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tupp

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Posts posted by tupp

  1. These rigs on a balcony rail are scary.

     

    I'm with @herein2020 -- use a small "safety'd" tripod gently leaned against the rail.  However, in addition to weighing down  down the tripod with a bag, also safety it with a tag line(s) attached to something solid (or very heavy) that is further in from the balcony.

     

    Don't even think about clamping to a glass balcony panel or putting any kind of torsion/flex stress on a balcony rail supported by a glass panel.  It is probably a good idea to avoid raining shards of glass and loose camera gear/rigging onto hapless pedestrians below.

     

    If you insist on clamping to a rail in lieu of using a tripod, definitely use one or more tag lines as described above, and don't make a hi-CG nor awkwardly offset rig.  Keep the rig light-weight, compact, low and well balanced above the rail.  That Dedolight clamp is a more expensive and less stable version of the original Tota-Clamp, which has a shorter baby pin that tucks into the clamp for travel.  That shorter pin is safer on a balcony rail and there are several compact ways to mount a tilt/ball head to that baby-pin.  Tota-Clamps can scratch surfaces if you don't tape the jaws.  The Camvate clamp with the ball head could likewise work, but the jaws might be to small (just like the Tota-Clamp).  There are other clamps not shown that would work better.

     

    If you don't have a lot of rigging safety experience, it probably would be best to avoid complex grip solutions on the edge of a balcony.  Regardless, always use a strong tag line(s) on any gear on a balcony, and don't detach the tag line until the gear/rig is moved safely away or below the balcony rail.

  2. On 1/19/2021 at 11:02 PM, Anil Royal said:

    Internal 8-bit CLOG recording, when viewed through waveform monitor, showed more room for brightness and darkness adjustments before clipping - compared to the external recordings! Isn't it supposed to be the other way!?! 

    No.  Bit depth and dynamic range are two completely independent properties (as the contrast "discrepancy" readily proves).

     

    Merely mapping two different bit depths to the same contrast range should not change the contrast.  Something else is causing the contrast difference in contrast.  Note that there is no difference in contrast between the 8-bit and 10-bit images from the recorder, but the internal 8-bit differs.  So, the camera is affecting the contrast.

     

    In regards to generally seeing a difference between 8-bit and 10-bit, you would likely see a difference if you compared the 8-bit and 10-bit images on a 10-bit monitor/projector.

  3. If no frames were discarded in any of the frame rate changes, the end result is identical to slowing down 119.88 fps footage to 23.976 fps.

     

    However, it sounds like your NLE may have converted 59.97 fps to 23.976 fps without changing the speed of the content.  In that case, your apparent slowing would be just 1/2 of normal speed -- equivalent to running 119.88 fps footage at 59.97 fps.

  4. 9 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

    @kye isn't talking about undercranking though, right? He's talking about slowing down 24 fps.

     

    Yes.  That is why I said this:

    12 hours ago, tupp said:

    It's a dramatic effect that sort of "feels" slow motion, but it is not the same as slowing the frame rate in post.

     

  5. 6 hours ago, IronFilm said:

    Basically you take a monopod, and stick the bottom of it into a little "pocket" (such as a very strong drink bottle holder) which is attached to a sturdy waist belt. 

    Yes.  A monopod is better than my suggestion of a tripod center column and head.  A monopod can telescope to different heights and a full tripod head isn't needed for this rig.

     

    By the way, I think that such a rig was called a "belt pod."

     

     

  6. In the film days, I under-cranked the camera on a couple projects.  It's a dramatic effect that sort of "feels" slow motion, but it is not the same as slowing the frame rate in post.

  7. 8 hours ago, Pascal Deshayes said:

    - I like it pretty run & gun/minimal/compact but how do you stabilize your shots? I don't want to go gimbal (artificially smooth) but some sort of support would be great. Are you guys using EasyRigs or something similar?

    As I'm pretty tall, I can't really put cameras on my shoulder or everything will have that downwards look. I usually shoot at chest/waist level.

     

    Try a "belt pole" rig:

    waist-rod1_large.PNG.1f6c4fd3275c0afe4bd91976e8e8e99b.PNG

    belt-pole2.thumb.jpg.46dea3f264b535dab16f97c45c4979c3.jpg

    If you have a lightweight tripod with a center column, you can try using the center column with the head and make a belt with a pouch.  It won't have an adjustable height, but it might put the camera close to where you need it, and you will get a rough idea of how stable such a rig can be.

