Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
ACE survey: Final Cut's slice growing
Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information, US, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Daily Variety, January 19, 2011
ACE survey: Final Cut's slice growing
Since 2004, Harry B. Miller III has conducted an informal annual survey of his colleagues in the American Cinema Editors to determine what equipment and technology they use in the editing room, the camera original and delivery format of editors' projects and how they're finished.
While the results of 2009-10's 130-respondent survey are not yet complete, they presently show Apple's Final Cut growing steadily from around 12% use in 2004 to about 20%, and Avid Technology platforms holding steady, with the Avid DX Mojo now dominant in concert with 24P HD origination.
"The trend is that Avid has 80% of the offline editor market," commented Miller, a member of the ACE board of directors. "That has held with some fluctuation." Miller added that Final Cut's growing market share is not all at the expense of Avid. "Other systems have disappeared, such as Lightworks. There was a year when only Thelma Schoonmaker was using it."
Perhaps because of Avid's saturated installed base, however, Final Cut is leading Avid in new-seat sales, 49.8% to 19.3%, according to SCRI's April survey of broadcast and post houses.
"Avid had a solid product line in the 1990s and early 2000s. Then they introduced the hardware called Adrenaline," Miller recalled. "That took market share from older systems, but it was a technology disaster. It was unstable, and it did not provide substantial benefits in video quality or performance."
By 2007, however, several editors, such as Jabez Olson ("King Kong"), Bill DeRonde ("American Idol") and Paul Crowder ("Riding Giants"), were giving Adrenaline high marks.
Miller argued that Avid's acceptance can be attributed not only to Avid's Final Cut-pressured price drop but also to "a substantial management and technology change where the management is more responsive to editors." Plus, he added, Avid put out a software-only version and a much better HD system.
Final Cut has risen, Miller contended, because of its use by prestigious editors such as Walter Murch; companies such as Universal Studios "developing their own workflow where they can online edit in Final Cut Pro"; and an endless search for cheaper post, though he pointed out that the price difference is now negligible. Significantly, the survey shows editors making the call on editing platforms less often, with producers, directors, studios and others calling the shots more.
As a working editor (recently on "Caprica"), Miller is firmly in the pro-Avid camp. "Final Cut has shown no improvement in years. I'm reaching the conclusion that (Apple) is a company that wants to make iPhones and iPads."
January 19, 2011
All Rights Reserved
Daily Variety, January 19, 2011
ACE survey: Final Cut's slice growing
Since 2004, Harry B. Miller III has conducted an informal annual survey of his colleagues in the American Cinema Editors to determine what equipment and technology they use in the editing room, the camera original and delivery format of editors' projects and how they're finished.
While the results of 2009-10's 130-respondent survey are not yet complete, they presently show Apple's Final Cut growing steadily from around 12% use in 2004 to about 20%, and Avid Technology platforms holding steady, with the Avid DX Mojo now dominant in concert with 24P HD origination.
"The trend is that Avid has 80% of the offline editor market," commented Miller, a member of the ACE board of directors. "That has held with some fluctuation." Miller added that Final Cut's growing market share is not all at the expense of Avid. "Other systems have disappeared, such as Lightworks. There was a year when only Thelma Schoonmaker was using it."
Perhaps because of Avid's saturated installed base, however, Final Cut is leading Avid in new-seat sales, 49.8% to 19.3%, according to SCRI's April survey of broadcast and post houses.
"Avid had a solid product line in the 1990s and early 2000s. Then they introduced the hardware called Adrenaline," Miller recalled. "That took market share from older systems, but it was a technology disaster. It was unstable, and it did not provide substantial benefits in video quality or performance."
By 2007, however, several editors, such as Jabez Olson ("King Kong"), Bill DeRonde ("American Idol") and Paul Crowder ("Riding Giants"), were giving Adrenaline high marks.
Miller argued that Avid's acceptance can be attributed not only to Avid's Final Cut-pressured price drop but also to "a substantial management and technology change where the management is more responsive to editors." Plus, he added, Avid put out a software-only version and a much better HD system.
Final Cut has risen, Miller contended, because of its use by prestigious editors such as Walter Murch; companies such as Universal Studios "developing their own workflow where they can online edit in Final Cut Pro"; and an endless search for cheaper post, though he pointed out that the price difference is now negligible. Significantly, the survey shows editors making the call on editing platforms less often, with producers, directors, studios and others calling the shots more.
As a working editor (recently on "Caprica"), Miller is firmly in the pro-Avid camp. "Final Cut has shown no improvement in years. I'm reaching the conclusion that (Apple) is a company that wants to make iPhones and iPads."
January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Looks like Apple are abandoning the FCP ship
Looks like Apple are abandoning the FCP ship: "It is rumoured that it’s not only Steve Jobbs that’s sick but Apple as a company are looking at abandoning Xsan and Final Cut Server, this will be a substantial blow to Final Cut Users as most pro houses including the BBC use Xserve in a daily basis. THE STORY as reported by MAC RUMOURS [...]"
Monday, January 10, 2011
Move Projects from FCP to AE Seamlessly (and Free!)
Move Projects from FCP to AE Seamlessly (and Free!):
November 8, 2010
by Richard Harrington, Final Cut Help
I am always on the lookout for things that can make my life easier… sleep in a can, comfortable shoes, great software.
November 8, 2010
by Richard Harrington, Final Cut Help
I am always on the lookout for things that can make my life easier… sleep in a can, comfortable shoes, great software.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Consumer Camcorders Proliferate in Stereo at CES
Consumer Camcorders Proliferate in Stereo at CES: "
"
News reports from the Consumer Electronics Show indicate that 3D is a big topic of discussion this year, although sales of 3D TV sets are disappointing. What is getting the attention in 3D? 3D cameras, of course. Sony, Panasonic, and JVC all showed consumer-friendly 3D cameras at the show.
Panasonic went the route of creating an optional “3D Conversion Lens,” the CW-CLT1, that turns two different 1080/60p camcorders into stereo 3D units. While Panasonic’s cameras still have a single imager to capture the stereo content, JVC touted its GS-TD1, which has two 3.32 megapixel CMOS sensors built in, capturing both right-eye and left-eye images at 1080i in something JVC calls “LR Independent Format.” No word on whether that new format complicates working with the files later — the bundled Everio MediaBrowser software for Windows will apparently automate sharing the videos via YouTube’s 3D player — but the camcorder also shoots in the more common, reduced-resolution side-by-side 3D format. The 3.5-inch LCD touch panel offers glasses-free stereo playback.
Sony has a similar model, the HDR-TD10, with double CMOS image sensors, a 3.5-inch glasses-free 3D touch screen, and 64 GB of flash memory. (In fact, it looks like the official announcement of Sony’s camera beat JVC to the punch by one day.)
JVC’s GS-TD1 ships in March and will cost $1999.95, and Sony’s HDR-TD10 will ship in April for “about $1500.” Panasonic was stingy with that kind of detail, saying in a press release that “pricing and availability [of the new cameras] will be announced 30 days prior to shipping date.”
But the coolest 3D camera at the show may be the Sony Bloggie MHS-FS3, billed as “the world’s first HD 3D pocket camera.” Packing 8 GB of on-board memory, the MHS-FS3 will ship in April for “about $250.” It has two lenses and two sensors, and content can be played back on the camera’s glasses-free 2.4-inch LCD screen.
Only time will tell whether any of these cameras produce good enough images for use by pros as 3D crash cams, but don’t rule them out.
The other super-hot consumer 3D product is the forthcoming Nintendo 3DS, a handheld stereo-3D gaming system that was reportedly being shown off the show floor. Taking into account the voluminous CES hype related to 4G data networks, it looks like CES this year is all about small-screen experiences, rather than big-screen TVs. Hollywood studios seemed to acknowledge as much with the announcement that a coalition of studios — Disney being the most notably absent — had lined up behind UltraViolet, a new system designed to allow consumers to watch movies they purchase on multiple platforms, including PCs, videogame consoles, and phones. (Well, we’ll see how that works out.)
Still, there may be another interesting inversion going on with digital media. Just as the portability of MP3 players dumped the music industry’s expensive new high-res formats (DVD-Audio and SACD) into the dustbin of history, 3D on the go may be a more compelling technology than 3D in the living room. That’s because glasses-free 3D is much more practical on small screens than large. Will the iPhone 5, or something like it, become the first blockbuster consumer platform for 3D stereo?
"
Monday, January 3, 2011
The DSLR Filmmaker’s Workflow
DSLR video has changed the industry. Over the past year, our photographic sensibilities have propelled the moving image-opening the door to a new realm of storytelling possibilities. For photographers, the form factor is comfortable and familiar. The lens selection? A dream come true. Custom color pallets, high ISO capture, all with a professional esthetic rivaling the production values of major Hollywood productions-how could this not be industry changing? Life changing, even?
Reviewing the rushes from my first outing with the Canon 5D Mark II, I almost lost my mind. The depth of field separations, lowlight performance, and 1080p quality were outstanding. The footage was easy to shoot. It was easy to drag and drop onto my computer. It was easy to play back in QuickTime Player. Then I loaded my footage into Final Cut Pro, assuming that post-production would be easy, as well.
This was the part where I really did lose my mind: editing the 5D II footage was a total nightmare. While things looked pretty good on the timeline, I couldn’t get the precise cuts that I wanted. Some chops were off by as many as five frames. Adding basic transitions, simple text–any small change–required rendering. Exporting dailies to DVD resulted in playback with dropped frames, digital artifacts, and the occasional Hulk-mad green screen. Here I was with a load of beautiful footage and no way to efficiently edit it.
