Steve Yedlin, ASC on Resolution

[Marc Wielage]

I used to believe that 35mm film had 4K+ worth of resolution, but I think Yedlin has shown it tops out at 3K max, though the difficulty here is not necessarily capturing the spacial fidelity but the color fidelity of the film.

When I worked for Kodak's Cinesite division in the early 2000s, the color scientists there told me privately that they felt the maximum resolution of 35mm 5219 negative was about 6K. But the trick was, a lot of factors prevented that 6K from ever being seen: jitter, focus, lens quality, exposure, contrast... lots of factors.

By the time you took film through a normal OCN -> IP -> IN -> release print stage, you were very lucky to have even 2K resolution. And that's one reason they chose 2K for the original Cineon format (and subsequent digital intermediate process). If you struck a print directly from the camera negative and bypassed the other formats, the quality was a lot better.

Color quality is a subjective area, but the guy who I think knew the most about that was Glenn Kennel, who was a big part of Kodak's 1990s Cineon project. He's been president of Arri America (and had a lot of input on Alexa) over the last 10 years. It's fair to say that Kennel's understanding of film color science has informed what Alexa does with digital color science.

 

[Adrian Jebef]

Harald Brendel lead color scientist at Arri was heavily involved with the cineon scanner and laser and was pulled onto the D-20 and Alexa projects. A simple but good interview:

[video]https://100.arri.com/interviews/event/5996c16ce625d77d504897e4[/video]


I've taken a class under Harald and he and his small team are a big reason Arri has dominated the professional imaging space. Looking forward it's all about HDR display instead of resolution. 8K doesn't hold a candle to 21 stops.

When I worked for Kodak's Cinesite division in the early 2000s, the color scientists there told me privately that they felt the maximum resolution of 35mm 5219 negative was about 6K. But the trick was, a lot of factors prevented that 6K from ever being seen: jitter, focus, lens quality, exposure, contrast... lots of factors.

By the time you took film through a normal OCN -> IP -> IN -> release print stage, you were very lucky to have even 2K resolution. And that's one reason they chose 2K for the original Cineon format (and subsequent digital intermediate process). If you struck a print directly from the camera negative and bypassed the other formats, the quality was a lot better.

Color quality is a subjective area, but the guy who I think knew the most about that was Glenn Kennel, who was a big part of Kodak's 1990s Cineon project. He's been president of Arri America (and had a lot of input on Alexa) over the last 10 years. It's fair to say that Kennel's understanding of film color science has informed what Alexa does with digital color science.

 

[Phil Holland]

If there's any interest in it, though much of my notes on my experiences are tossed around here on REDuser already.

As somebody who used to "do this" and also happened to work a heck of a lot with the first 4K film scanner the moving to the 6K scanner (Northlight) and also choosing it over an 8K one (Imagica).

Here's the general rundown. Super 35mm film captures around 4K resolution, however, we noticed distinct advantages of oversampling and scanning in at 6K to produce a grain size that's larger than a pixel and downsampling to 4K or 2K working resolution. There are subtle nuances in resolution between different film stocks, but that's a negligible if we are talking anything Vision II or Vision III related.

Everything that at my old studio was scanned in at 4K or 6K and scaled down to working resolution or kept at it's native resolution. Back out on the laser recorder we would either upscale and sharpen back out to 4K or provide a 4K file to the ARRILaser (before that LUXs, before that Solitaires which we still used for larger format filmouts).

While working with various formats, mainly Super 35mm through 70mm 15-perf IMAX, we did a lot of tests and I went through rather painstaking lengths to scan in film at very high resolutions, especially the larger formats like 65mm 5-perf, 8-perf, and 70mm 15-perf.

Long and the short of it, as Marc mentioned, there's a lot of things that get in the way of a pristine optical transfer hitting the eyes of viewers. For those fortunate to see it through at the studio, what has bothered so many Directors and DPs over the years was the film we were producing wasn't exactly ending up on viewers eyeballs. There's also a lot of interesting potential for issues with the film plane remaining stable during capture, especially on larger formats as the negative size itself is more prone to vibration due to things related to gate, sprocket to perf, and general film transport movements.