     

    A shoulder bracket is not necessary, but it allows one to let go of the camera.

  8. On 5/19/2020 at 5:39 AM, AdrParkinson said:

    How would you say it compares with the old Cinestyle profile for Canon? I always found that while it made grading easier, the bitrate just wasn't there to support it and so there were too many artifacts.

    On 5/19/2020 at 11:56 AM, tupp said:

    When I get a chance, I will try to snip out a few seconds from one of the files for download

    Better late than never...

     

    Here is a three second clip from a test shoot of the E-M10 III, with the camera's Highlight and Shadow control set to :  -1 highlights; 0 mids; and +1 shadows.

     

    Here is a coarsely graded video using the rest of the test footage from that session.

  9. 6 hours ago, seanzzxx said:

    eh I think I'll just wait for Tupp to show up and say that it cannot have a dense image as long as it wasn't shot on Kodachrome(tm), seeing how that has been this thread for the last month or so.

    LOL!

     

    Well, I think that some of the images that I linked were actually shot on Ektachrome and Kodacolor, but I mostly gave Kodachrome examples, as it is the "extreme" of the color emulsions.

     

    Also, I said early in the thread that color depth was probably the key variable for digital "thickness,"  so I agree that "dense" digital images can be (and have been) achieved with digital cameras.

     

     

    On 11/21/2020 at 5:34 PM, kye said:

    Thoughts on how thin / thick these two trailers are?

    Both trailers look good, but the Red footage looks thin/brittle compared to that of the Alexa footage.  Of course, much of these looks could result from the grade.

  10. If the goal is to convert batches of images from raw to jpeg, there are many free, open-source apps that do so.

     

    Darktable, RawTherapee  and and Photivo are powerful raw image developing applications.  Digikam is a less powerful photo management program, but it can do batch conversions.

     

    ImageMagick batch converts raw to jpeg.  It has a GUI, but most use it on the command line for speed.  If you are not trying to do anything fancy in your batch conversions, a simple ImageMagick terminal command is probably the quickest and easiest way to go.

     

     

     

  11. On 10/23/2020 at 6:07 PM, KnightsFan said:

    I think that simply adding water, thereby increasing specularity, contrast, and color saturation makes a drastic increase in thickness.

    It doesn't look "thicker" to me -- just wetter, causing different colors and, in this case, more contrast.  If you shot either scene (dry or wet) on Kodachrome, it would look significantly thicker.

     

    Also, the difference in the pattern of dappled light skews the comparison.  One can't help but wonder how this test would appear with an overcast sky.

     

     

    On 10/24/2020 at 2:23 AM, hyalinejim said:

    You can see that effect clearly here. This is Fuji 400H exposed at box speed:

    [snip]

    And this is the same chart exposed at -2 but scanned to bring up the midtones.

    That's some exceedingly coarse grain in the images of those charts.  Huge grain like that significantly reduces color depth, which affects the look of the charts and throws-off the comparison a little.

     

     

    On 10/24/2020 at 2:23 AM, hyalinejim said:

    Note how the shadows are lifted, because the shadow areas of the chart are now very close to the base fog of the emulsion, and are hardly registering at all

    That's one way to describe it.  Another way put it is that, due to the initial underexposure, more of the values from dark-tones to mid-tones are compressed together at the bottom end (along with the base fog).  So, when the exposure is boosted to restore the mid-tones to their normal value, the dark tones become brighter than usual, because they remain compressed close to the mid-tones.

     

     

    On 10/24/2020 at 2:23 AM, hyalinejim said:

    Yes, it's a less saturated image than the correctly exposed one. But if you took a digital shot of the same chart at the same exposure level, applied a curve to match the contrast and altered saturation so that the midtones match.... I think you'd still see the same pattern of more saturation in the shadows for film, and less in the highlights.

    I am not sure what this exposure comparison adds to the idea that the brighter tones in film emulsions generally are less saturated (with the darker tones being relatively more saturated, by default).

     

     

    On 10/24/2020 at 2:23 AM, hyalinejim said:

    Digital images look thin because of the way they (probably accurately) capture saturation from shadows to midtones to highlights.

    I agree partially --  I think that there are other variables involved in how film renders color.  For instance, film generally has more color depth than digital.

     

     

    On 10/24/2020 at 10:57 AM, KnightsFan said:

    I don't think you'd get a significantly thicker image out of any two decent digital/film cameras given the same scene and sensible settings.

