Blog
The Argentinian film market always was prolific but with modest budgets. With new digital technologies, our cinema grows a lot in production and post production facilities, meanwhile the pair of our cinema labs shutting down. That’s generates some anarchy about color grading procedures in our industry.
The post houses which offer color grading services through video transfers brings good expertise about signal treatment and its legal ranges, but nothing about color management. This leak of knowledge about standard procedures being more visible when the digital projector emerges at the time of the DCP as the new delivery format. In the other hand the Raw formats from the digital cameras in coexistence with other high-end cameras that from factory just bring Log encoded files, both results in technical misunderstandings about how a digital cinema camera achieve a registry during the shooting.
The big confusion
The field monitor for SD/HD video makers was considered the ultimate reference, because it works with the same color space and dynamic range which the mastering will be delivered. In case of Cinema, the field monitor leave to be a reference, because all knows that the digital cinema camera its capable of taking more information that a display can reproduce. But the incomprehension about differences between native color space and video standards, the high dynamic ranges from cameras and opto-electrical transfers as just a method of shrink file sizes makes misunderstandings among our film professionals, by installing diverse intuitive ideas about how the devices captures the light and transforms that in binary files.
The logarithmic codification was interpreted as the “actual” response of a sensor, because of that a less contrast image with less saturation appears like the maximum achievable quality of a camera. Including this supposition aims some aesthetic decisions and some subliminal association where the flat contrast could be “better”, because that aspect has all images in its origins. In other hand the decoding of the first Raw files that we managed brings too many options about color spaces and “gamma”, which deeps the problem of the intuitive working with this files and the starting point of every post production was a uncertain place for a colorist and for a VFx artists too, where every one made a different decoding, many times by doing irreversible transformations, by using specific LUT o maybe incorrect ones to bring to video space, or also by “manual” decoding applying custom curves to undone logarithmic codifications. Most of these procedures losses the native color space, by mapping the camera primaries in the 709/sRGB standards.
The VFx companies always claims for the media without grading, to make enable to extract the best information for the matchmoving and keying tasks but ignoring how to work with this media at the time of decoding. These operations, also handmade and intuitive generates a jump in continuity between shots with VFx, because the colorist has files with different starting point with a very different decoding that himself applies to the shots without VFx.
This experience moves also to the cinematographers to assume that with digital cinema cameras we lost the reference, and the image achieved in the field monitor will not be the starting point anymore in the grading room and start to depend exclusively of the colorist’s abilities.
New spaces
The DCI brings to the consciousness of many professional the concept of color space, because the DCDM container claims a swap of a XYZ model and at the same time a P3 gamut, which that made to many people to start to thinking about color management and how they are losing color palette while working just in 709. This topic keeps cryptic for many professionals and deposit a blind confidence to final transformations that the mastering DCP software made. But new terms like “white point” appears in the dialogue windows and that’s also starts to force to consider about how much we know about color.
The introduction of OLED TV also brings new questions because this technology being able the P3 visualization in a “consumer” display, which facilitates to minor resource companies to display the full gamut that will be projected in cinema screens.
The Netflix’s delivery specs add some consciousness about sensor effective resolution and also the possibility to visualize HDR by this news UHD TV. Right now, all the audiovisual market pay attention to quality standards and topics of color science start to be seriously observed.
New tools
With the appearing of ACES as color management option inside the most accessible and popular color grading applications and also the implementation of OCIO in an easy way inside VFx software, the research of efficient workflows starts with an easy and compatible way among applications.
The ACES disclosure in hispanic speaker countries is a little difficult because is hard to achieve color management documentation in our language, and because of that I start to be interested in the study of this issues, with the goal to recover to our cinema a standardized manner about color treatment in a non-destructive and continuous way, and for that ACES is a marvelous tool because it is enable in every application and its open source guarantee a neutral place inside the private development of proprietary color administration from every software.
Be welcomed this free and open initiative, useful to every budget level of audiovisual production.
About the autor
Edi Walger is today a professional trainer from his own school puntocine. His previous work as VFx Supervisor, Colorist and as SGO software development collaborator was the base of enough experience to abroad the education field with a solid know-how about workflow and technical and artistic formation.
He keeps bringing training about color spaces and the implementation of ACES, besides its disclosures in professional’s associations, press and exhibitions.
Contact: edicolordoctor@gmail.com, or by his Linkedin