Beautiful 4K Blackmagic Production Camera footage from James Miller

[thedest]

thedest, how about this? How does it look on your screen?

 

 

 

 

haarec, all the colors look very pale and undersaturated. There is too much noise on the right. On my iPad it looks better (I cant see the noise), but thats not a good sign.

 

I think that some of you guys may be using stock calibration on your displays. That means wrong gamma, saturation, blacks, sharpness etc.

 

Most displays and TVs come out of the store with a bad calibration. If you guys are using that kind of calibration you will see my grading with too much sharpening, contrast and saturation - but thats not a problem with the grading. Thats because the monitor is adding MORE saturation, contrast and sharpening over an image that has been graded to the limits of the safe levels.

 

Check that quick test. Its not the best tool to calibrate your monitor, but you can have an idea of what is happening:

 

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php

 

For example, if in the Black Level page you cant distiguish all the black squares, that will explain why you dont have a good shadow area and more noise on the right. Thats because you have raised your black levels to match your display. If thats true, on my grading the blacks probably look crushed to you. But they are not, as you can see on every NLE graphic.

 

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php

 

In the contrast page, look to the right. If you cant distinguish all the final steps or if the steps dont increase equally, my grading is probably oversaturated for you. You may even see some color bleeding. But thats not a problem with the grading. Again, its your monitor that is creating that.

 

And I repeat, my grading was made to be displayed on well callibrated monitors. Its probably 10% or more over what you would consider broadcast safe. When you do stuff for TV, you have to tone it down, because most TVs are not calibrated.

 

I did this grading because we are reviewing a camera, so its fair to push it to the limits - without creating artifacts.

 

And we are discussing about raw/ProRes. If you work with those codecs, you NEED a well calibrated monitor.

[AaronChicago]

Lets talk about art.

The example posted by Miller is too soft. Making the entire video soft is not beautifull, its a flaw. Whats the point of using expensive lenses to deliver a soft video?? You can soften a skin texture, but making the entire scene soft is wrong. The video will look like a low resolution out of focus video. With high end codecs, like raw, you can make the skin look soft and sharpen the eyes, for example. Eyes need to look sharp, otherwise the person will look lifeless and the video will look like a distant dream. He is also throwing away good dynamic range. He is blowing out the face of the main subject. She is like a pin up girl, but he graded her like a zombie shot on a low dynamic range camera. Her skin tone is green. One thing is to add a graded color to the scene, to create a mood, the other is to add a color cast that makes the skin tone look horrible.



I said it once and I will say it again. Applying pre-set looks like mojo, film convert tools, LUTs etc are not the way to do it. Grading is REALLY easy. You dont need those tricks.

And here is my simple grading for commercial use.

What did I do?

- Made her skin look soft
- Gave her a pin-up skin tone
- Increased the sharpness and contrast of her eyes, to make them stand out
- Changed her eye color, because I like blue
- Added a lot of saturation in her lips, to create a sexy look
- Increased the sharpness and the saturation of the yellow, to make her hair stand out
- Added some split toning (blue and purple) while mantaining her skin tone

Now I can see me gaining the contract for the commercial, while James grading would be only usable for an underground alien movie.






COMPARE THE 3 VERSIONS:

Did you grade the middle one? If so, it looks great.

[nazdar]

...

And here is the same video graded by me. Why cant they post videos with natural looking colors and sharp details?

...

 

 

POST PROCESSING FOR DUMMIES:

 

Lesson 1 - My sample is NOT graded, its COLOR CORRECTED using the limit parameters of high-end, well adjusted displays. There is a difference between grading and color correction. Please, start reading again from chapter 1.

...

 

Jeebus, man maybe you should get your stuff together first and check your integrity too!

 

You can write another 1000 reasons why is your grading-CC-whatever great, but everybody even average Joe can find out if it looks horrible or not with the one blink of an eye. And that what I love about it. "A picture is worth a thousand words"

The reason why we mess with colors is pure aesthetics and aesthetics is not allways about perfect sharpness, fidelity, rules and limits.

Free your mind and dont be a noob.

[Michael1]

Get this girl out of the tanning bed before you kill her!  :)  When have you guys ever seen a girl with light blue eyes with anything other than fair skin?

 

Michael

[thedest]

Did you grade the middle one? If so, it looks great.

 

Yes I did. But I dont like it. It looks too much comercial to me. I only did it to illustrate a subjective taste. Im not a big fan of beauty shots.

[thedest]

The reason why we mess with colors is pure aesthetics and aesthetics is not allways about perfect sharpness, fidelity, rules and limits.

 

Free your mind and dont be a noob.

 

 

It depends.

 

Are you color correcting? If so, you are not looking for aesthetics, you are looking for reality. If the reality looks ugly, thats what you will get. There is only one truth.

 

Are you grading? If so, you are creating a look. There is no truth here, only subjective tastes.

 

Both techniques have their place in the world.

 

And Im sorry for being a noob. I may not be as smart as you, but im trying. Im always open to learn new stuff - so, if you have something to teach, other than how to offend...

[thedest]

When have you guys ever seen a girl with light blue eyes with anything other than fair skin?