The problem with DSLR video is file compression. The most popular cameras out there use web-friendly formats. For shooting and sharing, this would be great, but web-friendly isn’t always edit-friendly. Canon’s 5D Mark II, 7D, 1D Mark IV, and Rebel T1i use QuickTime H.264 compression. This is the same compression method employed for most of the movie trailers we view online. Nikon cameras like the D3S, D90, and D5000 use AVI (Motion JPEG) compression. Pentax bodies like the K-7 and K-x utilize the same thing. Used within most nonlinear editing systems, these files are all terrible.
This article was written to help anyone that’s been there. I feel your pain. It took me a while to find the workflow that fit my editing style. Today I’m sharing my findings. There are many ways to arrive at your destination. This article is a great place to get started. In the coming months, there will be other techniques, strategies, and software available to simplify your life. Until then, let’s talk workflow. Quick note: I’m a Final Cut Studio user. If you’re on another NLE, skip down to Transcoding with Freeware.
Transcoding with Compressor
Before you begin, it’s best to organize your media files for efficiency. Create a file folder for your video footage. As a best practice, keep the folder limited to video files-no pics, thumbnails, or reference stuff. Video only.
Transcoding is a process that changes one file type into another. Using Compressor, a piece of high-quality conversion software included in Final Cut Studio, we’re going to transcode our DSLR video footage into something a bit more edit-friendly. Final Cut Pro plays well with almost all of the major video formats out there. In theory, we could transcode our footage into any one of these formats. But for maximum flexibility, I’d recommend using one of Apple’s ProRes offerings. Why ProRes? It doesn’t require rendering on the timeline, and if your project incorporates footage from other HD or SD cameras (non-DSLRs), everything still works well. For most users, ProRes 422HQ, 422, or 422LT should do the trick.
Launch Compressor. In the Settings window, you’ll find a range of ProRes options under Apple->Formats->QuickTime. Select any of the ProRes 422 settings. ProRes 422HQ offers the highest quality, but can get a bit heavy in terms of file size. If you’re working on a special effects project with loads of composites and motion graphics, consider ProRes with Alpha (ProRes 4444).
If you plan to work with DSLR video often, make your ProRes selection and click the Duplicate Selected Setting button (the third button from the left at the top of the Settings window). This copies your favorite ProRes flavor into the Custom Settings folder.
Double-click your ProRes setting. This opens up a small Inspector window. Click the Encoder button (second button from the left at the top of the window). Under Video: Settings, you can alter the frame rate to your liking. I recommend keeping this on “Current.” It’s best to do your initial edit in your DSLR’s native frame rate. Only alter these settings if your project requires you to do so.
In the Settings window, you should also see a tab labeled Destinations. Click this to specify where you want your transcoded material to be recorded. There are some prescribed options in the menu, but you can choose your own by clicking the “+” icon at the top right of the window.
An untitled project window should be open above the Settings and Inspector slugs. If not, use Command+N to create a new one. Click Add File at the top left of the window. A navigation finder will open up. Use this to locate your video content.
This is where it helps to have some patience. If you’re using a Core 2 Duo processor, you really don’t want to select more than 10 files at a time. Transcoding with Compressor is a bit taxing on the system, and if you overload it, it tends to crash. Quad Core users or editors who are working with a cluster of machines can work with a greater quantities of clips. The more powerful your machine or network of machines, the better luck you’ll have with larger batches.
Select all the clips in the untitled window with Command+A. Drag your ProRes selection from the Settings window over the selected clips. Choose the destination for your transcoded footage from the Tool Bar (Target->Destination). Click Submit at the bottom right of the window.
An option to name your project will appear. This auto-populates with the name of your first clip. Change this over to your project name, make sure that Priority is set to High, and click Submit.
Depending on the amount of footage that you’ve queued, the transcoding process could take minutes or hours. When the process is finished, you should be able to drag and drop your highly stable ProRes footage directly into Final Cut Pro.
Transcoding with Freeware
I love freeware. By definition, it’s free and often provides services that pay-software companies haven’t addressed yet. This is especially true with transcoding. Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 is a fast and efficient way to change your footage over to a more stable format.
Install and launch MPEG Streamclip. From the Tool Bar, select List->Batch List and select the video files that you want to transcode. You’ll need to drag these into the Batch List window. Unlike Compressor, the software holds up pretty well under a bulky queue of clips. Keep the number of your selections conservative, though-the larger your queue, the more likely a crash.
Since most NLEs are compatible with QuickTime, select Export to QuickTime from the pop-up dialogue box. From here, you’ll choose a destination for the converted footage in the “Select the Destination Folder” window. Click Select. From here, an options window opens with all of the available QuickTime codecs on your system. Since your DSLR captures in HD, I’d recommend using an HD codec. If you’re on a Mac, choose a ProRes flavor. PC folks can use a DVCPRO HD setting or any HD QuickTime variant they prefer.
Pull the Quality slider to 100%. Click the radio box to turn Interlaced Scaling off. All current DSLRs capture HD progressively, so there’s no sense in scaling your footage.
Click To Batch. A new window will open. Click Go. The transcoding process can take a while. However, MPEG Streamclip is significantly faster than Compressor.
Does the speed boost make the freeware better? Well, yes and no. If speed is the name of the game, use MPEG Streamclip. It’s fast and relatively stable. If you’re on a Mac and want a higher quality file, use Compressor. Shadow detail is significantly cleaner and the overall image has fewer artifacts.
Whichever way you choose to roll, your transcoded footage will now play nice on with your NLE. It’s good to experiment with both approaches. There’s no right or wrong here.
Summing It Up
DSLR filmmaking is probably the fastest growing segment of the moving image market. This transcoding tutorial is just a starting place for those of you that want to work with your footage in the editing room. As I said earlier, new workflows and software products are already on the way. Stay tuned! Stay sharp! Can’t wait to see you and your film on the festival circuit!
David Flores is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York City. He is a member of the B&H Creative Content Team. His latest film, Blue King, is set to debut in 2010 at the Derby City Film Festival.
Reviewing the rushes from my first outing with the Canon 5D Mark II, I almost lost my mind. The depth of field separations, lowlight performance, and 1080p quality were outstanding. The footage was easy to shoot. It was easy to drag and drop onto my computer. It was easy to play back in QuickTime Player. Then I loaded my footage into Final Cut Pro, assuming that post-production would be easy, as well.
This was the part where I really did lose my mind: editing the 5D II footage was a total nightmare. While things looked pretty good on the timeline, I couldn’t get the precise cuts that I wanted. Some chops were off by as many as five frames. Adding basic transitions, simple text–any small change–required rendering. Exporting dailies to DVD resulted in playback with dropped frames, digital artifacts, and the occasional Hulk-mad green screen. Here I was with a load of beautiful footage and no way to efficiently edit it.
The problem with DSLR video is file compression. The most popular cameras out there use web-friendly formats. For shooting and sharing, this would be great, but web-friendly isn’t always edit-friendly. Canon’s 5D Mark II, 7D, 1D Mark IV, and Rebel T1i use QuickTime H.264 compression. This is the same compression method employed for most of the movie trailers we view online. Nikon cameras like the D3S, D90, and D5000 use AVI (Motion JPEG) compression. Pentax bodies like the K-7 and K-x utilize the same thing. Used within most nonlinear editing systems, these files are all terrible.
This article was written to help anyone that’s been there. I feel your pain. It took me a while to find the workflow that fit my editing style. Today I’m sharing my findings. There are many ways to arrive at your destination. This article is a great place to get started. In the coming months, there will be other techniques, strategies, and software available to simplify your life. Until then, let’s talk workflow. Quick note: I’m a Final Cut Studio user. If you’re on another NLE, skip down to Transcoding with Freeware.
Transcoding with Compressor
Before you begin, it’s best to organize your media files for efficiency. Create a file folder for your video footage. As a best practice, keep the folder limited to video files-no pics, thumbnails, or reference stuff. Video only.
Transcoding is a process that changes one file type into another. Using Compressor, a piece of high-quality conversion software included in Final Cut Studio, we’re going to transcode our DSLR video footage into something a bit more edit-friendly. Final Cut Pro plays well with almost all of the major video formats out there. In theory, we could transcode our footage into any one of these formats. But for maximum flexibility, I’d recommend using one of Apple’s ProRes offerings. Why ProRes? It doesn’t require rendering on the timeline, and if your project incorporates footage from other HD or SD cameras (non-DSLRs), everything still works well. For most users, ProRes 422HQ, 422, or 422LT should do the trick.
Launch Compressor. In the Settings window, you’ll find a range of ProRes options under Apple->Formats->QuickTime. Select any of the ProRes 422 settings. ProRes 422HQ offers the highest quality, but can get a bit heavy in terms of file size. If you’re working on a special effects project with loads of composites and motion graphics, consider ProRes with Alpha (ProRes 4444).
If you plan to work with DSLR video often, make your ProRes selection and click the Duplicate Selected Setting button (the third button from the left at the top of the Settings window). This copies your favorite ProRes flavor into the Custom Settings folder.
Double-click your ProRes setting. This opens up a small Inspector window. Click the Encoder button (second button from the left at the top of the window). Under Video: Settings, you can alter the frame rate to your liking. I recommend keeping this on “Current.” It’s best to do your initial edit in your DSLR’s native frame rate. Only alter these settings if your project requires you to do so.
In the Settings window, you should also see a tab labeled Destinations. Click this to specify where you want your transcoded material to be recorded. There are some prescribed options in the menu, but you can choose your own by clicking the “+” icon at the top right of the window.
An untitled project window should be open above the Settings and Inspector slugs. If not, use Command+N to create a new one. Click Add File at the top left of the window. A navigation finder will open up. Use this to locate your video content.