    I disagree.  A lot depends on the emulsion.  I think that one would see a dramatic difference comparing Kodachrome to digital.  Typical print film would yield less of a difference.

  12. On 10/19/2020 at 6:38 AM, kye said:

    One is the ability to render subtle variations in tone, and yet, we're looking at all these test images in 8-bit, and some in less than 8-bit, yet this doesn't seem to be a limiting factor.

    Although we disagree on the "less than 8-bit" images, I have been waiting for someone to mention that we are viewing film emulsion images through 8-bit files.

     

    To the eye, the color depth of Kodachrome is considerably more vast than what is shown in these 8-bit images.  Kodachrome was one of the rare film processes that added dye to the emulsion during processing, which gave it such deep colors (and which is also more archival).  Some of that splendor is captured in these 8-bit scans, so, theoretically, there should be a way to duplicate those captured colors shooting digitally and outputting to 8-bit. 

     

     

     

    On 10/19/2020 at 6:38 AM, kye said:

    If you were looking at this scene in real life, these people wouldn't have so much variation in luminance and saturation in their skintones - that baby would have to have been sunbathing for hours but only on the sides of his face and not on the front.

    You probably would see the variation in the skin tones if you were there, but, to one's eyes, such variations don't seem so dramatic.  Furthermore, Kodachrome usually looked snappier than other reversal films (when normally processed), but when directly viewing a Kodachrome slide, it won't look as contrasty as the 8-bit scans we see in this thread.

    Of course, the baby's face (and the parents' faces) is brighter on the front, because of the lighting angle.  If the baby has been sunbathing for hours, then the father is crispier than George Hamilton.

  13. On 10/16/2020 at 1:09 PM, KnightsFan said:

    @tuppMaybe we're disagreeing on what thickness is, but I'd say about 50% of the ones you linked to are what I think of as thick.

    To me, the "thickness" of a film image is revealed by a rich, complex color(s).  That color is not necessarily saturated nor dark.

     

    That "thickness" of film emulsion has nothing to do with lighting nor with what is showing in the image.  Certainly, for the thickness to be revealed, there has to be some object in the frame that reflects a complex color.  An image of a white wall will not fully utilize the color depth of an imaging system.  However, a small, single color swatch within a mostly neutral image can certainly demonstrate "thickness."

     

    On 10/16/2020 at 11:55 PM, kye said:

    Long story short, film desaturates both the highlights and the shadows because on negative film the shadows are the highlights!  (pretty sure that's the right-way around..)

    I don't think that's how it works.  Of course, there is also reversal film.

     

     

    On 10/16/2020 at 11:55 PM, kye said:

    Yes, if the skin tones are from a bad codec and there is very little hue variation (ie, plastic skin tones) then that's not something that can be recovered from,...

    Agreed.  Digital tends to make skin tones mushy (plastic?) compared to film.

    Look at the complex skin tones in some of these Kodachrome images.  There is a lot going on in those skin tones that would be lost with most digital cameras.  In addition, observe the richness and complexity of the colors on the inanimate objects.

     

     

    On 10/16/2020 at 11:55 PM, kye said:

    but thickness is present in brighter lit images too isn't it?

    Yes.  Please note that most of the images in the above linked gallery are brightly lit and/or shot during broad daylight.

     

     

    On 10/16/2020 at 11:55 PM, kye said:

    Interesting images, and despite the age and lack of resolution and DR, there is definitely some thickness to them.

    Agreed.  I think that the quality that you seek is inherent in film emulsion, and that quality exists regardless of lighting and regardless of the overall brightness/darkness of an image.

     

     

    On 10/16/2020 at 11:55 PM, kye said:

    I wonder if maybe there is a contrast and saturation softness to them, not in the sense of them being low contrast or low saturation, but more that there is a softness to transitions of luma and chroma within the image?

    Because of the extensive color depth and the distinctive color rendering of normal film emulsion, variations in tone are often more apparent with film.  Not sure if that should be considered to be more of a gradual transition in chroma/luma or to be just higher "color resolution."

     

     

    On 10/16/2020 at 11:55 PM, kye said:

    I've been messing with some image processing and made some test images.  Curious to hear if these appear thick or not.

    Those images are nice, but they seem thinner than the Kodachrome images in the linked gallery above.