 

WOW! I dont think that you know much more than your neighbourhood. There is an entire world out there, my friend. You need to get out of your desk. You just sounded like Hitler right now! That may be one of the most stupid and nonsense comments EVER!

 

Have you ever heard about miscegenation? Let me tell you a secret: even black people can have blue eyes!

 

One of the hottest girls in the planet has a dark skin tone and blue eyes.

 

Let me present you to Adriana Lima.

 

[Michael1]

This must be a different Adriana Lima.

 

[thedest]

Yeah. The original one doesnt have a flash or a reflector attached to her face.

 

She is from Bahia, and she got famous because she had a peculiar exotic look, and that includes her "jambo" skin tone.

 

Are you defending your thesis that people with blue eyes can only have fair skin? Are you a racist or something? Or are you just VERY ignorant? Maybe a member of the SS?

 

And please, dont even bother to answer that. Lets not fill this topic with a horrible discussion like that.

 

And let me apologize, IN YOUR NAME, to those people that have darker skin tones and blue eyes.

[Sean Cunningham]

Perhaps you were being too subtle with your Ms. Lima example.  Here's Vanessa Williams:

 

 

...then you have actors like Michael Ealy from Almost Human.  Some theorize all blue eyes come from a single ancestor about 8000 years ago who lived on the coast of the Black Sea.  There is a rare genetic disorder that can give light blue eyes to a small number of folks of African descent but there are also non Waardenburg Syndrome instances of Africans born with blue eyes where it's not the product of interbreeding with someone of European descent.  

[Michael1]

Yeah. The original one doesnt have a flash or a reflector attached to her face.

 

She is from Bahia, and she got famous because she had a peculiar exotic look, and that includes her "jambo" skin tone.

 

Are you defending your thesis that people with blue eyes can only have fair skin? Are you a racist or something? Or are you just VERY ignorant? Maybe a member of the SS?

 

And please, dont even bother to answer that. Lets not fill this topic with a horrible discussion like that.

 

And let me apologize, IN YOUR NAME, to those people that have darker skin tones and blue eyes.

[Michael1]

 

 

 

I didn't think I had to be this explicit when I said, "When was the last time you saw...", but I was wrong.  The point is "rarity", not the ability to search Google. 

 

And again I was wrong thinking I could have a discussion on skin tones on a film site discussion on grading, without some idiot pulling out the race card.  That's really unbelievable.  I actually have to laugh at that, it's so absurd.

[nazdar]

Trolled to death.

[haarec]

thedest, now I am sure that this is something with you screen or maybe even further. What I did looks pretty naturally on a (of course) calibrated screen. You are right that first example of BMC footage was washed out, but the second example has too much red and the third (sorry) looks just horrible. Do something with this :)

[thedest]

 

 

I didn't think I had to be this explicit when I said, "When was the last time you saw...", but I was wrong.  The point is "rarity", not the ability to search Google. 

 

 

When have you guys ever seen a girl with light blue eyes with anything other than fair skin?

 

 

 

 

 

[Andrew Reid]

Does anyone see the title of the thread, something about 4K footage from the new Blackmagic camera?

 

Feel free to start a new thread for the grading discussion. Otherwise I will have to delete further off topic posts.

 

Thanks!

[thedest]

thedest, now I am sure that this is something with you screen or maybe even further. What I did looks pretty naturally on a (of course) calibrated screen. You are right that first example of BMC footage was washed out, but the second example has too much red and the third (sorry) looks just horrible. Do something with this :)

 

haarec, the second example is graded, not color corrected, so it has a color signature - because thats why you grade something. The highlights were actually changed to yellow, using split toning. Part of the shadows is pink, and the other part is blue. And that wasnt done using my eyes and the monitor as a reference. All was done using graphics and numbers.

 

There is no problem with the grading parameters. And again, thats not according to my calibration, thats according to parameters. So if you are seeing bleeding, crushing, halos etc, its because you have a calibration problem.

 

Thats how the vectorscope of your graded shot looks

 

 

As you can see, even if you are considering "broadcast safe colors" yours is undersatured. And dont forget, mine was not graded for low end TVs, it was callibrated for good displays. When you do that for TV, you shouldnt go over 75%. I went over 75%, but not even close to 100%.

 

 

Here, the red line shows what you consider a good skin tone in your grading. The blue line shows the color of blood flowing through human skin, regardless of the ethnicity of the person you’re filming. So your skin tone is wrong.

 

 

I may be wrong, but if you disagree with that, there are only 2 explanations: bad calibration or you just graded it to match your taste, using no paramaters. Thats acceptable, but we cant discuss personal taste.

[thedest]

Does anyone see the title of the thread, something about 4K footage from the new Blackmagic camera?

 

Feel free to start a new thread for the grading discussion. Otherwise I will have to delete further off topic posts.

 

Thanks!

 

Ops! Made my last post while you were posting that! Sorry

[Andrew Reid]

Like I say not trying to censor, feel free to put it all in a separate topic. Cheers

[Homerus]

I thought this thread was about the BMPC 4K...?