This is where it helps to have some patience. If you’re using a Core 2 Duo processor, you really don’t want to select more than 10 files at a time. Transcoding with Compressor is a bit taxing on the system, and if you overload it, it tends to crash. Quad Core users or editors who are working with a cluster of machines can work with a greater quantities of clips. The more powerful your machine or network of machines, the better luck you’ll have with larger batches.
Select all the clips in the untitled window with Command+A. Drag your ProRes selection from the Settings window over the selected clips. Choose the destination for your transcoded footage from the Tool Bar (Target->Destination). Click Submit at the bottom right of the window.
An option to name your project will appear. This auto-populates with the name of your first clip. Change this over to your project name, make sure that Priority is set to High, and click Submit.
Depending on the amount of footage that you’ve queued, the transcoding process could take minutes or hours. When the process is finished, you should be able to drag and drop your highly stable ProRes footage directly into Final Cut Pro.
Transcoding with Freeware
I love freeware. By definition, it’s free and often provides services that pay-software companies haven’t addressed yet. This is especially true with transcoding. Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 is a fast and efficient way to change your footage over to a more stable format.
Install and launch MPEG Streamclip. From the Tool Bar, select List->Batch List and select the video files that you want to transcode. You’ll need to drag these into the Batch List window. Unlike Compressor, the software holds up pretty well under a bulky queue of clips. Keep the number of your selections conservative, though-the larger your queue, the more likely a crash.
Since most NLEs are compatible with QuickTime, select Export to QuickTime from the pop-up dialogue box. From here, you’ll choose a destination for the converted footage in the “Select the Destination Folder” window. Click Select. From here, an options window opens with all of the available QuickTime codecs on your system. Since your DSLR captures in HD, I’d recommend using an HD codec. If you’re on a Mac, choose a ProRes flavor. PC folks can use a DVCPRO HD setting or any HD QuickTime variant they prefer.
Pull the Quality slider to 100%. Click the radio box to turn Interlaced Scaling off. All current DSLRs capture HD progressively, so there’s no sense in scaling your footage.
Click To Batch. A new window will open. Click Go. The transcoding process can take a while. However, MPEG Streamclip is significantly faster than Compressor.
Does the speed boost make the freeware better? Well, yes and no. If speed is the name of the game, use MPEG Streamclip. It’s fast and relatively stable. If you’re on a Mac and want a higher quality file, use Compressor. Shadow detail is significantly cleaner and the overall image has fewer artifacts.
Whichever way you choose to roll, your transcoded footage will now play nice on with your NLE. It’s good to experiment with both approaches. There’s no right or wrong here.
Summing It Up
DSLR filmmaking is probably the fastest growing segment of the moving image market. This transcoding tutorial is just a starting place for those of you that want to work with your footage in the editing room. As I said earlier, new workflows and software products are already on the way. Stay tuned! Stay sharp! Can’t wait to see you and your film on the festival circuit!
David Flores is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York City. He is a member of the B&H Creative Content Team. His latest film, Blue King, is set to debut in 2010 at the Derby City Film Festival.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Useful Tool for FCP Network Admins
Useful Tool for FCP Network Admins: "
"
Digital Rebellion has recently released a new tool that adds additional functionality to one of its other very useful tools, FCS Maintenance Pack. The new FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin will let a system administrator perform the tasks and functions of the maintenance pack remotely. A full rundown of the tool was posted on the Digital Rebellion site just over a week ago. Some basic bullet points about the new tool (from the Digital Rebellion site):
- Perform maintenance tasks across the network simultaneously
- Sync plugins, preferences, user paths and scheduled tasks between computers
- Use the Difference Finder tool to find the differences in specification between computers on the network, allowing you to determine why a particular system isn’t working correctly when others are fine
- View aggregate crash statistics including the number of crashes across the network per day, week or month, the most common cause of crashes, and the most and least stable machines
- Users can alert administrators to problems on their system, allowing the administrator to resolve them remotely
- Maintenance tasks can also be scheduled to run automatically on every system
Full pricing includes both five-user and unlimited licenses, as well as bundles of the Network Admin tool with FCS Maintenance Pack (it has to be installed on all the client computers that you might be admin-ing to on your network. As always, there’s a free trial available.
"
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Grading The Graders, Part 1 - Postworld
Grading The Graders, Part 1 - Postworld
There seems to be a lot of talk these days about color grading, and a lot of it seems to revolve around what system represents the best solution given a particular set of circumstances. In a lot of these discussions, there seems to be a lot of attention paid to using general purpose platforms, such as nonlinear editors like Final Cut, Avid Media Composer, and Premiere Pro, for this purpose, or using software written for the purpose of file format conversion, like Red’s Redcine-X, for final creative color grading. And while for some this may present a very inexpensive (i.e., essentially free) solution on certain personal projects, in the professional world it is generally not practical or desirable. And it is not pricing that determines these things, rather, it is a combination of factors that together fulfill the practical needs of a professional colorist.
More...
There seems to be a lot of talk these days about color grading, and a lot of it seems to revolve around what system represents the best solution given a particular set of circumstances. In a lot of these discussions, there seems to be a lot of attention paid to using general purpose platforms, such as nonlinear editors like Final Cut, Avid Media Composer, and Premiere Pro, for this purpose, or using software written for the purpose of file format conversion, like Red’s Redcine-X, for final creative color grading. And while for some this may present a very inexpensive (i.e., essentially free) solution on certain personal projects, in the professional world it is generally not practical or desirable. And it is not pricing that determines these things, rather, it is a combination of factors that together fulfill the practical needs of a professional colorist.
More...
Solutions to Improve FCP’s Media Management II
Back in May, I wrote about FcpReconnect as one answer to Apple Final Cut Pro’s less-than-robust media management. In this entry, I’ll cover Matchback Magic, a handy application developed by Philip Hodgetts and Dr. Gregory Clarke of Intelligent Assistance to make FCP media bullet-proof. Through the Assisted Editing product line, they’ve developed a number of workflow tools that leverage the power of XML for Final Cut Pro users.The essential media management differences between Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro stem from the fact that Avid cross-references media files with bin clips through a media database. You can rename clips, but not media and the database files keep everything straight. Matchback Magic was developed out of the need to make FCP media “operator safe” and in effect, to behave more like Avid media.
Offline/Online
Matchback Magic is designed for an offline/online editing workflow. The creative editing phase uses proxy media and the final project is relinked to full-quality media for finishing and output. FCP handles this fairly well, but the process is prone to operator error, which can result in files not properly relinking at the end. The main reason for offline/online editing is so that you don’t have to deal with a lot of high-resolution files during the rough cut phase of the project. For instance, it might be an HD job, but cutting with DV25 media makes it possible to cut on a laptop without taxing the system.
Matchback Magic “protects” files against human error by “injecting” metadata from the full-quality master files into the proxy media files. Once that’s done, no matter what happens to the proxy media – change timecode, reel numbers, files names, etc. – Matchback Magic can conform an edit so that the final sequence frame-accurately matches the rough cut and media is properly relinked.
Real world test
I tested this out with the same Cheese Shop project as before. My master files are 1920×1080 ProResLT conversions from H.264 camera files that originated in a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Reel and timecode information was added usingQtChange. These files were further encoded to a second set of anamorphic DV25 files to be used for offline editing. This is my starting point. All media handling at this stage has been outside of FCP, which is typical of a lot of file-based workflows, not just with HDSLR cameras. For example, if you used an AJA KiPro recorder or were supplied converted QuickTime camera masters from a videographer or a film lab, then this would follow the same methodology.I originally ran into one small, but puzzling issue. Matchback Magic didn’t work correctly until I removed the file extensions (.mov) from both sets of media files. That’s easy to do with the R-Name batch utility, but it wasn’t the way it should work. It turns out that this was related to which metadata from the XML was used to determine file names. After some testing and discussions with the developers, they were able to make a quick modification to the application to correct this issue. An automatic online update to the application and everything was working as expected. No need to worry about the presence or absence of file extensions. One of the beauties of working with a small, but responsive software development company!
Here are the basic steps to follow.
Step 1 – Start a new FCP project and import the folder of full-quality files. Highlight that folder and export an XML file.
Step 2 – Open Matchback Magic. Import the XML file and the folder of matching proxy media. Press Add Matchback Protection. This will insert metadata from the full-quality files into the proxy files. When this step is done, there will be a new FCP project labeled Matchback Magic containing the folder of proxy clips. You may delete this project or rename the project and continue from there as your rough cut starting point. One way to verify that the proxy media has actually been altered is that the modification date will now read as the current date and time.
Step 3 – Edit as you normally would using the proxy media. At this point you may safely change not only the master clip names, but also the media file names. This could potentially be disastrous under normal FCP operations; hence, the beauty of Matchback Magic.
Step 4 – When the cut is locked, create a new, blank sequence with a preset that matches your final quality output. (This isn’t essential, but will save some steps.) Highlight both this blank sequence and the sequence representing the approved cut and export an XML file.
Step 5 – Open Matchback Magic, click the Conform tab, then Read Matchback Information. Open the XML file from Step 4. The information will be displayed in the spreadsheet-style window.
Step 6 – Click Conform Sequence, which takes you back to FCP and an Import XML dialogue window. Select Create New Project (from the pulldown) as the target for the conformed sequence. A new, single sequence will be linked to the full quality media files. As an added touch, the offline media will be on higher tracks of the same timeline. You may compare tracks to verify frame-accuracy between the rough cut and the conformed cut. Sequence clips will display the names (as added or changed during offline editing), while the actual media file names of the full-quality media will remain unchanged.
This is a very simplified workflow test that demonstrates the power of Matchback Magic. One of the beauties of FCP is how XML can be used to augment the application beyond its inherent design. Other features include the ability to track double-system audio and exporting ALE and Excel files. More of this can be seen in their demo video. The process is bullet proof and actually simpler than FCP’s own Media Manager.