     

     

    On 10/17/2020 at 8:41 AM, KnightsFan said:

    Here's a frame from The Grandmaster which I think hits peak thickness. Dark, rich colors, a couple highlights, real depth with several layers and a nice falloff of focus that makes things a little more dreamy rather than out of focus.

    The image is nicely crafted, but I read that it was shot on Fuji Eterna stock.  Nevertheless, to me its colors look "thinner" than those shown in this in this Kodachrome gallery.

     

     

    On 10/17/2020 at 9:49 AM, BTM_Pix said:

    In the same vein, this might be a useful resource for you.  https://film-grab.com

    Great site!  Thanks for the link!

     

     

    On 10/17/2020 at 10:10 AM, KnightsFan said:

    That's why I say it's mainly about what's in the scene.

    I disagree.  I think that the "thickness" of film is inherent in how emulsion renders color.

     

     

    On 10/17/2020 at 10:10 AM, KnightsFan said:

    The soft diffuse light comign from the side in the Grandmaster really allows every texture to have a smooth gradation from light to dark, whereas your subject in the boat is much more evenly lit from left to right.

    The cross-lighting in that "Grandmaster" image seems hard and contrasty to me (which can reveal texture more readily than a softer source).  I don't see many smooth gradations/chirascuro.

     

     

    17 hours ago, mat33 said:

    I think the light and amount of contrast of the scene makes a huge difference to the image thickness.

    Evidently, OP seeks the "thickness" that is inherent in film emulsion, regardless of lighting and contrast.

     

     

    17 hours ago, mat33 said:

    Here is a screen shot from the D16 (not mine) which while compressed to heck look 'thick' and alive to me.

    Nice shots!

    Images from CCD cameras such as the Digital Bolex generally seem to have "thicker" color than their CMOS counterparts.

    However, even CCD cameras don't seem to have the same level of thickness as many film emulsions.

     

     

    5 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

    I just watched the 12k sample footage from the other thread and I think that it displays thick colors despite being an ultra sharp digital capture.

    That certainly is a pretty image.

    Keep in mind that higher resolution begets more color depth in an image.  Furthermore, if your image was shot with Blackmagic Ursa Min 12K, that sensor is supposedly RGBW (with perhaps a little too much "W"), which probably yields nicer colors.

  14. 3 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

    Got some examples? Because I generally don't see those typical home videos as having thick images

    Of course, a lot of home weren't properly exposed and showed scenes with huge contrast range that the emulsion couldn't handle.  However, I did find some examples that have decent exposure and aren't too faded.

     

    Here's one from the 1940's showing showing a fairly deep blue, red and yellow, and then showing a rich color on a car.

     

    Thick greens here, and later a brief moment showing solid reds, and some rich cyan and indigo.  Unfortunately, someone added a fake gate with a big hair.

     

    A lot of contrast in these shots, but the substantial warm greens and warm skin and wood shine, plus one of the later shots with a better "white balance" shows a nice, complex blue on the eldest child's clothes.

     

    Here is a musical gallery of Kodachrome stills.  Much less fading here.  I'd like to see these colors duplicated in digital imaging.  Please note that Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" lyrics don't exactly refer to the emulsion!

     

    OP's original question concerns getting a certain color richness that is inherent in most film stocks but absent from most digital systems.  It doesn't involve lighting, per se, although there has to be enough light to get a good exposure and there can't be to much contrast in the scene.

     

     

    4 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

    They're pretty close, I don't really care if there's dithering or compression adding in-between values. You can clearly see the banding, and my point it that while banding is ugly, it isn't the primary factor in thickness.

    We have no idea if OP's simulated images are close to how they should actually appear, because 80%-90% of the pixels in those images fall outside of the values dictated by the simulated bit depth.  No conclusions can be drawn from those images.

     

    By the way, I agree that banding is not the most crucial consideration here -- banding is just a posterization artifact to which lower bit depths are more susceptible.  I maintain that color depth is the primary element of the film "thickness" in question.

  15. 14 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

    Don't forget about shadow saturation! It often gets ignored in talk about highlight rolloff.  The Art Adams articles kye posted above are very interesting but he's only concerned with highlight saturation behaviour.

    Well, when I listed the film "thickness" property of "lower saturation in the brighter areas," naturally, that means that the lower values have more saturation.

     

    I think that one of those linked articles mentioned the tendency that film emulsions generally have more saturation at and below middle values.

     

    Thanks for posting the comparisons!

