since more bandwidth means less DVD recording time).

To get true film grain look, the resolution of the grain must be different size in the yellow, magenta, and cyan since the grain sizes are not the same in film, also the grain size varies with the density since in a neg-pos process the grains are larger at both ends of the scale (but the spaces are smaller), but grain is most noticeable in the mid-tones since that is were the film is about 50% light blocking and 50% light transmiting.

I would recommend making a DVD of your test footage at different bit rates for the MEPG2 to check the effect of the grain depth in your original 4K or 2K DPX files. Play the DVD on both computer and DVD player with TV since the TV and computer monitor do not look the same because the TV has low pass filters. And if you have access to the compressors used for compressed cable HD try the current 3 HD programs in one SD bandwidth setting they seem to be using now.

I saw what appeared to be a BluRay showing a movie in a store, and the image had grain that "splotched" on and off in different parts of the frame because of its interaction with the compression. I have had BIG problems working with MPEG2 conversion of things that look fine in a uncompressed AVI, but show very bad results with grain, blocking, and other blinking artifacts from there being too much detail in the AVI for the compressor to deal with, it makes some things like grain and edges both sharper in places and fuzzer in other places then changes the places the artifacts show up a few frames later even on a static shot made from the SAME freeze frame!
 
Thanks DANCAD3D,

it's good to all those stuff.

My test here was for an aesthetic purpose only and not for any DVD-Blu-Ray burning.

Also as you can see I had another issue with the lens (Zeiss T2 85mm with PL adapter)

and FF during shooting to get this particular shot to look better as it can... :sick: & :) .
 
I wonder if we're gonna see an intra-frame consumer codec in the near future.

For delivery in BluRay or other media.

Is the RED RAY codec inter-frame or intra?
 
RED RAY should be R3D.

BTW if I would need a real film look I should get a print to film option using 2K or 4K from RED master in DPX/Cineon compression.

But this example above in this tread is just to get a feeling about film look with RED.
 
The Third Man said:
RED RAY should be R3D.

BTW if I would need a real film look I should get a print to film option using 2K or 4K from RED master in DPX/Cineon compression.

But this example above in this tread is just to get a feeling about film look with RED.
Click to expand...

OT: where can one print 4k to film? Any addresses and/or prices?
 
www.DANCAD3D.com said:
Just a note to point out that although "grain" may look useful in a film out projected 24fps uncompressed, it can be a problem making a DVD, BluRay or compressed cable and broadcast.

To do interframe compression parts of the frame are only updated maybe 4fps to 8fps so the grain will stand still in those parts of the frame. Also grain increases the bandwith used in "blank" parts of the frame, so the parts that should have detail may suffer loss of bandwidth because of competition with the grain.

To reduce bandwidth the compressor may filter the "grain" down, but it may do so unevenly so that parts of the frame that move may show more grain than parts of the frame that stand "still" making for a distracting effect where patches of grain are sharp then fuzzy short of blinking at about 4Hz.

Adding "grain" in digital form can be a bigger issue than film grain, since film grain is from 8 to 16 pixels in area at 4K or larger, digital grain tends to have sharper edges since it is computer generated and not opticaly imaged. The sharper the grain the more it will interact with peaking in the TV or projector, and the more it will be at the detail threshold of the compressor grain/noise filters.

Also, resizing the 4K or 2K images down to HD or SD/DVD in hardware or software can make grain change, and make the images look noisier. Since you do not know where your images are going, adding noise can introduce problems later in the compressed and resized formats, and you cannot go back and re-do everything without cost to fix the messed up results.

I have noticed that the best DVDs seem to run the images through a edge softening filter of some kind, maybe to reduce bandwidth and blocking. Adding grain would have the opposite i.e. using more bandwidth and increasing blocking (and reducing the time you can store on the DVD since more bandwidth means less DVD recording time).

To get true film grain look, the resolution of the grain must be different size in the yellow, magenta, and cyan since the grain sizes are not the same in film, also the grain size varies with the density since in a neg-pos process the grains are larger at both ends of the scale (but the spaces are smaller), but grain is most noticeable in the mid-tones since that is were the film is about 50% light blocking and 50% light transmiting.

I would recommend making a DVD of your test footage at different bit rates for the MEPG2 to check the effect of the grain depth in your original 4K or 2K DPX files. Play the DVD on both computer and DVD player with TV since the TV and computer monitor do not look the same because the TV has low pass filters. And if you have access to the compressors used for compressed cable HD try the current 3 HD programs in one SD bandwidth setting they seem to be using now.