The demo version of Matchback Magic can be used to inject protection information. Even if you don’t think you’ll need it, you can use the demo to protect the files. If it turns out later that you need Matchback Magic to “save” you after all, simply buy and activate the software to enable the other steps.
©2010 Oliver Peters
Thursday, October 21, 2010
What about a low rez to hi rez conform option for 7D footage on an Avid?
There’s a forum topic over at Reduser.net that I’ve been following for quite a while. It’s called new Jamfuze info new Jamfuze info and is a discussion about a Macintosh software product, written by a user, that works to process RED .R3D media into mfx files for direct importing into Avid Media Composer. That thread eventually moved into a discussion of a similar product that might include processing of Canon 7D (and I assume 5D, 1D, Rebel T2i) footage as well. What might become 7Dfuze was born.
More...
Monday, August 9, 2010
Calibrating Colors Bars for FCP and Avid
Calibrating Colors Bars for FCP and Avid:
For video professionals it’s important to view your final product the way in the same way that your intended audience will be viewing it. This means watching your final product on an external broadcast montitor or HD screen.
More...
For video professionals it’s important to view your final product the way in the same way that your intended audience will be viewing it. This means watching your final product on an external broadcast montitor or HD screen.
More...
Saturday, February 13, 2010
SUBWAY SHORT TEST - BOURNE STYLE
Read Stu's posting on ProLost about a new idea for a DV Rebel camera quality metric being called 'The Subway Short' (a phrase coined by Gage).
More...
What are pixel aspect ratios?
Why do your graphic supers have funny jagged edges in Photoshop, but they look fine on (television) screen? For that matter, how can anamorphic formats cram so much width into a regular NTSC-type signal? The answer, simply put, is that pixels come in all shapes and sizes.Recall that pixels are the individual points of color that make up a picture on your screen. While computer screens and similar displays usually use pixels that are square, televisions, historically, have not. In fact, the concept of a "pixel" didn't figure into analog television signals at all -- the NTSC specification called for 480 "lines," but the signal within those lines did not specify discrete units of width.
When the notion of digital video became a reality, the standards bodies that be decided that -- for both NTSC and PAL -- there would be exactly 720 pixels per line. Thus, the 480i resolutions we know and love: 720x480 NTSC, and 720x576 PAL.
Now, in order for video rendered in the new 720x___ proportions to look the same as it always had on analog screens, it didn't make sense to think of the 720 dots on each row as square. NTSC video, for example, was customarily rendered at a ratio of 4 units wide by 3 units tall. That translates to 640 pixels wide for every 480 pixels tall -- not 720.
The solution, then, was to render pixels as non-square: about 0.9 units wide for every unit tall, in the case of NTSC video (and about 1.09:1 for PAL). When encoding widescreen video as anamorphic DV, the ratio became skewed to "fat" pixels -- 1.21:1.
Fortunately for all of us, modern standards like HD have evolved in an age where digital editing and dissemination are the norm. HD standards were drawn up with square pixels in mind, so pixel aspect ratios are unimportant when considering fully native HD workflows. But unfortunately, HDV at 1080i -- with a native resolution of 1440x1080 to represent HD's 1920x1080 -- assumes fat pixels just as its predecessor DV formats did, this time at a ratio of 1.33:1.
Of course, modern imaging tools like Photoshop and After Effects ship with a wide array of presets fully appropriate to each type of native footage. As long as you realize that these presets involve more than just codecs and pixel resolution, you should avoid nasty surprises involving "squished" graphics.
The Manual Duck
Ahhh the age old struggle between Final Cut Pro and After Effects. For what seems like centuries now us Final Cut Pro editors have been struggling with finding an efficient and, moreover, convenient workflow between FCP and After Effects. Sure, products like Livetype and Motion have come along and made life easier for some tasks but when it comes down to real motion graphics work and serious compositing nothing beats After Effects. Have you ever put Motion’s Primatte RT side by side with a key pulled from After Effects Keylight? To me there’s no comparison.
Coming from an editor’s chair, not a designer’s, it took me a while to really get up to speed with After Effects. In the past I was using AE infrequently for several reasons: 1. I didn’t know the interface and key commands well, 2. I didn’t know the software’s capabilities well, 3. I was intimidated by the rigid workflow between FCP and AE. All these factors equaled inefficent workflow and so I just usually opted not to use AE in favor of a faster and more flexible option like Livetype or Motion.
However, in the past year the work we have been doing has called more and more for serious graphics design and compositing, Livetype and Motion were simply not going to cut it. So I buckled down and really learned the After Effects interface, key commands and it’s capabilities. Through that hard work I quickly became much more efficent with AE and started creating some really cool stuff. But all this new-found efficency with AE itself still did nothing to help with a round-trip workflow to and from FCP. And if we can assume anything about Apple and Adobe there will probably never be an intergrated roundtrip solution between the two.
Now of course there are 3rd party solutions out there that help with this problem (at least half of the problem anyway). Automatic Duck is a great 3rd party solution that exports Final Cut Pro projects and timelines in a format that After Effects understands and converts to compositions. Bam, you’ve got half of the roundtrip issue solved right there, prepare a timline in FCP and export with Automatic Duck into AE and take care of your graphics and compositing. The problems? Output is still the same, you must render your comps out of AE and import them into FCP just like always. Then later if changes are needed you must go back to AE, make your changes, and re-render the revised comp and import back into FCP. The other problem, Automatic Duck is expensive. If you’re a home business or just struggling like everyone else in this economy buying the plug-in may not be an option.
I call this solution The Manual Duck. It doesn’t involve any special plug-ins or any other software, it’s just a few simple steps to add to the workflow that can make the trip to and from AE much easier, and more importantly, leave less room for errors requiring revisions in After Effects later.
I had a job recently where I knew that I was probably going to need to do almost entirely in After Effects. It was an image piece that involved nothing but text builds and a few stock images. The producers instructions were simply to take the “boring” corporate message and make it just “look cool.” Ahhh, is there anything better then the old “Just make it look cool…” line? And what’s more, from listening to the music that was selected, it was going to be a music driven edit.
In my opinion After Effects is not a good audio editor from a workflow perspective and have to cut to music in After Effects can be a big hassle being that there’s no “real” real-time playback or scrubbing of audio. All this added up to a perfect candidate for The Manual Duck workflow.
It’s simple really, start in Final Cut Pro. I laid down the music track in an empty timeline and made the audio edit (the track did need to be cut down and mixed a bit). Once I was happy with the audio I started to block out what I wanted the shots to be using the built-in text tool. I had the script and knew what order the text build had to go in. With the text tool I was able to very quickly block out where the individual sentences would go. I went along through the song and timed out all the text builds adding no style or animation of any sort. The key to this step is the speed at which you can work, just copy-paste the text clips from one edit to the next and copy-paste the next sentence from the script into the text tool. Format just a bit so the lines can be read and that’s all you need to do. Of course, if your project is more complex you can get as complex as you’d like during this step, adding images, transitions, etc. The point is that you lay everything down and time everything out in Final Cut Pro where you have quick real-time editing available with no significant render or RAM preview time.
The project blocked out in a FCP timeline
From there export the timeline to a codec that After Effects will play well with. Import that QT into AE and drop it into your Comp. From here you can proceed in the manner you prefer best. You can scrub through the Comp and add markers at the edit points or do split-track edits. Either way you can quickly scrub the Comp and see where you made edits in FCP with no need for audio playback or scrubbing. Also you now have a base layer that acts as a virtual storyboard. As you build your effects and composite you can easily solo the base QT layer to see what you blocked out next.
The FCP QT imported into an AE Comp
As a side note I after I have made my markers or split tracks I turn off the visibility and lock this layer to ease RAM preview time and avoid offsetting the layer with a stray drag.
The final composite
Now there’s nothing automated about the process and it doesn’t add any sort of round-tripping between the two but I’ve found that it helps a great deal with being efficient once in After Effects and leaves far less room for errors and mis-timimg. If you can build your graphics and composite and get it right the first time that is far more valuable than the extra time it took to block the project in Final Cut Pro.
Color Theory for Cinematographers
At this year’s San Antonio Film Academy, I gave two lectures on three Cs of cinematography, composition, contrast, and color. Color is often overlooked by beginning DPs, and it is an extremely powerful tool. I described color in cinematography as “the use of analogous or complimentary color tones to create contrasts between elements in the frame and communicate emotional ideas to the audience.”
Not a great description, but good enough for starters. Color can be used to communicate information to audiences in all kinds of ways. For example, the storyline in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic takes place in three different places, each of which is a very different color. Viewers can instantly tell where characters are and what part of the story they are watching. This is a very obvious way to communicate basic information.
Color can also communicate emotional information. Certain cinematic conventions have developed which help with this, for example warm lighting to convey safety and cool lighting to suggest danger are about as standard as shadows to convey mystery and brightness to signify security. Some directors, like James Cameron, stick to these conventions religiously, but others are willing to shake things up.
It can be very helpful to depart from the expected if your film requires it. Spielberg flipped the light=good/shadows=bad expectation on its head for E.T., and Ridley Scott changed all the normal colors rules for Black Hawk Down. Because these films are more complex than say, a standard comedy, forcing the audience to adjust to and rethink the world of the film is very effective.
When we first see Scott’s Somalia it looks like this – dirty, grungy, and brown. A greeny-orangey tobacco-filter brown. This is not the rich golden Africa of Sahara or Gladiator, but a dingy and dangerous place. Diesel smoke makes even the sky grubby. So far, so good.
By contrast, US soldiers live in high-tech steel barracks lit by cool halogen lights and laptop screens. Remember, cinematic convention usually says that warm tones indicate a cosy safe place and harsh blues like these mean cold clinical uncertainty, but not in Black Hawk Down. This color palette is unfamiliar territory, just like Somalia.