If you've been fortunate to shoot timelapse on 70mm you notice pretty clearly that in motion versus still frames are rather different in resolve power when comparing stills. However, the resolution gains are still there more or less in motion. So while you should be getting 11.5K w/ 70mm, typically it really falls down into the 5.7-6.5K resolution arena in practice and degrades from there down the line. For film though, it is still the highest possible resolving thing technically speaking, though I would bargain that 65mm 5-perf and VistaVision can net you an overall better shooting experience in a variety of ways outside of the larger format size related aesthetics.

On the technical level in most ways with 8K digital cinema cameras you are producing a higher visual quality than most film based workflows overall. Even down to color when we get into how big a pixel is versus how big an silver halide crystal is, the quantity of them exposed with color information, tonal information, and the gaps within the substrate itself. Right down to dynamic range, film tends to top out at 13 stops and if you know what you are doing and doing it well you can likely sneak out 15 stops. Most digital cinema cameras have surpassed that a while back even.

That said, what makes motion picture film beautiful is it's overall aesthetic towards how it captures light, color, and tonality as well as more unique effects from the medium such as halation and highlight roll-off. In many ways digital has surpassed film on technical levels. Creatively though it still represents a fine medium for visual storytelling, as do modern digital cinema cameras.

We're all painting, just with different paint. (It's Just Paint reference right there for those who know me)


I've got some thoughts I need to organize and likely figure out the best way to display them that are lightly towards the contrarian side of some of what's discussed (and clearly not discussed), but it's all rather empirical with a range into creative subjection. It's 2018 afterall. Might be time to tie all of this up with a nice ribbon and bow.

**edit and again while much of this is on REDuser I've publicly displayed all of my resolution R&D and research in a slightly more useful form of a format comparison tool, for instance RED Monstro 8K VV versus VistaVision:
http://phfx.com/tools/formatCompare/formatCompare.cgi?formatOne_typeTech=Kodak%7CFilm&formatOne_format=VistaVision+8-Perf&formatTwo_typeTech=RED%7CMonstro+8K+VV&formatTwo_format=8K+FF&focalLengths=

 

[John Brawley]

If you struck a print directly from the camera negative and bypassed the other formats, the quality was a lot better.

1000%.

I saw an anamorphic film called "Silent Light" at the Sydney Film festival a few years ago, and lucky enough to chat to the director about it afterwards. It was beautifully shot, very simple and naturalistically done.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0841925

It looked so magnificent, so much more subtle and beautiful than other film prints I was seeing at the same time during the festival and I asked him about his process. He smiled and told me I'd just watched an answer print and he had bypassed scanning and DI for exactly this reason knowing his film would be a "limited release" He felt that we'd all gotten used to 2K scans of film and forgotten how good a first generation anamorphic film print can look.

It was breathtakingly good seeing what photochemical origination and projection from a first generation film print could produce and I think he was right. After nearly a decade (at that point) of looking at DI and digital projection, instead of traditionally finished and timed film prints I do think we've forgotten how good film can be on it's best day.

Sadly though, most prints were never going to look that good because of the many shortcuts taken by distributors and exhibitors in the film days.

I'm pretty sure now days you'd struggle to even do a film print finish like his.

And as a side note, many many of the films that are still with us today exist because of projectionists and others bootlegging a print for themselves. I somehow don't see anyone keeping useless DCP / DCI prints on a hard drive. What also amazes me is how films can now look better than they originally did because the scanning technology has gotten better and better and we can get more from the film. Anyone see "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week ?" in a cinema ? I was so used to seeing them as "archival" footage, but it often felt very contemporary once they re-scanned and restored the film that existed of them.

JB

 

[Michael Tiemann]

1000%.

I saw an anamorphic film called "Silent Light" at the Sydney Film festival a few years ago, and lucky enough to chat to the director about it afterwards. It was beautifully shot, very simple and naturalistically done.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0841925

It looked so magnificent, so much more subtle and beautiful than other film prints I was seeing at the same time during the festival and I asked him about his process. He smiled and told me I'd just watched an answer print and he had bypassed scanning and DI for exactly this reason knowing his film would be a "limited release" He felt that we'd all gotten used to 2K scans of film and forgotten how good a first generation anamorphic film print can look.

It was breathtakingly good seeing what photochemical origination and projection from a first generation film print could produce and I think he was right. After nearly a decade (at that point) of looking at DI and digital projection, instead of traditionally finished and timed film prints I do think we've forgotten how good film can be on it's best day.

Sadly though, most prints were never going to look that good because of the many shortcuts taken by distributors and exhibitors in the film days.

