Brett Noe Productions

Technicolor released their CineStyle picture profile for Canon HDSLRs this week. It is a new “superflat” profile meant to eke out more shadow detail when shooting and allowing easier grading in post. It was created with the Canon 5D Mark II in mind but will work with any of the current Canon EOS line. I took the plunge and installed it. It loaded easily on my Canon Rebel T2i. It adjusts most settings when loaded but some minor tweaks had to be done to the settings in camera. I had to manually adjust the saturation to -2.

It comes with an S-curve LUT that you can apply using Red Giant Software’s LUT Buddy. Very handy and works in Premiere, After Effects and FCP 6 and 7. I have seen people ask why you would want to apply the LUT as makes the footage look almost the same as some of the in camera settings. The reason to use it is that the LUT is not burned in. You can apply the LUT, look at the footage and if you like the look keep it. Using in camera settings you’re stuck with that look, forever.

Here is what the image looks like without the LUT and CC and with:

There is more detail and grading was easy. Technicolor recommends that you use ISOs in increments of 160. These ISOs generally have less noise in the shadows. To do this on the T2i requires the Magic Lantern firmware mod.

This looks like a great profile and I will be using it from now on.

Thanks to Yahoo selling Delicious to the founders of YouTube, I went over and checked out my old links. Surprise! Some of them were broken.

Some information can be located via The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Some, fortunately, I saved myself. Here is a great post by J. Van Auken, reposted in its entirety, from the now defunct cineobscure.com.

DYNAMIC RANGE AND LIGHTING FOR FILM

The new vision3 stock.

What if I told you you could get a crisper, poppier, higher contrast, more film like image out of your camera, spend less that $40, and save hours in post at the same time?

Keep reading.

The digital age has allowed for countless people who would otherwise be unable, to have the means of making their own films for a fraction of what it cost not 20 years ago. It has also allowed for them to become fat and lazy filmmakers, who have become dependant on the technology, and have abandoned the old, “obsolete,” techniques in favor of ‘easier’ ways of doing things.

The biggest crutch kids entering filmmaking cling to is their LCD monitor. The sales reps at Best Buy trick them into thinking that what they see on the screen is what they get, and the Spielbergs-to-be run off under the impression that they have everything that they need to make a great picture.

The problem is that the LCD on your camera isn’t calibrated. At all. And let’s say you have a big fancy external monitor, calibrated and leant to you by Roger Deakins for the weekend; well, that’s great, but the problem remains that you still aren’t seeing what you get. If you use that monitor as your only guide, you won’t be able to take full advantage of your camera’s dynamic range, and end up with a picture that was not lit for film, but lit for TV. So, unless you’re shooting for Monday afternoon Telemundo, read on.

First, the technical background;

Your LCD, under perfect circumstances (which you’ll never have) can resolve about 6 stops of latitude. That’s six f-stop levels between the darkest area where you can perceive detail, and the brightest area that you can perceive detail. Your camera, however, has greater range. How much? well, the majority of digital cameras have between 8 – 9 stops, Vision2 has near 10, Vision3 more than that, and Kodak Tmax400 has well over 14 stops of latitude.

That difference between what you can’t quite see on the screen, and what your camera is still picking up, can encompass a lot of screen space and detail. Leaving it under lit, only to find that there were details or problems you missed later on is taking a big chance. It also robs you of true “contrast.” Contrast shouldn’t be something you add to a shot in post with an effect slider. Doing that only cuts your dynamic range more, increases artifacting and visible noise, and leaves you with a messy picture that any 6 year old with a handycam can make. As a cinematographer, your frame is your canvas. You can’t go cutting portions out or leaving chunks of it to chance.

“But Joe!” you whine, “If I can’t easily see everything on my preview monitor, how could I predict how to light for it?”

Now we get to why the article is entitled “lighting for film.”

Though there are a number of tools that help in determining proper lighting and exposure, the one we are going to cover today is the classic: the Light meter. When we shoot film, there is no accurate preview. If you’re lucky enough to have a video tap, it still suffers from the same problems of all LCD’s as listed above. So, you need to break out the ol’ light meter, and do things the old fashioned way.