When Task Force Ranger goes into Mogadishu they go into the warm, brown, dangerous sunlight and bad things happen. This bright warm orange light is not safe. This is different. The audience has been thrown a curve ball, just like our heroes.
Even the command center has warmer light in it during the attacks than it did previously. The monitors are still blue, so the fill light is cool, but the key light on JSOC officers is warm, like on their men in the field. Command is just as messed up as the operation.
Ever since Saving Private Ryan war movies have tended towards a very desaturated bleach-bypass look, especially for combat scenes (including the opening scene of Gladiator). Ridley Scott and DP Slawomir Idziak have bucked the trend here as well, and it is very effective.
Finally, our men begin to find cover. Inexplicably, the basements of the abandoned slums they hide in have a very cool lighting scheme. Subconsciously, even though this is not conventional color use, the audience knows that they are safer here that outside in the brown. By now, all our viewers have picked up on how the palette works.
As time ticks away the odds get worse, the situation becomes more and more dangerous. Even that deadly warm sunlight is trying to invade the cool blue safe house. Every part of the film, including the color palette, is communicating jeopardy to the audience.
Traditionally, nighttime is communicated on film by desaturation and an ever-present blue moonlight, but once again Ridley Scott has a better idea. Somalian night is spooky green, and the tracers and explosions add orange to the scene. It’s the same sickly warm tone as the daytime, but brighter and scarier. There is no blue here; no safety.
But fortunately, a relief convey is rolling out. The 10th Mountain Division brings bright blue halogen lights to banish the orange and green of danger. By amplifying the saturation of these night scenes far beyond what is “normal,” the audience finds them very unsettling. This is the perfect emotion for what is being depicted.
Up until now, most of the scenes have been almost monochromatic, despite being highly saturated. Only at the climax do all of our colors really collide. These soldiers are pinned between threatening orange fire behind them and the uncertain dark green night in front of them, but safe blue headlights are coming in from the right. It’s final showdown time.
And of course, the battle ends just as the blue light of dawn makes everything safe and secure. The grueling Mogadishu Mile becomes almost a victory lap with this new color palette. The Rangers are back to their normal hue, and all is well… pretty much.
Ridley Scott does a tremendous job with this film through clever color use. It might be a little surprising, since everyone wears the same clothing, all the buildings are the same shade, and a lot of the film takes place at night, but I think this film makes better use of color as a storytelling tool than even Gladiator.
To see how closely color is tied to the events of the film, take a look at the chart below. Brendan Dawes has come up with a great new way to examine the pacing and overall color of films, and here are a few more color charts to look through.
As you can see, since the colors are tied directly to the moods of the film, clear trends are visible as different things happen in the film. We can see the film’s acts and turning points highlighted clearly. I am certain that Ridley Scott and Slawomir Idziak created a color chart like the stripe I made on the right to plan things out, and by analyzing this chart (slightly cropped for clarity), we can see a coherent vision appear.
Color is such a powerful part of cinema storytelling that we should never neglect it. And despite the power of modern color correction tools, we can never leave it to chance or expect to come up with a highly effective Ridley-Scott-style color script in post. All the Cs of cinematography take careful thought and a lot of planning to use properly, but when plotted out, they add a tremendous amount of storytelling power.
Not a great description, but good enough for starters. Color can be used to communicate information to audiences in all kinds of ways. For example, the storyline in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic takes place in three different places, each of which is a very different color. Viewers can instantly tell where characters are and what part of the story they are watching. This is a very obvious way to communicate basic information.
Color can also communicate emotional information. Certain cinematic conventions have developed which help with this, for example warm lighting to convey safety and cool lighting to suggest danger are about as standard as shadows to convey mystery and brightness to signify security. Some directors, like James Cameron, stick to these conventions religiously, but others are willing to shake things up.
It can be very helpful to depart from the expected if your film requires it. Spielberg flipped the light=good/shadows=bad expectation on its head for E.T., and Ridley Scott changed all the normal colors rules for Black Hawk Down. Because these films are more complex than say, a standard comedy, forcing the audience to adjust to and rethink the world of the film is very effective.
When we first see Scott’s Somalia it looks like this – dirty, grungy, and brown. A greeny-orangey tobacco-filter brown. This is not the rich golden Africa of Sahara or Gladiator, but a dingy and dangerous place. Diesel smoke makes even the sky grubby. So far, so good.
By contrast, US soldiers live in high-tech steel barracks lit by cool halogen lights and laptop screens. Remember, cinematic convention usually says that warm tones indicate a cosy safe place and harsh blues like these mean cold clinical uncertainty, but not in Black Hawk Down. This color palette is unfamiliar territory, just like Somalia.
When Task Force Ranger goes into Mogadishu they go into the warm, brown, dangerous sunlight and bad things happen. This bright warm orange light is not safe. This is different. The audience has been thrown a curve ball, just like our heroes.
Even the command center has warmer light in it during the attacks than it did previously. The monitors are still blue, so the fill light is cool, but the key light on JSOC officers is warm, like on their men in the field. Command is just as messed up as the operation.
Ever since Saving Private Ryan war movies have tended towards a very desaturated bleach-bypass look, especially for combat scenes (including the opening scene of Gladiator). Ridley Scott and DP Slawomir Idziak have bucked the trend here as well, and it is very effective.
Finally, our men begin to find cover. Inexplicably, the basements of the abandoned slums they hide in have a very cool lighting scheme. Subconsciously, even though this is not conventional color use, the audience knows that they are safer here that outside in the brown. By now, all our viewers have picked up on how the palette works.
As time ticks away the odds get worse, the situation becomes more and more dangerous. Even that deadly warm sunlight is trying to invade the cool blue safe house. Every part of the film, including the color palette, is communicating jeopardy to the audience.
Traditionally, nighttime is communicated on film by desaturation and an ever-present blue moonlight, but once again Ridley Scott has a better idea. Somalian night is spooky green, and the tracers and explosions add orange to the scene. It’s the same sickly warm tone as the daytime, but brighter and scarier. There is no blue here; no safety.
But fortunately, a relief convey is rolling out. The 10th Mountain Division brings bright blue halogen lights to banish the orange and green of danger. By amplifying the saturation of these night scenes far beyond what is “normal,” the audience finds them very unsettling. This is the perfect emotion for what is being depicted.
Up until now, most of the scenes have been almost monochromatic, despite being highly saturated. Only at the climax do all of our colors really collide. These soldiers are pinned between threatening orange fire behind them and the uncertain dark green night in front of them, but safe blue headlights are coming in from the right. It’s final showdown time.
And of course, the battle ends just as the blue light of dawn makes everything safe and secure. The grueling Mogadishu Mile becomes almost a victory lap with this new color palette. The Rangers are back to their normal hue, and all is well… pretty much.
Ridley Scott does a tremendous job with this film through clever color use. It might be a little surprising, since everyone wears the same clothing, all the buildings are the same shade, and a lot of the film takes place at night, but I think this film makes better use of color as a storytelling tool than even Gladiator.
To see how closely color is tied to the events of the film, take a look at the chart below. Brendan Dawes has come up with a great new way to examine the pacing and overall color of films, and here are a few more color charts to look through.
As you can see, since the colors are tied directly to the moods of the film, clear trends are visible as different things happen in the film. We can see the film’s acts and turning points highlighted clearly. I am certain that Ridley Scott and Slawomir Idziak created a color chart like the stripe I made on the right to plan things out, and by analyzing this chart (slightly cropped for clarity), we can see a coherent vision appear.
Color is such a powerful part of cinema storytelling that we should never neglect it. And despite the power of modern color correction tools, we can never leave it to chance or expect to come up with a highly effective Ridley-Scott-style color script in post. All the Cs of cinematography take careful thought and a lot of planning to use properly, but when plotted out, they add a tremendous amount of storytelling power.
Tip: Render Faster & Smarter in After Effects with BG Renderer
My only assumption with this tip is that you use Adobe After Effects CS4 (or even CS3) on a multi-processor machine, Mac or Windows. Beyond that:
maybe you only have one main machine and often face the dilemma of wanting to render while continuing to work
perhaps you monitor your system’s performance carefully and have noticed that your After Effects renders don’t always peg all of the processors
possibly you own or have owned a copy or copies of Gridiron Software’s Nucleo Pro and have experienced the joy of background rendering in After Effects already. However you’re not experiencing that joy in CS4, because Gridiron has been too busy with another little project to update it.
It could even be that you are aware that you can kick off an After Effects render in a shell (Terminal on Mac, DOS on Windows), allowing you to render without the GUI, and thus keep working. If so, if you’re like 99% of visual artists, you’re not that fond of memorizing, typing or optimizing code.
If any or all of these is true, get ready to buy Lloyd Alvarez a beer, because he offers the answer to all of these and more. Lloyd’s site is home of many useful tools, another of which may appear in this space this month, but as my first true tip of the month I wish to promote his most infinitely valuable script. And I say infinitely valuable because BG Renderer is offered free, a 100% discount off the alternatives.
maybe you only have one main machine and often face the dilemma of wanting to render while continuing to work
perhaps you monitor your system’s performance carefully and have noticed that your After Effects renders don’t always peg all of the processors
possibly you own or have owned a copy or copies of Gridiron Software’s Nucleo Pro and have experienced the joy of background rendering in After Effects already. However you’re not experiencing that joy in CS4, because Gridiron has been too busy with another little project to update it.
It could even be that you are aware that you can kick off an After Effects render in a shell (Terminal on Mac, DOS on Windows), allowing you to render without the GUI, and thus keep working. If so, if you’re like 99% of visual artists, you’re not that fond of memorizing, typing or optimizing code.