I'm pretty sure now days you'd struggle to even do a film print finish like his.

And as a side note, many many of the films that are still with us today exist because of projectionists and others bootlegging a print for themselves. I somehow don't see anyone keeping useless DCP / DCI prints on a hard drive. What also amazes me is how films can now look better than they originally did because the scanning technology has gotten better and better and we can get more from the film. Anyone see "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week ?" in a cinema ? I was so used to seeing them as "archival" footage, but it often felt very contemporary once they re-scanned and restored the film that existed of them.

JB

...which brings us back to Michael Cioni's point (from another thread): you can never have too much quality at acquisition.

As Marc Wielage says above, 2K was never a resolution given us by God as the answer for the maximum resolution anybody would ever want. It was the answer "what do we have left after all the mean things we're going to do to images shot in our existing format?" As Phil Holland answers above, when given the opportunity to work with a higher-resolution acquisition format (such as 15-perf), then of course the logical result is a higher-resolution intermediary, which provides higher quality and also a wider range of exhibition formats. Those facts, and the one you give show pretty conclusively that yes, 2K is a reasonably compromise for the lowest common denominator of what comes out of the end of a 35mm film workflow. But it's not the best we can do. Moreover, when we look realistically at the obstacles from acquisition to exposition in the purely digital realm, even if we want to hit a 2K target (which is a low bar, as we've already established), we need space for debayer (1.5x to 2x for really high quality), plus space to reframe (another 1.2x - 1.5x) and sometimes the option to punch in (1.5x-2x). The latter two don't necessarily multiply, but the first times the range of the second gives us 1.8x-4x, which argues strongly for 4K-8K acquisition for strong 2K finish. If we are more ambitious about our exposition goals, these numbers go up accordingly, which is doubtless why Phil is shooting his aerials in 12K.

 

[Jacek Zakowicz]

Or, it could be just a marketing talk so camera manufacturers can sell new cameras easier ;-)

 

[M Most]

1000%.
Sadly though, most prints were never going to look that good because of the many shortcuts taken by distributors and exhibitors in the film days.

Going through an intermediate stage (i.e., OCN->IP->IN->Release Print) was not a "shortcut." It was a necessary series of steps in order to be able to mass produce release prints. It was never possible to produce 5000 prints from one original assembled negative, so multiple IPs were made, which were used to make mutliple IN's, and the prints were made from there. This was not a "choice" or a "shortcut", it was the only way to produce what was needed in the purely photochemical world. Studio prints, and a small number of archival prints, were often made directly from the original negative, but it was never more than a very small run, for obvious reasons (not wanting to damage the original negative being one pretty clear one....).

 

[M Most]

...which brings us back to Michael Cioni's point (from another thread): you can never have too much quality at acquisition.

2K was never a resolution given us by God as the answer for the maximum resolution anybody would ever want. It was the answer "what do we have left after all the mean things we're going to do to images shot in our existing format?"

In terms of film scanning that is partially true. What is also true is that the computer technology available at the time of Cineon's introduction did not really allow for higher than that, either in terms of storage or processing, at least not in a practical way. Today, the use of 2K as a release format is common because DLP Cinema projectors were made that way. The use of a "lower than 4K" format for things like VFX is still common because today's large features often have a VFX content of 80% or more of the shots in the movie, meaning that thousands of shots going through the VFX pipeline is pretty much par for the course for nearly all studio pictures today, whether they seem to be "VFX pictures" or not. Getting hundreds or thousands of composites involving hundreds of elements each done at the demanded quality level in a typical release time frame is still almost impossible today at higher resolutions. What is done today is a realization of those limitations, whether laypeople realize it or not.

 

[John Brawley]

Going through an intermediate stage (i.e., OCN->IP->IN->Release Print) was not a "shortcut." It was a necessary series of steps in order to be able to mass produce release prints. It was never possible to produce 5000 prints from one original assembled negative, so multiple IPs were made, which were used to make mutliple IN's, and the prints were made from there. This was not a "choice" or a "shortcut", it was the only way to produce what was needed in the purely photochemical world. Studio prints, and a small number of archival prints, were often made directly from the original negative, but it was never more than a very small run, for obvious reasons (not wanting to damage the original negative being one pretty clear one....).

Mike, I was talking about other problems...exhibitors under powering their projectors and substituting reels. Running prints long past their use by date after being damaged. I know an oscar winning DP who told me that a film he timed for a kodak release (In the US) was released on Fuji print stock in Australia because it was cheaper.