     

     

    9 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

    I think that image "thickness" is 90% what is in frame and how it's lit.

    Then what explains the strong "thickness" of terribly framed and badly lit home movies that were shot on Kodachrome 64?

     

     

     

    9 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

    - Bit depth comes into play, if only slightly. The images @kyeposted basically had no difference in the highlights, but in the dark areas banding is very apparent.

    Unfortunately, @kye's images are significantly flawed, and they do not actually simulate the claimed bit-depths.  No conclusions can be made from them.

     

    By the way, bit depth is not color depth.

  16. 19 hours ago, kye said:

    OK, one last attempt.

    Here is a LUT stress test image from truecolour.  It shows smooth graduations across the full colour space and is useful for seeing if there are any artefacts likely to be caused by a LUT or grade.

    This is it taken into Resolve and exported out without any effects applied.

    This is the LUT image with my plugin set to 1-bit.  This should create only white, red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, cyan, and black.

    This is the LUT image with my plugin set to 2-bits.  This will create more variation.

    Thank you for posting these Trueclor tests, but these images are not relevant to the fact that the "4.5-bit" image that you posted earlier is flawed and is in no way conclusive proof that "4.5-bit" images can closely approximate 8-bit images.

     

    On the other hand, after examining your 2-bit Truecolor test, it indicates that there is a problem in your rounding code and/or your imaging pipeline.

     

    2-bit RGB can produce 64 colors, including black, white and two evenly spaced neutral grays.  There seem to be significantly fewer than 64 colors.   Furthermore, some of the adjacent color patches blend with each other in a somewhat irregular way, instead of forming the orderly, clearly defined and well separated pattern of colors that a 2-bit RGB system should produce with that test chart.  In addition, there is only one neutral gray shade rendered, when there should be two different grays.

     

    Looking at the histogram of the 2-bit Truecolor image shows three "spikes" when there should be four with a 2-bit image:

    2-bit_hist.png.c42b1e836f22ff7ad348d98c692751d3.png

    Your 2-bit simulation is actually 1.5 bit simulation (with other problems).  So, your "rounding" code could have a bug.

     

     

    20 hours ago, kye said:

    If you whip one of the above images into your software package I would imagine that you'd find the compression might have created intermediary colours on the edges of the flat areas, but if my processing was creating intermediate colours then they would be visible as separate flat areas, but as you can see, there are none.

    Well, something is going wrong, and I am not sure if it's compression.  I think that PNG images can exported without compression, so it might be good to post uncompressed PNG's from now on, to eliminate that variable.

     

    Another thing that would help is if you would stick to the bit depths in question -- 8-bit and "4.5-bit."  All of this bouncing around to various bit depths just further complicates the comparisons.

     

  17. 1 hour ago, kye said:

    One of the up-shots of subtractive colour vs additive colour is that with subtractive colour you get a peak in saturation below the luminance level that saturation peaks at in an additive model.

    Not all additive color mixing works the same.  Likewise, not all subtractive color mixing works the same.

     

    However, you might be correct generally in regards to film vs. digital.

     

     

    1 hour ago, kye said:

    This can be arranged.

    One has to allow for the boosted levels in each emulsion layer that counter the subtractive effects.

     

     

    1 hour ago, kye said:

    Scopes make this kind of error all the time.

    I don't think the scopes are mistaken, but your single trace histogram makes it difficult to discern what exactly is happening (although close examination of your histogram reveals a lot of pixels where they shouldn't be) .  It's best to use a histogram with a column for every value increment.

     

     

    1 hour ago, kye said:

    What this means is that if your input data is 0, 0, 0, X, 0, 0, 0 the curve will have non-zero data on either side of the spike.  This article talks about it in the context of image processing, but it applies any time you have a step-change in values.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_artifacts

    I estimate that around 80%-90% of the pixels fall in between the proper bit depth increments -- the problem is too big to be "ringing artifacts."

     

     

    1 hour ago, kye said:

    There is nothing in my code that would allow for the creation of intermediary values, and I'm seeing visually the right behaviour at lower bit-depths when I look at the image (as shown previously with the 1-bit image quality), so at this point I'm happy to conclude that there are no values in between and that its a scoping limitation, or is being created by the jpg compression process.

    There is a significant problem... some variable(s) that is uncontrolled, and the images do not simulate the reduced bit depths.  No conclusions can be drawn until the problem is fixed.

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