hyalinejim

Late last year I saw Goodfellas projected on 35mm film.  Absolutely incredible movie.
I've been going back and watching more classics, some that I've seen a long time ago and some I've never seen.  Lots to watch and enjoy if you zoom out and watch the best from the entire catalogue of cinema history.

Can we talk about the GH7 in this thread?

I am currently writing a guide to all the classic digicams from Y2k.
And it has made me realise that I am getting a bit bored of full frame at F1.2.
I think a similar thing has happened with anamorphic. The look has been held hostage by the ad world and cheapened, overused.
So in a way it is quite refreshing to spend time with a Canon G2 from 2002 with (decent for the time) 2/3" sensor, or if you want a modern 2/3" sensor, the Fuji X-30. Also fun are the tiny Canon IXUS models with CHDK for raw, and some of the older smartphones like the iPhone 4S.
It has made me think that if the light isn't right and the subject isn't interesting no amount of shallow DOF can make it worthwhile so why bother?
And if the light IS right and the subject IS fantastic then a deep DOF can sometimes make it look even better, sometimes not - but it's definitely a valid creative choice.
I also think the modern cameras are just getting too good... too clean, too clinical, too sharp, especially the modern lenses (be it anamorphic or otherwise). And we have had this discussion for about 15 years now and not a single manufacturer has listened.
There is nobody in the modern camera industry fulfilling the niche of analogue / film compact replacement camera other than the y2k CCD digicams. And don't get me started on the desire for a Digital Bolex sequel!

I like the formfactor of the Canon XC10/X15. Give it 10bit and a good codec, 4K60, zoom with F2 at the wide and F2.8 at the long end. Voila! I think their launch video really shown off the mojo that camera had. I like really the motion cadence and the rendering of textures. Mojo. 😊 @hyalinejimhad posted a video of his with beautiful colors achieved in Rec709. Anyway, great launch video and a great concept for a S16 cinema camera.
 

Hello 👋 

I found LightRoom to be a very well-designed tool back when I was doing photos.  I read about wedding photographers ripping through several hundred images from a wedding and only needing seconds per one, and I could completely believe it.
Such an interface, where you just start at the top and go down through each section as required / desired, is a very easy experience.
I'm at a bit of a crossroads with my colour grading approach, where on the one hand I could implement a default node tree with heaps of nodes, and I could adjust different things in different nodes that are each configured in the right colour spaces etc, but the other pathway is for me to just design my own plugin that is like LightRoom and just has the sliders I want, each in the right colour space, that are in the order I want to apply them in.
I think this is why all those all-in-one solutions like Dehancer / Filmconvert / etc all have options to select the input colour space.  
The saving grace of all this is that most log profiles are so similar to each other that they mostly work with each other if you're willing to adjust a few sliders to compensate and aren't trying to really fine-tune a particular look.
If you don't have colour management (either the tool doesn't support it or you haven't learned it) then you're really fumbling in the dark.  To a certain extent I can understand people not wanting to learn it, because there are a few core concepts you need to wrap your head around, but on the other hand it is so incredibly powerful that it's kind of like being given a winning lottery ticket but not bothering to cash it in because you'd have to work out how to declare it on your next tax return.

Lol! I have used just one LUT for every single client job I've done over the last 5 years.
It emulates the colour response of slightly overexposed Portra 400 film.
I pop it on and adjust brightness, contrast and white balance in ACES space before the LUT. It takes 15 to 30 seconds to do most clips, and makes matching shots a breeze.
I've made a new version for myself every time I get a new camera, so technically it hasn't been just one LUT, it's been three. But it does the same thing for each camera.

Yes, exactly! If you can get your NLE to make linear adjustments to the data then corrections are a breeze. I force Premiere to do it using LUTs.
Log to ACES - corrections - ACES back to Log - Log to look LUT.
It's a clunky workaround, but it works!