If any or all of these is true, get ready to buy Lloyd Alvarez a beer, because he offers the answer to all of these and more. Lloyd’s site is home of many useful tools, another of which may appear in this space this month, but as my first true tip of the month I wish to promote his most infinitely valuable script. And I say infinitely valuable because BG Renderer is offered free, a 100% discount off the alternatives.
Common Digital Image Formats
The following table lists key characteristics of common digital image file formats.
| Format | Bit depth (per pixel) | Color model | Lossy compression | Lossless compression | Layers | Alpha channels | Embedded timecode | Additional features |
| Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) | Various | Various |
x
|
x
|
x
|
x
| Supports all feature of TIFF specification, various metadata | |
| xAdobe Photoshop Document (PSD) | Various | Various |
x
|
x
|
x
| Supports vectors, parametric image operations, color profiles, other metadata | ||
| Kodak Cineon (CIN) | 30 | Logarithmic RGB, linear RGB |
x
| Can store key numbers, other metadata | ||||
| CompuServe Graphical Interchange Format (GIF) | 8 | Indexed RGB | Supports animation, keyed alpha | |||||
| SMPTE Digital Picture Exchange (DPX) | 24, 30 | Logarithmic RGB, linear RGB |
x
| Supports all features of Cineon specification | ||||
| JPEG | 24 | Linear RGB |
x
|
x
| ||||
| JPEG-2000 | Various | Various |
x
|
x
|
x
| Supports color profiles, other metadata | ||
| TIFF | Various | Various |
x
|
x
|
x
|
x
| Several variants of the TIFF format are available, such as LogLuv and Pixar, allowing for different dynamic ranges, supports color profiles, other metadata | |
| OpenEXR | 48 | Logarithmic HDR |
x
|
x
| Covers 9.6 orders of magnitude with 0.1% precision, can store key numbers, other metadata | |||
| Radiance | 32 | Logarithmic HDR |
x
| Covers 76 orders of magnitude with 1.0% precision | ||||
| Portable Network Graphics (PNG) | 24 | Linear RGB |
x
|
x
| ||||
| Targa (TGA) | 24 | Linear RGB |
x
| |||||
| Windows Bitmap (BMP) | 8, 24 | Linear RGB |
Colour Grading - concepts and paradigms
Of all the digital cinematic processes I use and teach it is Colour Grading and the manipulation of chromatic form - light, shade, tone, style - that i find the most overly engaging and pleasing. Editing has it's thrills, the on-set experience of shooting is a great pressure cooker and building visual effects is an intricate art but none of these seem to have the same immediate power of colour grading. Here the response, the result, the impact of your manipulations is so immediate, tangible and, when done right, profound that its hard not to get a kick out of it.
One of the things i love most about teaching what ive done as a profession for so long is that you, as tutor, are forced to question, interrogate and articulate the not just the how but the Why of what you do. As a result I can say with great confidence that I now have a far greater understanding of cinema practice, process and artistic impact from teaching it then I did from making it. When you're teaching (particularly when teaching very smart, inquisitive and ambitious students) you're forced to investigate the deeper level thinking that informs the instinct of what you do as a practitioner. 'How' is not good enough, it has to be re-enforced with the why. And it's here that the teacher is prompted to make great discoveries for themselves every bit as palpable as those of the students.
It's in this vein that i have recently been intrigued by an investigation into how we use and manipulate colour in cinema. The tools for colour grading are so powerful, so flexible, so accessible (RedGiant Magic Bullet Looks is arguable to most popular piece of software at the International Film School Sydney) that it's all too easy to 'get carried away' and have students deliver childish results born of the 'because I can' approach to software. What i wanted was to build a viable conceptual framework to focus students' use of colour grading with set of guiding principles to make their use of colour more grounded and informed. More controlled brush strokes and less coloiur splatter.
The first run at such a taxonomical break down yielded more than a dozen modes of colour use in cinema and it was invariably a mis-mash of rather un-useful terms. The most powerful paradigms are most often simple ones; those that function as Verbs - driving a process in action - rather than Noun's naming that process after-the-fact.
So I distilled and came up with a much more modest and simple triptych of modes by which colour may be employed in a cinematic image; three methods to describe the intent of a colour change, look, style or grade.
1. Impression - our visual response
This kind of grade is one designed to imprint on the mind of the viewer an element beyond the picture; to leave an impression by creating a visual response from a set of tones overlaying the image.
An example of this would be Se7en where by a distinct de-saturated, sepia tone, dreary and dirty palette of tones seems intent on a specific feeling in the viewer. We might think of the Impression grade as one where the viewer's experience of the action and events is done through a filter and it's the filter rather than the contents of the frame that leaves the most stark impression. We might forget scenes, plots and characters faces but no one who has seen Se7en can forget the impression the visual tone made.
2. Expression - our emotional response
The Expressionist grade reflects emotional states, emotional changes and emotional journey's. Where the Impressionist grade is concerned with the external - the world and how that world feels - the Expressionist grade is concerned with the internal, the mind set and those elements stemming from character wants and desires. An Expressionist grade seeks to express an internal mind state of a character, or characters, on the world around them. Expression grades are therefore essentially reflective - reflecting in colour and tone the internal sentiments or journeys the characters are going through.
The image below is from the Korean film Natural City and each change in colour grade from scene to scene is intrinsically connected with the internal monologue of the characters. Desaturated, bleak, cold, high contrast when the character is cold and unfeeling. Warm, soft, glowing, saturated when the character is reflecting on memories and better times. Expressionist grades are outward reflections of internal states.
3. Construction - our cultural response
A Constructivist grade is one that builds upon, exploits or plays with or against pre-existing knowledge the viewer may have. Such a grade relies on a cultural understanding of what the audience already knows, perceives or expects and then plays too or against those pre-concieved notions. As viewers we are neither passive nor empty vessels. We enter the movie with an inbuilt knowledge bank and that information is the touchstone filter for everything we watch.
A simple example would be Three Kings where the image plays hard in opposition to established visual references the viewer already possess of desert war and the middle east. Rather than the blazing yellows, hot red tones and open blue-skies that form the popular conceptions of the middle east, Three Kings delivers a deliberately desaturated palette. Cold, bleached of warm tones, skies blown out to white. The films' grade plays against cultural assumptions to create a constructed cultural response.
Now this if of course not to suggest that all films work in one of these 3 modes in exclusivity. Most cinematic works may range through each of these in the duration of their screening; drawing upon Impressionist, Expressionist and Constructivist modes at different times for different aesthetic outcomes. Nor should such a set of conceptualizations be taken as an all encompassing tool of analysis of cinema colour. Rather these three modes are merely the basis by which the colourist may begin to ask questions of the film they are working. hey are intended as a starting point. If a colour gradist can look the film/sequcne/shot they are working and ask :
- What impression am i trying to leave?
- What expression am I trying to invoke?
- What cultural response am I trying to solicit?
then they will be able to enter the colour manipulation process with a far greater degree of clarity and articulated purpose.... less colour splatter and more defined brush strokes.
As with all cinematic arts the power to unlock creative endeavor lies in the knowledge of technical detail. Cinema IS Technology. As such the list below of tutorials, articles and essays regarding colour grading should form the initial reading list for anyone interested in engaging colour manipulation in a proactive way.
----
Colour Correction by Kevin Shaw
When colour correction is a necessity by Kevin Shaw
Layer it by Kevin Shaw
Website of Colorist Kevin Shaw (lots of great articles)
The nature of light and colour
The not so technical guide to log-gamma curves
Professional Colour Correction with Premiere Pro
The Colorists (article on colour grading professionals)
How to use Magic Bullet Looks (a step by step video)
Grading ‘return to dungeness’ : video tutorial on using MBL
Using Colorista in Final Cut Pro Introduction
Using Colorista in Final Cut Pro Advanced
One of the things i love most about teaching what ive done as a profession for so long is that you, as tutor, are forced to question, interrogate and articulate the not just the how but the Why of what you do. As a result I can say with great confidence that I now have a far greater understanding of cinema practice, process and artistic impact from teaching it then I did from making it. When you're teaching (particularly when teaching very smart, inquisitive and ambitious students) you're forced to investigate the deeper level thinking that informs the instinct of what you do as a practitioner. 'How' is not good enough, it has to be re-enforced with the why. And it's here that the teacher is prompted to make great discoveries for themselves every bit as palpable as those of the students.
It's in this vein that i have recently been intrigued by an investigation into how we use and manipulate colour in cinema. The tools for colour grading are so powerful, so flexible, so accessible (RedGiant Magic Bullet Looks is arguable to most popular piece of software at the International Film School Sydney) that it's all too easy to 'get carried away' and have students deliver childish results born of the 'because I can' approach to software. What i wanted was to build a viable conceptual framework to focus students' use of colour grading with set of guiding principles to make their use of colour more grounded and informed. More controlled brush strokes and less coloiur splatter.
The first run at such a taxonomical break down yielded more than a dozen modes of colour use in cinema and it was invariably a mis-mash of rather un-useful terms. The most powerful paradigms are most often simple ones; those that function as Verbs - driving a process in action - rather than Noun's naming that process after-the-fact.
So I distilled and came up with a much more modest and simple triptych of modes by which colour may be employed in a cinematic image; three methods to describe the intent of a colour change, look, style or grade.
1. Impression - our visual response
This kind of grade is one designed to imprint on the mind of the viewer an element beyond the picture; to leave an impression by creating a visual response from a set of tones overlaying the image.
An example of this would be Se7en where by a distinct de-saturated, sepia tone, dreary and dirty palette of tones seems intent on a specific feeling in the viewer. We might think of the Impression grade as one where the viewer's experience of the action and events is done through a filter and it's the filter rather than the contents of the frame that leaves the most stark impression. We might forget scenes, plots and characters faces but no one who has seen Se7en can forget the impression the visual tone made.