In short, a light meter is a tool that measures the amount of light falling on an element of your scene. You can find them on ebay. I’ve seen Sekonic studio meters go for $40, and it does the job.

HOW TO ADD CONTRAST WITH A LIGHT METER:

Contrast in a shot can be set using the principle of lighting ratios. A ratio is determined by finding the intensity or brightness of your key light (in a unit of measure known as a footcandle), and then finding the intensity of your fill light. To do so, you turn on ONLY the light you’re trying to measure, and then take a light reading from your subject. When you have the two values, you add the key light value to the fill light value, then divide the sum by the fill light value.

Para exemplo: if you have a key light of 800 foot candles, and a fill of 200 footcandles, then your equation would be (800+200) / 200. which reduces to 5 /1, which makes your lighting ratio 5:1. That’s right. I just used math in the real world. Call Ripley’s.

Now, the higher your lighting ratio, the more contrast is in your scene. A ratio of 2:1 is relatively low contrast, and would be used for comedies, or sitcoms. A ratio of 8:1 is high contrast, and would be in use for horrors or noirs.

Okay, so let’s say you’re shooting a drama. You’ve decided you want a 5:1 light ratio. Cool. How does dynamic range come into play?

LIGHTING FOR DYNAMIC RANGE:

So, you have a scene. Your ratio is 5:1, and your key light is 800 foot candles, and you’re shooting with your HVX which has 8 stops of latitude, and coincidentally, a broken LCD (cause you tried a flip hack and voided the hell out of your warranty).

Well, if you set exposure with your light meter, and the key light on your subject was at 800 footcandles, that makes 800 your peg. What’s a peg? Consider a peg the middle of your dynamic range. When you take a meter reading, and the meter gives you the f-stop to set your camera to, that’s the middle of your range. If you have 8 stops of dynamic range, that means you have 4 stops above (brighter) the peg, and 4 stops under (darker).

Stops of light are measurable exponentially, in that every stop of light is twice as much as the one under it.

Knowing that, we can take our peg, 800, and measure 4 stops up; 1600, 3200, 6400, 12,800. So, we know that anything in our frame that meters over 12,800 foot candles will blow out, and we won’t be able to see it.

On the other side, if we measure down, (400, 200, 100, 50) we find that objects metering below 50 foot candles will not show up in our frame.

Great. We did all that math, and now our heads hurt. Now What?

If you light every element within your frame so that at least 50 footcandles of light fall on it, and no more than 12,800 footcandles fall on it, then everything in the frame will be visible. More over, if you include some elements in your frame that are lit at the bottom of your dynamic range, and some that are lit at the top, along with a subject metered in the middle, you are taking full advantage of your medium. This is called being a cinematographer.

THE BEAUTY PART:

You now know enough so that

you can make your frame as contrasty as you want
you know exactly the most and least amount of light to put on any object in the frame.

By following these steps, you keep everything in your frame within your dynamic range and take full advantage of your camera, while at the same time avoiding flat and low contrast pictures, and avoid losing all your range by correcting in post.

Perhaps the biggest benefit will be training yourself to use the industry standard method of exposing a picture. Heaven willing, you’ll get on a big shoot with a budget some day, and you don’t want to be the laughingstock on set because you spent half an hour trying to find the flipout LCD on an Arri. I see a lot of kids come in, representing themselves as ‘pros’, but lacking the skillset that’s required to make a living in feature films. Don’t be a casualty of the comforts offered by digital technology, and learn the skills now.

From the Delicious blog:

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Read the rest here.

A great post by Stu Maschwitz on Prolost. Read it here.

This is my favorite quote:

Whichever is the case, take heed: your TV will try very, very hard to make whatever movies you watch on it look not just bad, but aggressively, satanically, puppy-drowningly bad.

While working on my site, I came across this post by Andy Salterri describing how to use Vimeo videos in ShadowBox JS.

If, like me, you do video production for a living and you are a Shadowbox JS user, this will be helpful. I dislike having to keep track of multiple copies of my videos. This means I have one less to keep track of now. I am pleased.

You can see the results here.