While I agree that it's very pleasant to grade a project where all clips have the same exposure level, I've found that I really like the ACES CC curve - because it's perfectly straight! This makes matching exposure a doddle. I just need to move the whole waveform up or down to match one shot with another. Again, if I could slap on a LUT and walk away I absolutely would - I would even burn it in!
But for real world shooting it's incredibly difficult to nail exposure every time. And by "nail" I mean get the exposure that looks best to me. The topic of how to expose correctly is a rabbit hole when shooting outside of the studio: angle of the grey card to the light source, how to use a reflective meter correctly, worrying about K constants etc. Even when shooting negative film, there is always room for adjusting the brightness of the image in the printing or scanning process to compensate for "errors" in exposure.
For me, with digital video, the ideal solution is to shoot log, adjust the signal in ACES CC space to balance all clips, and send that to a nice conversion. This is a slightly different approach to what @kye suggests in the first post, I think, which is to not accept a given conversion as is, but to grade each clip to taste after the conversion. Instead, I have a conversion that I feel is nice enough without further tweaking, but I am using ACES to digitally re-work the signal in such a way that it's very similar to what you would get if the scene were brighter/darker, high-key/low-key, warmer/cooler. In this way it's actually very similar to shooting RAW photographs and using a RAW converter. And it allows for conscious decisions such as ETTR strategies, as well as compensating for errors.
So my post work involves a brightness slider, a contrast slider and a colour wheel. And that's it!

While I agree that it's very pleasant to grade a project where all clips have the same exposure level, I've found that I really like the ACES CC curve - because it's perfectly straight! This makes matching exposure a doddle. I just need to move the whole waveform up or down to match one shot with another. Again, if I could slap on a LUT and walk away I absolutely would - I would even burn it in!
But for real world shooting it's incredibly difficult to nail exposure every time. And by "nail" I mean get the exposure that looks best to me. The topic of how to expose correctly is a rabbit hole when shooting outside of the studio: angle of the grey card to the light source, how to use a reflective meter correctly, worrying about K constants etc. Even when shooting negative film, there is always room for adjusting the brightness of the image in the printing or scanning process to compensate for "errors" in exposure.
For me, with digital video, the ideal solution is to shoot log, adjust the signal in ACES CC space to balance all clips, and send that to a nice conversion. This is a slightly different approach to what @kye suggests in the first post, I think, which is to not accept a given conversion as is, but to grade each clip to taste after the conversion. Instead, I have a conversion that I feel is nice enough without further tweaking, but I am using ACES to digitally re-work the signal in such a way that it's very similar to what you would get if the scene were brighter/darker, high-key/low-key, warmer/cooler. In this way it's actually very similar to shooting RAW photographs and using a RAW converter. And it allows for conscious decisions such as ETTR strategies, as well as compensating for errors.
So my post work involves a brightness slider, a contrast slider and a colour wheel. And that's it!

Yes, exactly! If you can get your NLE to make linear adjustments to the data then corrections are a breeze. I force Premiere to do it using LUTs.
Log to ACES - corrections - ACES back to Log - Log to look LUT.
It's a clunky workaround, but it works!

While I agree that it's very pleasant to grade a project where all clips have the same exposure level, I've found that I really like the ACES CC curve - because it's perfectly straight! This makes matching exposure a doddle. I just need to move the whole waveform up or down to match one shot with another. Again, if I could slap on a LUT and walk away I absolutely would - I would even burn it in!
But for real world shooting it's incredibly difficult to nail exposure every time. And by "nail" I mean get the exposure that looks best to me. The topic of how to expose correctly is a rabbit hole when shooting outside of the studio: angle of the grey card to the light source, how to use a reflective meter correctly, worrying about K constants etc. Even when shooting negative film, there is always room for adjusting the brightness of the image in the printing or scanning process to compensate for "errors" in exposure.
For me, with digital video, the ideal solution is to shoot log, adjust the signal in ACES CC space to balance all clips, and send that to a nice conversion. This is a slightly different approach to what @kye suggests in the first post, I think, which is to not accept a given conversion as is, but to grade each clip to taste after the conversion. Instead, I have a conversion that I feel is nice enough without further tweaking, but I am using ACES to digitally re-work the signal in such a way that it's very similar to what you would get if the scene were brighter/darker, high-key/low-key, warmer/cooler. In this way it's actually very similar to shooting RAW photographs and using a RAW converter. And it allows for conscious decisions such as ETTR strategies, as well as compensating for errors.
So my post work involves a brightness slider, a contrast slider and a colour wheel. And that's it!