I saw what appeared to be a BluRay showing a movie in a store, and the image had grain that "splotched" on and off in different parts of the frame because of its interaction with the compression. I have had BIG problems working with MPEG2 conversion of things that look fine in a uncompressed AVI, but show very bad results with grain, blocking, and other blinking artifacts from there being too much detail in the AVI for the compressor to deal with, it makes some things like grain and edges both sharper in places and fuzzer in other places then changes the places the artifacts show up a few frames later even on a static shot made from the SAME freeze frame!
Click to expand...
Absolutely correct about this. It can be a real problem. Takes a lot of experimenting to get it to work, if it works at all. MPEG just doesn't like grain. We played with a lot of tests early on with film look software and it was very difficult when going to DVD.
 
Joofa said:
H.264 already allows for Intra-frame compression in addition to the usual inter-frame compression.
Click to expand...


I suppose that this is part of higher-end compressors.

I failed to find such options in the Premiere [Main Concept] h.264 encoder.

I think that the open-source x264 doesn't have it either.

Does h.264 from FCP have this?
 
karapetkov said:
I suppose that this is part of higher-end compressors.

I failed to find such options in the Premiere [Main Concept] h.264 encoder.

I think that the open-source x264 doesn't have it either.

Does h.264 from FCP have this?
Click to expand...

First of all typically compression standards only define the decoder and not the encoder. The implementation of an encoder is left to whomever is implementing the encoder. Therefore, if Premiere/FCP are not allowing this, then they just chose not to do it.

I would think x264 should give more control than Premiere/FCP, and I surprised that as you mention it did not let you do so.
 
Joofa said:
I would think x264 should give more control than Premiere/FCP, and I surprised that as you mention it did not let you do so.
Click to expand...


I'm not 100 % certain if it does it or not.

This little thingy [x264] is actually huge. :)

Maybe I haven't found the right options.

Hmmm... probably it's this "lossless" mode that they've recently introduced, cause it disables all B-frame options and blocking schemes.

But it also creates huge files...

I guess that, if you want the quality, you gotta pay for it :).
 
shooter said:
Excellent post DanCad3D. There was another post on this issue related to the reasons broadcast networks won't accept 16mm film for HD broadcast due to the grain and problems with MPEG compression.

-shooter
Click to expand...

Sorry but that's bollocks.

*SOME* broadcasters don't like 16mm because they are trying to compress the crap out of their TV broadcast signals. As far as I know, no Australian broadcasters have refused 16mm. *SOME* departments within the BBC and their partner network Discovery have mandated this because of the way *they* choose to compress (over compress?) their images.

If anything I have heard here in Australia that some HDV formats (or anything less than 50 Mbs) is not up to scratch. One documentary maker colleague of mine was told that HDV and XDCAM EX were'nt good enough, and that he had to shoot on a 1920 capable camera. A pretty expensive impost on an indie documentary maker.

When someone says something that is blatently incorrect like this, it seems to have a way of becoming fact.

The truth is that a VERY SMALL number of broadcasters have issues with 16mm, and most delivery documents don't actually specify the origination format.

The fact that video and compression engineers are making judgements on the technical quality is also pretty disappointing when it should actually be about the content itself.

I once had a show I worked on rejected by a German broadcaster for severe blanking issues.

When we looked at the footage at the TC they specified on the tape, it was a shot of a photo being projected through a slide projector onto a wall. They didn't like all the black space around the image. The director, had chosen to shoot the projected slides off a wall instead of the usual scan and 2D move.

Even then, it still took a lot of convincing and we had to go to the head of the network to get them to override the rejection !

jb
 
IRON MAN in DLP not so grany?

IRON MAN in DLP not so grany?

The Third Man said:
RED as a FILM LOOK
I just saw IRON MAN trailers and found out that an old grainy film look from 80's is very IN at the moment.
Click to expand...

I went down to see IRON MAN in DLP projection to see what you were talking about with the "grainy look". With the DLP projection it did not look very grany like 300 except for a few shots.

Sometime Trailers are opticaly printed from a edited printing negative, but I would not think they would do that since it said the film had a DI in the credits (obviously). The Trailer might be on Agfa or Lucky print stock? Maybe they ran out of Trailers and made a "dirty dupe":umm: ?

Anyway, the film looks OK on DLP although the projector seems to have a chromatic aberration giving everything a rainbow fringe, maybe the projector needs work, they turned the lights down more than normal for around here, but the projector was leeking light so there was light passing through the black parts maybe about like the Kodak print stock with the weak black.

Over all IRON MAN looks good, a kid behind me keept saying out loud "Oooo" and "Wahooo" and sometimes "That's coooool", he sounded around 6. He did this about every five minutes over the length of the film!

What grain I saw in IRON MAN, in most shots, could probably be filtered out before the frames get to DVD compression.

The film scans I have been working with show MUCH more grain even from 35mm. When you color correct you are stretching histogram so anything noisy in the image gets more contrast in some part of the curve, that makes dust and grain heaver. Best to get the source frames as clean and bright as you can at least to archive, since with everything being compressed, and the economic incentive to make things a bad as one can get away with to squeeze the penny, you don't know what will happen to your images.

