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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Variety strikes again...

David Mullen ASC said:
I wonder if grain is a small factor in the perception of color complexity -- we've talked before about how grain gives the impression of detail and resolution because it gives the eye something to focus on as being sharp even if the actual image is not sharp... I wonder if the mix of color dye clouds in a film image to some small degree helps fight against that feeling of monochromatic blandness that skin can fall into with some digital photos. Not that it would contribute to some of the issues I am talking about, but it may be a factor.
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Sounds plausible. After all if you have a monochrome image composed of binary b&w dots you can form a gray-scale image. Similarly the grain in an image could perhaps be 'expanding' the color space through dithering. But I think it's evident even in 320x240 images by which point any grain in the image would be completely blended out.

Part of the problem I think definitely used to be compression and degraining algorithms, especially in early DIs. You would see a smudgy, impressionistic median filter look. The D5 even does this in higher ISOs, looks terrible in my opinion. The Crossing the Line footage that I've seen had some bad smudginess to it as well as if it was run through the pastel filter in Photoshop. I think that was the cause of the "plastic" look that was the subject of much scorn when DIs first became common. Makes everything look airbrushed and fake even when downrezzed. I think people spotted "plastic skin" more keenly than anything else just because we're so hardwired to judge faces, even though the entire picture was getting denoised.

I don't agree though with the argument though that digital just can't match film in the 8bit sRGB colorspace we're used to working in. Even lousy scans of film still manage to capture whatever it is that's so good.

My pet theory is that as film overexposes it goes desaturated. Digital seems to go to super saturated as it overexposes. I've had some luck in the past just by taking the luma of an image and pulling down the warm saturation based on luminance with some pretty good results. But if someone could bring a good empirical test to bare that would be phenomenal. It's certainly a conversation that's lacking in good concrete data.
 
It is amazing how similar this film / digital skin tone discussion is to the analog / digital topic in audio. There it is perceived "openness, immediacy".

It is the essentialy the same topic. Some subconciously superhearing / superseeing that is aware of experiencing a sampled item? As opposed to the watching the "real" thing.

Language bias right there.

The "superhearing" is BTW my pet theory. Seems Dave just came up with some kind of a "superseeing" version:
I have owned the same grand piano for most of my adult life, never getting tired of its sound. I also used almost all of the digital sampled piano plug ins in my studio, always going from a phase of enthusiasm and joy to boredom and restlessness in a couple of months.
Somehow I maybe realise that I am always listening to the exact same sound (the sample) as opposed to the myriad of variations my grand piano is able to produce.

Jochen (have not grown tired of my RED images - so there goes my analogy)
 
David Mullen ASC said:
It's definitely a mix of creative and technical issues, but it's also an issue of the chain of events from what you put in front of the camera all the way to how it's presented, and thus it can be hard to break it down to find out where something is starting to drift in the wrong direction. Was it the make-up? Did the HMI light have a color spike problem? Does the lens have a color tint? Was there a stray color coming from some bounce source? Was the transcoding, processing done correctly? How was it viewed during correction? Was the master made correctly? The copies? Is the display device calibrated correctly?

But beyond all of that, I do think there is an overall "issue" with skintone reproduction in digital systems, cameras, recorders, and codecs seem to want to push certain pastel and complex/mixed colors in certain directions, which affect color-correction decisions pro and con later, etc. But I also think we are talking subtleties here for the most part, but subtleties are what skintones are all about. Despite all the creative issues involved, there has been a tendency for Red-shot movies of the past to have what could be called an Agfa-look, sort of the impression of brown and cyan, and I don't know why. It can't entirely be due to creative choices. I'm waiting for more Red-shot movies to work in a more Technicolor/Kodachrome palette, not the Autumn-Winter colors of so many Red movies -- maybe "Spider-Man 4" with that red and blue outfit...
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That agfa look seems often to come from trying to get the teal-orange look that has become popular. On a couple of those movies I've seen the R3Ds and it looks completely natural without the grade. I'm hoping the whole teal orange complementary color grading thing goes away. Transformers was the latest one to push it hard.

Regarding the first comment above... the interaction between makeup and light and the resulting metamerism, which then gets interpreted by sensor/filmstock and color processing, plays a huge part in the look of the skintones. Some bands/lines of makeup do seem to respond better under some light sources than others.
 
Deanan said:
That agfa look seems often to come from trying to get the teal-orange look that has become popular. On a couple of those movies I've seen the R3Ds and it looks completely natural without the grade. I'm hoping the whole teal orange complementary color grading thing goes away. Transformers was the latest one to push it hard.
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The more sophisticated movie-going public is now very aware of the teal/orange thing, where it used to be more of a subconscious thing to get actors to "pop" more. It's been mocked numerous times on the web and in print.