Actually, with proper colour management, it is Linear.
The Offset control in Resolve literally applies Linear gain, just like setting the node to Linear Gamma and then using the Gain wheel.

If was able to nail exposure and white balance in every shot I wouldn't need any tweaking other than contrast.
But I don't think anyone expects there to be a magic transform that doesn't require some small bit of work. We also want to leave ourselves a bit of flexibility in deferring some decisions until post.

If was able to nail exposure and white balance in every shot I wouldn't need any tweaking other than contrast.
But I don't think anyone expects there to be a magic transform that doesn't require some small bit of work. We also want to leave ourselves a bit of flexibility in deferring some decisions until post.

If was able to nail exposure and white balance in every shot I wouldn't need any tweaking other than contrast.
But I don't think anyone expects there to be a magic transform that doesn't require some small bit of work. We also want to leave ourselves a bit of flexibility in deferring some decisions until post.

Lol! I have used just one LUT for every single client job I've done over the last 5 years.
It emulates the colour response of slightly overexposed Portra 400 film.
I pop it on and adjust brightness, contrast and white balance in ACES space before the LUT. It takes 15 to 30 seconds to do most clips, and makes matching shots a breeze.
I've made a new version for myself every time I get a new camera, so technically it hasn't been just one LUT, it's been three. But it does the same thing for each camera.

Lol! I have used just one LUT for every single client job I've done over the last 5 years.
It emulates the colour response of slightly overexposed Portra 400 film.
I pop it on and adjust brightness, contrast and white balance in ACES space before the LUT. It takes 15 to 30 seconds to do most clips, and makes matching shots a breeze.
I've made a new version for myself every time I get a new camera, so technically it hasn't been just one LUT, it's been three. But it does the same thing for each camera.

There has just been leaked the upcoming release schedule for their slate of movies:

I've heard that von Neumann will be 7hrs long. 

I should also add to the above, that if you're shooting with any modern camera with 12stops or more of DR in a high-DR environment and the shadow noise and highlight clipping are both visible, then stop grading your images so they look like log footage and add some contrast FFS 🙂 

A new blog post:
https://www.eoshd.com/news/oppenheimer-why-christopher-nolan-uses-a-flip-phone/
It is interesting that the same technology that enables modern life, also at the same time destroys us.

But what about the stills from Gimme Shelter, above?
"Albert ran the camera, shooting his subjects with a zoom lens from across the room; David did the sound"
https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/cameras-keep-rolling-at-maysles-films
That wasn't 500 people, if was 2, one of whom had a camera that shot film. If it had been a C300 or whatever, the documentary would be just as interesting, but it wouldn't look as good in my view.
We should celebrate the look(s) of film, and try to recapture some of the magic that has been lost in the gradual enshittification of colour that has transpired over the last 10 years. I blame log for this btw!

 
 

Yes, but if that movie had been shot on a digital camera it probably wouldn't have looked as nice.
I watch a lot of old movies on the Criterion Channel and am regularly impressed by how good film looked.

Just to pick one example that struck me recently, The American Friend, Wim Wenders, 1977





 
It's also interesting to consider documentary. The Maysles brothers were early proponents of cinema verite in the US  (or direct cinema, or run and gun you could call it!) So it would have been one of them with a 16mm camera and a sound recordist. Here's Gimme Shelter (1970):






 
If you're interested in cinema (as opposed to endless franchise regurgitations) then the Criterion Channel is incredible. Non-US users can Google how to sign up.
 

My understanding of it was that a colour timer would take the negative and make a positive print using a special machine where each frame of the film was exposed via a separate light for Red, Green and Blue, and the machine allowed the exposure time for each to be adjusted.  Thus the phrase "colour timing".
Adjusting all of them would raise/lower the overall exposure and adjusting them in relation to each other would adjust the WB.  The controls from that operation live on as the "printer lights" controls in Resolve and other software, as they literally adjusted the lights of the printer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading#Color_timing