JB

 

[Björn Benckert]

Also very different to talk about a highres scan and a Cmos sensor. The scan actually scan 3x the resolution one time for each rgb color for every pixel with a color wheel infront of the gate. C-mos does things very differently.

I had 2 "highres" scaners one oxberry/Domino and a Arri Genesis. The Domino as I remember downsampled to 3k the Genisis scanned at max 4k. Lot of times we scanned 4k and downsampled to 2k did the VFX and then blow back up trough the domino using the sink algoritms. The difference on the final prints where pretty slim. And 99.9% of the time it was not the resolution of the scanner or printer that was the the weak link. More often there where poor exposure in camera, lens softness, lab iregularites and other things that had far greater impact on the final result than the actuall scanner / printer.

Developing on a monday did not give the same result on a tusday and so on the lab fluids where never the same and the result and colors had quite wide variations that when corrected also affect shapness.

I dont know how many kilometers of film we actually shot out. But I can say one thing, and that is that even the best of it does not come close to todays digital cameras.

Also something I see alot today in the digital world is "over graded" stuff, things that is simply tweeked to far in the grading process to look good on the big screen. When films where cut with sisssors, that was not an option. You had to nail exposure and even if you did not the shots got somewhat the same contrast ratio etc no matter if you wanted it or not. To day people tend to shoot one thing and then turning it into something else in the grade, sure sometimes that looks great, but to me more often it increase the artificial feel of it all.

 

[Rosie Scott]

It looked so magnificent, so much more subtle and beautiful than other film prints I was seeing at the same time during the festival and I asked him about his process. He smiled and told me I'd just watched an answer print and he had bypassed scanning and DI for exactly this reason knowing his film would be a "limited release"

JB

I had the same emotional reaction to the image when I saw an answer print of Dunkirk projected at the BFI IMAX; it was like being hit hard in the face...with subtlety. Doused in beautiful, deep subtlety. I personally didn't feel there was much of an emotional difference, if any, between the 15 perf and the 5 perf stuff, tbh.

 

[Aaron Lochert]

Reviving this thread because Steve Yedlin's done another brilliant demo. This one is a followup to his Display Prep demo. Inspirational, to say the least.

http://yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/DispPrepDemoFollowup.html

 

[andrewhake]

Reviving this thread because Steve Yedlin's done another brilliant demo. This one is a followup to his Display Prep demo. Inspirational, to say the least.

http://yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/DispPrepDemoFollowup.html

Very good video. So many people in this industry swear by one camera or the other for so many reasons that make no sense. If anything it just shows a lack of understanding of how all of this stuff works. I love the thought of "is this camera capable of capturing enough information to achieve the look I am after?". Because that is all that's really important in the end. So much of the discussion just becomes subjective and down to personal workflow preferences, and usually the preference just comes from someone having more experience with one tool or another.

I can't say I agree completely with a lot of his initial resolution discussion in the earlier videos though, although there are some very good points. I own and use a DSMC2 Gemini that only shoots 5k that can create an extremely nice well resolved 4k image, for most of my use cases this is more than adequate for what I am shooting, but having seen content shot on an 8k camera and displayed at 8k, I am fully convinced that additional resolution is useful depending on what is shot. I definitely think there is a limit to how much resolution is useful. But saying it is 2k or 3k is misleading given the content that is being shown and especially how it is being shown. Resolution is a tool just like any other camera attributes. When given examples where resolution isn't as important (such as humans in poorly lit rooms with limited focus) yes it won't be apparently as important. If his examples were different, the entire perception would change. I think the more interesting discussion is around screen size versus resolution, and how much this effects perception. When zoomed and cropped in on a particular portion of an image, resolution isn't as important as when viewing an entire image full on at scale in front of you, on a screen size that makes it the "same" FOV as the zoomed and cropped 1:1 size on a smaller screen. On a small screen your field of vision can't get fully engulfed like it can on a larger screen while also maintaining perceived sharpness, because you can't put your face up to a small display and maintain the same level of focus. So again if the presentation was different, the perception of sharpness would change. Whether or not that perception changes due to resolution or FOV I'm not sure, but I think is the more interesting discussion. Especially with the types of extremely high resolution low pixel pitch LED walls that are slowing becoming more mainstream. If the example images he shot were of a vast panoramic landscape with endless amounts of high frequency detail, and you were viewing on a massive high resolution display, your perception of sharpness would almost certainly change when comparing to lower resolution counterparts.