One thing you might try is to make a Black and White copy of each frame, add grain noise to the Black and White copy, adjust the gamma to make that copy lighter in the mid-tones, run the Black and White copy through a soften filter, then combine that soft grany Black and White copy with the Color copy of the frame, increase the saturation, and adjust the gamma on the combo to make the mid tones like they were in the original, that gives you 4 color results like bleach bypass or some Technicolor prints that were yellow-cyan-magenta-plus silver.
 
Grain is really an emotional thing.

I've been doing 35mm film out service for a decade now, and have seen so many different ways of poeple trying to make their footage "look like film". Some used plugins to add jitter, scratches, light changes. Some added grain, which makes very rare sense on film out if you go on film. Just print on film and you'll have grain again, native and natural film grain... But as I said ist an emotional thing, a matter of taste. The best approach to resemble "film look" with electronic cameras is to simulate the DOF. A collegue from me (who build the Drake camera) has build a device about 15-20 years ago, to mount native 35mm lenses using a matte screen onto a 16mm Beaulieu camera. It was for his own. Only five years ago P+S Technik became popular with an exact copy of that device. They didn't know of each other, so it was a reborn identical devlopment. Ben (Gabler) the inventor of the P+S 35mm adapter (I know him, he's from Frankfurt as my company is, and we did the very first 90min feature with the P+S adapter ever in history) made a good decision doing this device. It was IMHO the biggest impact on electronic "filming" ever in history. My collegue still bites his back for this, but thats life...

So it comes down that the DOF of 35mm film is the most important thing to distinguish "film" from "video", to distinguish "artificial storytelling" from "live reality news gathering".

I just think if Buster Keaton would be still alive, do you think he would have shot ~18fps B/W shaky images, or instead choose the very best technology available to show his work, his stories, his stunts?
I think he would opt for the better quality images, with no grain, no flickering, no scratches, no jitter, color! He would surely have bought a RED or two...

OK, thats a bit off theme now, but I think these revivals of looks will quickly disappear in the next decade, as digitial acquisition and projection become a reality.

Many poeple consider grain, jitter etc. to make a film feel like a film. If you analyze that a bit more you quickly find that film as we know it so far is very quickly recognized by our brain as a form of story telling, where as digital material not showing this kind of "artefacts" has more impact to our brain in terms of feeling like a window to reality. We recognize a "film" as being artificial, whereas we recognize CNN as being real. This has also to do with DOF. The extreme small DOF of 35mm storytelling forces the people to follow an instructed line of viewing, the director and DOP "direct" the spectators to "follow focus". In news gathering we have sharp images all over, we can watch whereever we want, regardless of where the DOP wanted us to watch, because we can focus on almost everything. Thats underlines that "reality window" effect.

I do imagine that at some point some drastically "real" movies will appear on the large screens (wasn't Dogma already an approach towards this?) that will shatter us with leaving us more room to watch to, to feel uncomfortably real, to suck us into the story far more than any traditional story telling. 3D is becoming interesting here as well, as 3D is a bit more complex to handle with regards to DOF effects.

I do not vote pro or contra film grain, I just wanted to explore some thoughts and concepts behind the way we look at images. Thats mainly a psychological thing. I know a lot of poeple who have real problems when films become "to real", when their stomach can no longer decide if its truely happening "now" or if its an artifical unrealistic story being "watched" just currently, which can be stopped anytime.

So grainy looks, as cool as they might be, are often working very controversy in context of "reality" but more in a context of "in which decade does that storytelling play". The more grain a film has, the more sepia it has, the more we go back in time. In future we'll miss that feature I guess, as cameras become technically perfect, far better than what our eye would ever detect as "artificial". Have you seen the NHK UHD stuff, live? I did on IBC, and it blew me away, even more than Peter Jacksons work with RED 4K on the big screen one year later. That UHD stuff is feeling like a window, it sucks you up. But RED 4K is already very very close to this. And that is good, because UHD is unbelieveable far away...

Just some thoughts for the night :)

Axel
 
I think that it all depends upon the story.

The story dictates the visuals.

For that super-clean grainless look to work for the story, it has to be a situated in the present, or in the last... 20 years.

It might be used in a futuristic story or in a story about a totally imaginary world.

But before say... 1984 ;).... it wouldn't look right, IMHO.

For example, would you use this kind of visuals in a WWII movie... in the trenches... super clean trenches footage?... wouldn't work for me...

And would you give me a super clean and pure, grainless close-up on Julius Caesar, while giving a speech to his seasoned soldiers.

There's 5000 years of human history that kinda suggests grain :)... and only a mere 20-30 years that would allow for a super clean picture to be a good thing for the story.

For me, grain is here to stay.

Anyway, juz my 2c.

Different people, different ideals.

Sya, gotta watch Munich now...

Spielberg is a grainy guy.

:)
 
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