Setting Epic black levels to ZERO

[Nino Tamburri]

I recently shot a web series where were shooting, cutting and delivering on the road.
Due to the nature and turn around time of the project we recorded to a PIX240 for a prores edit and finish in FCP7.

The editor also did a very basic colour grade. This is obviously not an ideal situation to say the least, but that was the gig.
We were looking at the red footage on the scopes and saw that the IRE black levels were sitting slightly above zero.
I ended up making an adjustment to the X axis Black levels in the LUMA option of the curves adjustment menu. A setting of 0.03 seemed to reduce the black levels to ZERO on the RGB scopes in the editing software, and gave us nice rich blacks out of the camera.

My question is! Is this the best way to reduce the black levels to Zero without affecting any other part of the image, or is there a more simple way?

Thanks

 

[Marc Wielage]

My question is! Is this the best way to reduce the black levels to Zero without affecting any other part of the image, or is there a more simple way?

Yes. Hire an experienced colorist with a calibrated monitor and good scopes, and have them drop the blacks where you need them to be. Custom curves, density, and other adjustments are all part of that. There is no "one size fits all" adjustment.

Important safety tip: often when you have a shot where there was no actual black in the scene -- like a low-contrast shot with fog or problematic lightings -- the image can start getting very ugly when you force the blacks down. It takes a lot of skill to control this and avoid noise and other kinds of artifacts.

 

[Tom Gleeson]

Nino,

I usually have shadow set to -.1 in the Looks Menu. But I should qualify that this is done for more pleasing monitoring and generally the material is graded.

 

[Nick Shaw]

I would suggest that it is not necessarily a problem in the workflow you are using to have the blacks slightly raised in the original recording. It is a trivial matter to make a colour correction preset in FCP7 and apply it to all the clips to sit the blacks down. If you do it in camera, and then record that to the PIX240, you risk lowering it too much, and clipping off shadow detail.

You could try recording REDLogFilm to the PIX, and using my FCP7 plugin to convert that to REDgamma3 (with the option of a pedestal adjustment in the plugin). However this may not be suitable, due to the 8-bit limit in my plugin. It depends where your deliverable is going to be seen. I know people have done this for the web.