The argument that as resolution increases compression will have to as well is also extremely misleading and just plain untrue in most cases in terms of capture and delivery to viewers. Bandwidth and compression algorithms are only improving, as are most people's viewing capabilities. If anything as resolution increases compression just gets more efficient at maintaining image quality while using less space. There probably is a point where people don't consider themselves bandwidth or viewing limited, and where filmmakers don't consider themselves resolution limited any longer, but we have probably just recently arrived at that point with Alexa 65 6k and Red 8k Monstro. And are getting close to arriving there with viewing with modern OLED (and future microLED) displays, as well as high quality LED theater walls.

I do agree that creative choices like color correction, dynamic range, noise, focus, and most importantly subject matter can have a larger effect on perceived image quality and perceived resolution. Personally after getting accustomed the the contrast ratio and black levels a modern OLED consumer TV, going to any pubic movie theater besides one of Dolby's with much better contrast and black levels is kind of painful. And having seen what is possible with high resolution (far beyond 8k) low pixel pitch LED walls, which basically feel like looking at a gigantic OLED TV with blacks that are actually black, that disdain for protectors and silver screens just increases further. My "perceived resolution" is drastically increased when looking at higher dynamic range. Even if the content being shown isn't as "high quality" in terms of bit depth and resolution, the perceived quality can be much higher just because of the viewing situation. Sound plays a huge roll in that as well, but again that is very content dependent and very subjective. Personally I don't really care that much about delivery at higher than 4k resolution for most viewing theatrical viewing cases. Especially when it comes to images of humans captured by a camera and lens. I think we are getting to the point where lenses are the more limiting factor in terms of sharpness and resolution, and not camera sensors. And also how much resolution I want to see of other humans haha. I think resolution is more useful as a tool when the content doesn't involve other humans. It becomes much more dramatic when looking at things we aren't using to seeing every day, like exotic animals or parts of nature we aren't used to seeing. I do VFX/animation for a living and I have created and viewed that content at much higher resolutions than 4k, or even 8k, and at 60fps, for very particular use cases. And comparing that to a lower resolution version on the same large screen size can be quite dramatic depending on the content. So maybe if I could see content shot by a 16k camera, on a 16k LED wall, with lenses that can resolve 16k in a meaningful way my perception would shift again. But probably not if all people do with it is point that camera at humans in a poorly lit set to do camera tests and talk about pointless things that can easily be handled in post like rendition of skin tones..

 

[Patrick Tresch]

I love the idea of the camera being a data collection machine. The look is backed in only when you reach the limit of the machine.
The more infos you can capture the better you can create a look. In todays highend cameras there are no limits that differentiate camera looks. It's what you acchieve in post and pipeline used wich makes the look not the camera.


I would love to hear from Graeme about the RAW part of the video in @ 26'00''. It looks like if debayer process would be something very simple... and color decisions like color temp and tint don't change the quality of the signal if it's done before or after the RGB conversion. "Color beeing geometry and not color subtility" 32'15''

Pat

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

What does Steve like to view his content on? An 1080, uhd or 8k display? One problem with full hd was viewing "high frequency" scenes like a forest with alot of tiny leaves and thin straws of grass moving in the wind, and a slow moving camera (to much movement and the motionblur could eat the problem away). Things starts to "flicker" (flicker is not the correct word for this artifact, but you know what I mean). The same scene in uhd on a uhd television will not have this issue. Having to much post sharpening on the television will exaggerate this effect to.

I just think uhd make high frequency images more natural and more pleasant. For low frequency image I cant argue. But why not shoot at high resolution when you can and save you master file. And if you have a slow computer/dont think you need more than 1080. Then you just downsample down to 1080 and gain all the bennefits downsampling. Even if you would uppress this at a later point you still be better of than if you original was shot at 1080.

Also for keying thin straws of grass when the blue screen is far away from the camera. Then you will be glad if the straw is more than 2 pixels wide.

Will be interesting to view this new video and its an interesting discussion. Thanks Steve.

 

[Phil Holland]

Won't speak for Steve here on any level, but I was at this event and what was more enriching was being able to pick Steve's noggin on a variety of topics afterwards at Cat and the Fiddle for likely way too long. Very appreciative of that.