Hopefully that awareness will make it go away, and movie-makers will stop tricking up their DI process with stupid shit like that.
 
One just has to look at colour TV shows from when colour was just introduced. Everything was COLOUR!, and the colours were often very primary and lacking in subtlety, and compared to the black and white TV that had gone before, it almost seemed that quality lighting to create depth and character had been replaced by COLOUR! (Compare The Outer Limits with Star Trek, for instance).

When any new technology comes along, people can tend to go over-the-top with it, like in some recent stereo movies that push that effect into your face every chance they get.

Now with TV we get colour and good lighting (hopefully!), but when the new tech comes along, it takes a while for people to get the hang of making the right aesthetic choices with it. When that occurs, all is good.

I've got the very same feeling that DI is one of those technology things like colour TV.

Graeme
 
Variety sells ads. That's what "press" is. Buy an ad and get an awesome article somehow related to your product/project whatever...

It's so clear I was encouraged to buy a full page ad once to "motivate" the paper's writers to actually give my project a review...

You want our company and it's divisions and friends companies to buy ads in your paper? You want to get access to our sets and cast or the ones that work with our products? You want to get access to our parties or friends lists? Well write about us good stuff, and write about such and such less good stuff...

Papers are politics. Nothing is objective anymore if it ever was.

The fact that a journalist ignores the obvious fact that a CF card or hard drive costs less than the equivalent duration in film stock, plus its processing, plus its telecine, plus its ingesting and all the staff salaries and equipment involved in the above, including cars, trucks and gas involved in the courier, is plain nonsense, no, stupidity!

Plus it's green. Sorry but shooting HD saves tons of chemicals being wasted on film processing. A film lab is a chemical plant. It's not just cheaper, it's environmentally friendly.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Maybe a good test would be to shoot five faces of varying skintone color and quality, in daylight, tungsten, and Cool White fluorescent, on the M-X sensor and on 35mm film stock, at different exposures, and see if there is a skintone reproduction issue or not. If the "problem" can't be replicated, then maybe it doesn't exist...
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I've had done parallel shooting of 5219 and M-X, including 3 different skin tones. I use such tests to evaluate the colour science developments. The tricky thing would be to be able to present the results double-blind.

Graeme
 
I think it may be in the process, not in the format.

This last year I have worked with three different DoP's who have all done features on M and MX before we started to work together, and every single one of them have been surprised - in a positive way, with the latitude/DR and color-results I have given them for online, particullarily around skin and highlights about to blow.

It's not hard to get right, you just need to get it right.

This was before RC2/RLF, btw - which only has made it all even simpler.

and I don't think that's a RED specific statement, BTW...
 
Stochastic, frequency modulated color modeling in a hexachrome color space? Anyone? Randomized grain structures representing digital data as a means of both interpolating from a 2K source to re-master to a 4K deliverable and modeling a more natural skin tone. Possible yet? Graeme?
 
Lewis-M Soucy said:
Plus it's green. Sorry but shooting HD saves tons of chemicals being wasted on film processing. A film lab is a chemical plant. It's not just cheaper, it's environmentally friendly.
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That could be Reds new motto:

Go GREEN, shoot RED!!!:tongue_smilie:
 
Jeff Coatney said:
Stochastic, frequency modulated color modeling in a hexachrome color space? Anyone? Randomized grain structures representing digital data as a means of both interpolating from a 2K source to re-master to a 4K deliverable and modeling a more natural skin tone. Possible yet? Graeme?
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I'm always working on things. I don't just want colours that measure right, I want them to look right, and be easy to get right.

Graeme
 
An off-topic thread on REDuser? Now that's a surprise.... :-)

Graeme
 
Tim Whitcomb said:
I love that this thread has gone off topic. Great stuff here! thanks for sharing everyone
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Not really off topic. The implication in the article was that red had a video look to it and Alexa doesn't. Why and if someone might feel that way seems likeTHE discussion the article demands.
 
Graeme Nattress said:
I've had done parallel shooting of 5219 and M-X, including 3 different skin tones. I use such tests to evaluate the colour science developments. The tricky thing would be to be able to present the results double-blind.

Graeme
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Oh, I'd love to see those shootings...

I'm also curious how they compare in terms of dynamic range, especially now that HDRx™™ has arrived. I know you're not trying to replicate 5219 but the film look will be the holy grail for lots of folks for some time to come.
 
From what I could see, M-X was very similar to the DR of 5219 as is. HDRx pushes beyond that.

Graeme
 
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