2. Expression - our emotional response
The Expressionist grade reflects emotional states, emotional changes and emotional journey's. Where the Impressionist grade is concerned with the external - the world and how that world feels - the Expressionist grade is concerned with the internal, the mind set and those elements stemming from character wants and desires. An Expressionist grade seeks to express an internal mind state of a character, or characters, on the world around them. Expression grades are therefore essentially reflective - reflecting in colour and tone the internal sentiments or journeys the characters are going through.
The image below is from the Korean film Natural City and each change in colour grade from scene to scene is intrinsically connected with the internal monologue of the characters. Desaturated, bleak, cold, high contrast when the character is cold and unfeeling. Warm, soft, glowing, saturated when the character is reflecting on memories and better times. Expressionist grades are outward reflections of internal states.
3. Construction - our cultural response
A Constructivist grade is one that builds upon, exploits or plays with or against pre-existing knowledge the viewer may have. Such a grade relies on a cultural understanding of what the audience already knows, perceives or expects and then plays too or against those pre-concieved notions. As viewers we are neither passive nor empty vessels. We enter the movie with an inbuilt knowledge bank and that information is the touchstone filter for everything we watch.
A simple example would be Three Kings where the image plays hard in opposition to established visual references the viewer already possess of desert war and the middle east. Rather than the blazing yellows, hot red tones and open blue-skies that form the popular conceptions of the middle east, Three Kings delivers a deliberately desaturated palette. Cold, bleached of warm tones, skies blown out to white. The films' grade plays against cultural assumptions to create a constructed cultural response.
Now this if of course not to suggest that all films work in one of these 3 modes in exclusivity. Most cinematic works may range through each of these in the duration of their screening; drawing upon Impressionist, Expressionist and Constructivist modes at different times for different aesthetic outcomes. Nor should such a set of conceptualizations be taken as an all encompassing tool of analysis of cinema colour. Rather these three modes are merely the basis by which the colourist may begin to ask questions of the film they are working. hey are intended as a starting point. If a colour gradist can look the film/sequcne/shot they are working and ask :
- What impression am i trying to leave?
- What expression am I trying to invoke?
- What cultural response am I trying to solicit?
then they will be able to enter the colour manipulation process with a far greater degree of clarity and articulated purpose.... less colour splatter and more defined brush strokes.
As with all cinematic arts the power to unlock creative endeavor lies in the knowledge of technical detail. Cinema IS Technology. As such the list below of tutorials, articles and essays regarding colour grading should form the initial reading list for anyone interested in engaging colour manipulation in a proactive way.
----
Colour Correction by Kevin Shaw
When colour correction is a necessity by Kevin Shaw
Layer it by Kevin Shaw
Website of Colorist Kevin Shaw (lots of great articles)
The nature of light and colour
The not so technical guide to log-gamma curves
Professional Colour Correction with Premiere Pro
The Colorists (article on colour grading professionals)
How to use Magic Bullet Looks (a step by step video)
Grading ‘return to dungeness’ : video tutorial on using MBL
Using Colorista in Final Cut Pro Introduction
Using Colorista in Final Cut Pro Advanced
The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners standpoint
Colour is a phenomenon of mind and eye - what you now perceive as colour, is shape and form rendered as experience. Visible light is electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. It is remarkable that so many distinct causes of colour should apply to a small band of electromagnetic radiation to which the eye is sensitive, a band less than one 'octave' wide in an electromagnetic spectrum of more than 80 'octaves.' When thinking about the issue of synesthesia, remember that it occurs in a very limited sensorium.
Above are two representations of colour space. In each, the coloured area represents the visual field that evolution has endowed us with. This is one octave of possible experience.
Trying to systematize the idea of colour and naming that understanding ‘colour space’ has historical precedents which I’ll discuss later, but the notion of systematizing the concept grows out of ‘Enlightenment’ desires to know the world in a material way by mapping and planning, then proceeding into Victorian methods derived from, indexing and cataloging – which comes from a desire to create the experience of understanding from methodology, an idea who’s dominance is still with us.
Colour has been formulated by intellectual cartographers but is not a map – colour is experiential as the cinematographer well knows. In photographic terms colour as a function of seeing and meaning came late to the form. Because of this, notions of areas of containment of colour grew – as if colour had been graphically applied to an area - thus denying its inherence in form. This is in fact true in terms of late analogue televisual forms – but not true of digital electronic cinematography.
Film is exposed and latently holds an image, then is developed to ‘reveal’ that image. Film was and is a medium that had and still has many intricate and alchemical processes before its exhibition and revelation of a captured reality in the cinema: a temple built for the purpose of ritual display, where all who enter are required to suspend their disbelief. Film asks us to deny the actual material reality of the environment we are in and also to deny something of our own self.
Colour in this environment too was to be a function of the act of belief in the unreal. The generation of the idea of Colour space is an umbrella concept under which sets of ideas coalesced around the organisation of that function and as such took on various methodologies for its assemblage.
Because we are the ape that we are, mathematics quickly becomes for us a key organising factor in the description of this functionality.
“A colour model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colours can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or colour components - for instance RGB and CMYK”.
“Most colour models begin as three dimensional forms because when you distribute the values in 2D space, that space cannot hold all the necessary axes relevant to the distribution of those values”.
In one of the examples above, there is a simple distribution of values that charts how a display from a computer is related to a display from a printer - in other words what the computer can display and what a printer can display.
The other example of colour space seeks to demonstrate the relationship of the visible spectrum to film, print and the computer.
“The range of colours varies enormously across different media. Of the billions of colours in the visible spectrum, a computer screen can display millions, a high-quality printer in the order of thousands, and older computer systems may support only 216 colours across different platforms.”
I could elucidate further on variations of description of print colour space, film colour space and computer colour space, I could elucidate further on whether those spaces are best displayed in their respective display co-ordinates of RGB or CMYK.
I could try to tell a history of film space and how electronic space addressed that, of how Kodak generated the cineon file system which was created for electronic encoding of film colour space with later developments of Digital Picture Exchange (or DPX), both of which generate a set of separate files each of which is one frame of film taken over into one digital frame of display - of how each carried meta-data about the conditions under which the image was generated in - and so on and so forth - but I won’t because that is for further reading - if you are interested.
What I will do and I’m trying to do it right now, is to indicate that simple technical terms that are understood by ‘the industries’ are replete with not only cultural and social meaning - but also exist within paradigms of understanding that are now changing – primarily due to the advent of the digital.
The Practitioner
I wish to turn now to the practical act of the cinematographer entering into the concept of colour space and how that can be achieved.
The early issues of video and film are now behind us and in some senses a rapprochement between film and the latest representative of the electronic – digital electronic cinematography - has occurred.
Original electronic imaging was analogue in form – as was film – yet the formulation of the capturing of an image was different from film.
Film has a large latitude – one could make an intelligent ‘mistake’ and rework the material and formulate a sense of ‘atmosphere’ within the image. This is commonly known as ‘the Look’.
Analogue video was clean and clinical and you had to get the exposure right – in the early days, if you didn’t get exposure correct then you didn’t get focus. Colour itself was grafted on to an already set formulation of image capture – PAL - it was effectively an afterthought: Phase Alternate Line.
I shot one of the first features, generated on video and transferred to film for theatrical distribution; this was Birmingham Film and Video Workshops production ‘Out of Order’. I approached the task by imagining video as being like a reversal stock – with very little latitude for mistakes in exposure. The transfer to film was adequate, but when compared to today’s digital transfer techniques, was not good in terms of colour.
With the advent of electronic cinematography something very important has happened in the capturing of the image. In both photo-chemical and electronic cinematography until the image is developed, the image resides in a latent form in both the silver halides and the un-rendered data. Development, the bringing forth of the image in film is similar to the rendering of the image in the digital and electronic domain – and importantly, colour is within the bit-depth of electronic data and is therefore an integral part of its material form.
This developing practical understanding in the professional realm is counter to arguments that circulate within media theory – for instance: New Media A Critical introduction latest publication 2009, Lister, et al, claims an essential virtuality to new media where the precise immateriality of digital media is stressed over and over again.
However, industrial and professional expertise now challenges academic convention by seeking to re-inscribe digital image making as a material process.
One of the first films that took a material film base and dealt with colour in the electronic realm was ‘O Brother Where are thou’. When Roger Deakins was asked by the Coen Brothers to shoot this, being a creative and intuitive cinematographer, he knew that he was being offered a chance to cross the bridge between the ‘convergent’ and the ‘integrative’ paradigm. Deakins job as he saw it was to enact the kind of colour space seen in the faded, poignant, postcards of the twenties. Deakins knows his film colour space. He’s had enough practice.
I want to tell you the kind of method that a practitioner like Roger Deakins employs to understand the function of colour in the world when faced with a multi-million dollar set of technologies - also adopted by a friend of mine when shooting a quarter of a billion dollar production recently.
If you decide that you’re going for a certain look, because intellectually you’ve justified to yourself that this look in some way underlines the intention of the director - and after you and he or she has toured the galleries, looked through the books, seen the movies that seem to relate to the project – and after you’ve jettisoned all of that because you know that referencing is mostly an act of creative failure and after every residue of resistance has gone, then and only then you turn to your intuition about the way you must proceed.
It might be that that intuition is to evoke green as a colour - or maybe it’s a magenta cast - or it has a warm glow which at the dramatic end you feel has to be taken away from the audience and supplanted by its opposite....
Which ever of these tactics you decide to embrace to achieve your goal, you accept the fact that you have to enter a colour space and live in that space until you know it fully - so fully that you can reveal its nature to both yourself and then the audience.
