RED RAW to 35mm

[John Moores]

I have a test shot on RED that we're putting to 35mm 4k. I'm looking for advice on how best to export frames from Red Alert to optimize them for going to film. I was going to export linear 16-bit tiffs and then convert them to dpx LOG files, but if anyone has experience with filmouts, or any suggestions, I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks
John

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Hi John

I am doing a film out test at Technicolor. The print should be ready to look at next week.

Can't comment on the technical specs you require. Who is going to do the film print?

They usually handle the conversion from R3d to DPX.

PM me if you want to view the test next week.

 

[Antoine Fabi]

Hi Johnny,

I made a 35mm film print for a 30 sec commercial last year.

It looked very very good in theaters.

I sent a TIFF image sequence and the audio track with a Two Pop.

I graded it here in FCP and asked the transfer house that i wanted the film to look exactly the way i graded it, without any change.

It looked exactly the way i graded it.

There must be MANY good methods, but this one worked 100%.

Hope it helps.

Antoine

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Hi Johnny,

I graded it here in FCP and asked the transfer house that i wanted the film to look exactly the way i graded it, without any change.

It looked exactly the way i graded it.

There must be MANY good methods, but this one worked 100%.

I don't know what display device you ware using, in what viewing environment, but typically all that needs to have some custom Lut's for your specific display and some short of monitor calibration to happen...

We offer a consulting service that makes Color from FCS2 to be able to have WYSIWYG for film out... it's not an easy task to achieve it... in terms of color management... the big post houses with DI systems are spending thousands of dollars to achieve it...

Read this thread http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=18545

 

[John Moores]

Hi Evangelos,
Thanks for the info. For this particular test we aren't trying to match a filmout to any individual look we've created; we shot 35mm side by side with RED,the idea being to see what the differences are. So what we want is the closest thing to "natural" RED as possible. I'm assuming that would be to export dpx files as REDLOG...
Thoughts?

Best
John

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Unfortunately thats not possible... the film recording process will add a red yellow cast and the blacks will be lifted due to the photochemical process and the film emulsions of negative and positive stock that will be used in the film recording process... The REDLog is not a proper Log encoding so you will have overexposed highlights... The film thats being captured by a film camera its being desinged to correct all these errors photochemically, so the answer print from the film will look great...

I thing the best it will be to export linear TIFF images in REDspace and hope that your lab will have same magic empirical method to came close...

But forget about DPX Log... it really needs calibrated grading environment to correct the image and put it in the proper range with the proper correction to work.

 

[simonpeterarnold]

Unfortunately thats not possible... the film recording process will add a red yellow cast and the blacks will be lifted due to the photochemical process and the film emulsions of negative and positive stock that will be used in the film recording process... The REDLog is not a proper Log encoding so you will have overexposed highlights... The film thats being captured by a film camera its being desinged to correct all these errors photochemically, so the answer print from the film will look great...

I thing the best it will be to export linear TIFF images in REDspace and hope that your lab will have same magic empirical method to came close...

But forget about DPX Log... it really needs calibrated grading environment to correct the image and put it in the proper range with the proper correction to work.

We have experienced issues with moving Red in to filmspace as you loose lots of latitude and your system really does need calibrating accordingly. As we use Baselight our colour scientist team devised a plan and decided the best method would be to debayer Linear 16bit Tiffs with no matrix and devised a Trulight profile that convert the files on ingest into baselight to print density and apply a LUT so we could see how it would look on film. It all worked but we never actually printed back to film its just a workflow.

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Simon, what you saw in the digital projection needed some correction? or the LUT is also, except of the density conversion, fixes the asymmetry of the photochemical process?

In plain English, do you see (on the digital projection after all conversions) what the DoP and Director see on their monitors while they were shooting?