There's a lot to digest with his work on the Prep Demo and at it's core the word Authorship is key. That will likely mean a lot of different things to different people, but Steve's deconstructive approach to crafting a final image is admirable in the sense that he is basically normalizing whatever he's working with and building from there. Though the focus here isn't exactly a resolution focus, in conversation the clear point of motion picture film as medium in many ways has ran it's course, which is echoed industry wide. In fact, as Steve mentioned it was indeed the lowest resolving medium in a realm of higher resolution modern digital cinema cameras whose technical merit also extends to cleaner images, more light sensitive capture tools, more dynamic range, and even more color. Steve's demo really shows that aiming for a print film essentially emulation you can craft a nearly identical image, which is something that is common in higher end VFX, especially on projects mixing digital and motion picture film. But the note about the appropriate medium in there is one to take home with you, especially on image cleanliness. And one thing that really needs to be discussed further now is the advancement of consumer display technology in relationship to the images we are creating for them.

Steve is a fan of having more information as starting point for sure, because with that you can direct it to wherever you want to go. Which is pretty much seen here.

In the theater at EFilm btw it was a 4K projector.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Won't speak for Steve here on any level, but I was at this event and what was more enriching was being able to pick Steve's noggin on a variety of topics afterwards at Cat and the Fiddle for likely way too long. Very appreciative of that.

There's a lot to digest with his work on the Prep Demo and at it's core the word Authorship is key. That will likely mean a lot of different things to different people, but Steve's deconstructive approach to crafting a final image is admirable in the sense that he is basically normalizing whatever he's working with and building from there. Though the focus here isn't exactly a resolution focus, in conversation the clear point of motion picture film as medium in many ways has ran it's course, which is echoed industry wide. In fact, as Steve mentioned it was indeed the lowest resolving medium in a realm of higher resolution modern digital cinema cameras whose technical merit also extends to cleaner images, more light sensitive capture tools, more dynamic range, and even more color. Steve's demo really shows that aiming for a print film essentially emulation you can craft a nearly identical image, which is something that is common in higher end VFX, especially on projects mixing digital and motion picture film. But the note about the appropriate medium in there is one to take home with you, especially on image cleanliness. And one thing that really needs to be discussed further now is the advancement of consumer display technology in relationship to the images we are creating for them.

Steve is a fan of having more information as starting point for sure, because with that you can direct it to wherever you want to go. Which is pretty much seen here.

In the theater at EFilm btw it was a 4K projector.

Here's my attempt to unpack the above: when the cinematic "author" has a clear vision of what they want to achieve, digital cinema cameras like Monstro provide the widest range of options for achieving those results, whether the aim is to emulate film or to create entirely new aesthetics due to higher resolution, wider dynamic range, greater sensitivity, wider color gamut, etc. Display technologies also play a role in the end-user's experience; UHD projection with well-mastered UHD source really shines. Not said, but equally obvious: if the author's vision is precisely living within the medium of film, then of course film is no worse than digital as an intermediate format. But why would an author want to constrain their vision to the limits of a medium, when there are much more versatile media now available?

 

[Mark Spraker]

Reviving this thread because Steve Yedlin's done another brilliant demo. This one is a followup to his Display Prep demo. Inspirational, to say the least.

http://yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/DispPrepDemoFollowup.html

Thanks for reviving this thread; I really enjoyed the demo so getting to see a deeper explanation and deconstruction of it was enlightening.

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I found that quite useful, so thanks for sharing it, Aaron. Now I know what a 3D LUT is and how it's represented. Here's a question I would have asked him: why not take an average of about 6 or so frames of 5219 before taking colour samples to create a LUT?

I'm sympathetic to the notion that digital can look as nice as film, although there are one or two things that digital fails at miserably. But only one or two things. Anyway, that was not the point of the presentation.

Although, if digital can look exactly like film, why haven't I seen it? Perhaps this is on me to figure out why, as I may not have looked at enough material.

What's also interesting to me is that Nuke can be used to create LUTs. I thought it was merely a compositing tool, and I thought that Resolve was what you used to make LUTs.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

What's also interesting to me is that Nuke can be used to create LUTs. I thought it was merely a compositing tool, and I thought that Resolve was what you used to make LUTs.

Any system that's powerful enough to have a scripting language can make a call out to Python or R, which have packages that can create and manipulate LUTs. It's amazing what software can do when it works like software, rather than just a canvas that responds to mouse clicks.