So you buy yourself some sunglasses.
If the world you need to reveal is green, you find the right colour green and wear those sunglasses for a month or for however long you need to wear them to know the world that has that particular shade of green.
Conversely, but with a little more risk, you can take the opposite approach and buy a pair of sunglasses that are the complimentary opposite colour of the world you eventually wish to invoke.
In so doing you exposure yourself to the opposite world of colour so that when you take the glasses off, the complimentary opposite of the world is revealed with even greater intensity – more so than the continuous appraisal of the world by seeing the correct colour continuously. That moment is a moment of incomparable intensity.
HISTORY
I now want to give you a brief idea of how we began to systematise the idea of colour:
Aristotle developed the first known theory of colour. He postulated that God sent down colour from the heavens as celestial rays. He identified four colours corresponding to the four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water.
Leonardo da Vinci was the first to suggest an alternative hierarchy of colour. In his Treatise on Painting, he said that while philosophers viewed white as the 'cause, or the receiver' of colours and black as the absence of colour, both were essential to the painter, with white representing light, and black, darkness. He listed his six colours and within this is the age old symbolic system of alchemy.
The Enlightenment project then later stimulated a material examination of our physical state so that eventually theories developed that began to mirror and explain how we next believed that we ‘really’ perceive colour.
Isaac Newton created a colour wheel of perception in response.
Moses Harriss wrote the Natural System of Colours in 1776.
J. W. Goethe developed a colour harmony theory on the basis of his hue circle. In this circle, colours are categorised into two sides, the positive and the negative.
Ewald Hering (1834-1918) devised the first accurate theory of colour vision. And so on and so forth until we truly enter the physiological description of ‘reality’:
“Colour is a response of the eye and brain to data received by the visual systems evolved from the immediate environment. Objects emit light in various mixtures of wavelengths. Our minds perceive those wavelength-mixtures as a phenomenon we call colour, and this perception creates questions that current colour theory tries to explain”.
Vertebrate animals were primitively tetrachromatic. Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying colour information, or possessing four different types of cone cells in the eye.
With the trichromacy normal in humans, the gamut of colours construed by our perception will not cover all possible colours. Human trichromatic colour vision is a recent evolutionary novelty that first evolved in the common ancestor of the Old World Primates. Placental mammals lost both the short and mid wavelength cones. Human red-green colour blindness occurs because the two copies of the red and green opsin genes remain in close proximity on the X chromosome.
So we humans have a weak link in our chain with regards to colour - we are not 4 cone tetrochromats, we have three and in some cases only two - in extremely rare cases we have one!
We are now within a profoundly material description of our experience, yet this is incomplete, especially in terms of emotion and intelligence as has been brought out in other papers - I want to bring in another idea that relates to this description which is called: the Modular Transfer Function.
MODULAR TRANSFER FUNCTION
We humans value detail and sharpness more than resolution in an image. High resolution is synonymous with preservation of detail and sharpness, but high pixel count - which is generally regarded as being a measure of how good an image is - does not always translate into high resolution.
“As you try to increase the amount of information on the screen, the contrast that you get from a small resolution element to the next smallest resolution element is diminished. The point where we can no longer see contrast difference is called the limit of visual acuity. It’s the law of diminishing returns, and a system’s ability to preserve contrast at various resolutions is described by the modulation transfer function (MTF).“
The point of this technical description is that, as Alice observed on traveling through the looking glass, the smaller you go, the rounder you get. As Ivan Illych noted in his analysis of the creation of systems, there are drawbacks within the actual material construct of the system that you design. And this is especially so with colour: for instance a camera might be at 4k resolution in red – but it might only be 2k resolution in blue.
What I’m trying to come to here, is that I regard the area that each colour space covers as being a footprint of understanding, demonstrative of a world view - and world views, as we know, have many ramifications.
COLOUR AND CULTURE
In film alone, compare Technicolour of the '50's with Colour film in the Eastern Block in the 80's and Chinese colour film in the 40’s. Surely a statement about national psyches and all existing within different film colour spaces.... The dominant colouration of these spaces speak about the state of the nations zeitgeist at the time of production.
The recent electronic and data based colour space is a statement about this particular time and the new possible epistemologies of understanding that are developing beyond the simple systems of materialist thought and materialist theory.
BRINGING CONCEPTS TOGETHER
Using the metaphor of ‘modular transfer function’, that a chain of information and in this case a chain of understanding, is only as wide and as deep and as strong, to mix my metaphors, as the weakest link in that chain. Then only in the narrow optical region, just that region to which the human eye is sensitive, is the energy of light well attuned to the electronic structure of matter from which colour derives.
But we must not confuse this attunement as a metaphor of complete meaning - there are many meanings to be obtained within the concept of colour space, many emotional spaces, many spiritual and many intellectual spaces – and above all, many experiential spaces.
We see within a matrix of words when considering the subject, but when simply experiencing it, we do so on a different level of comprehension.
1 With the advent of the digital and our necessary remediation of it via older analogue understandings, we are upon the brink of constructing new concepts, to utilise the metaphor of colour, that will enable us to see outside of our current visible spectrum and therefore gain understanding to illuminate our intellectual world with greater intensity and detail. In this ‘seeing’, new language will be generated, new ideas, new uses of light and new concepts of colour and understanding that will begin to match what is now intimated through the development of digital colour space.
To effect this change at a more rapid and experiential pace – to achieve revelation: let us all buy a new pair of sunglasses.
Above are two representations of colour space. In each, the coloured area represents the visual field that evolution has endowed us with. This is one octave of possible experience.Trying to systematize the idea of colour and naming that understanding ‘colour space’ has historical precedents which I’ll discuss later, but the notion of systematizing the concept grows out of ‘Enlightenment’ desires to know the world in a material way by mapping and planning, then proceeding into Victorian methods derived from, indexing and cataloging – which comes from a desire to create the experience of understanding from methodology, an idea who’s dominance is still with us.
Colour has been formulated by intellectual cartographers but is not a map – colour is experiential as the cinematographer well knows. In photographic terms colour as a function of seeing and meaning came late to the form. Because of this, notions of areas of containment of colour grew – as if colour had been graphically applied to an area - thus denying its inherence in form. This is in fact true in terms of late analogue televisual forms – but not true of digital electronic cinematography.
Film is exposed and latently holds an image, then is developed to ‘reveal’ that image. Film was and is a medium that had and still has many intricate and alchemical processes before its exhibition and revelation of a captured reality in the cinema: a temple built for the purpose of ritual display, where all who enter are required to suspend their disbelief. Film asks us to deny the actual material reality of the environment we are in and also to deny something of our own self.
Colour in this environment too was to be a function of the act of belief in the unreal. The generation of the idea of Colour space is an umbrella concept under which sets of ideas coalesced around the organisation of that function and as such took on various methodologies for its assemblage.
Because we are the ape that we are, mathematics quickly becomes for us a key organising factor in the description of this functionality.
“A colour model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colours can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or colour components - for instance RGB and CMYK”.
“Most colour models begin as three dimensional forms because when you distribute the values in 2D space, that space cannot hold all the necessary axes relevant to the distribution of those values”.
In one of the examples above, there is a simple distribution of values that charts how a display from a computer is related to a display from a printer - in other words what the computer can display and what a printer can display.
The other example of colour space seeks to demonstrate the relationship of the visible spectrum to film, print and the computer.
“The range of colours varies enormously across different media. Of the billions of colours in the visible spectrum, a computer screen can display millions, a high-quality printer in the order of thousands, and older computer systems may support only 216 colours across different platforms.”
I could elucidate further on variations of description of print colour space, film colour space and computer colour space, I could elucidate further on whether those spaces are best displayed in their respective display co-ordinates of RGB or CMYK.
I could try to tell a history of film space and how electronic space addressed that, of how Kodak generated the cineon file system which was created for electronic encoding of film colour space with later developments of Digital Picture Exchange (or DPX), both of which generate a set of separate files each of which is one frame of film taken over into one digital frame of display - of how each carried meta-data about the conditions under which the image was generated in - and so on and so forth - but I won’t because that is for further reading - if you are interested.
What I will do and I’m trying to do it right now, is to indicate that simple technical terms that are understood by ‘the industries’ are replete with not only cultural and social meaning - but also exist within paradigms of understanding that are now changing – primarily due to the advent of the digital.
The Practitioner
I wish to turn now to the practical act of the cinematographer entering into the concept of colour space and how that can be achieved.
The early issues of video and film are now behind us and in some senses a rapprochement between film and the latest representative of the electronic – digital electronic cinematography - has occurred.
Original electronic imaging was analogue in form – as was film – yet the formulation of the capturing of an image was different from film.
Film has a large latitude – one could make an intelligent ‘mistake’ and rework the material and formulate a sense of ‘atmosphere’ within the image. This is commonly known as ‘the Look’.
Analogue video was clean and clinical and you had to get the exposure right – in the early days, if you didn’t get exposure correct then you didn’t get focus. Colour itself was grafted on to an already set formulation of image capture – PAL - it was effectively an afterthought: Phase Alternate Line.
I shot one of the first features, generated on video and transferred to film for theatrical distribution; this was Birmingham Film and Video Workshops production ‘Out of Order’. I approached the task by imagining video as being like a reversal stock – with very little latitude for mistakes in exposure. The transfer to film was adequate, but when compared to today’s digital transfer techniques, was not good in terms of colour.
With the advent of electronic cinematography something very important has happened in the capturing of the image. In both photo-chemical and electronic cinematography until the image is developed, the image resides in a latent form in both the silver halides and the un-rendered data. Development, the bringing forth of the image in film is similar to the rendering of the image in the digital and electronic domain – and importantly, colour is within the bit-depth of electronic data and is therefore an integral part of its material form.
This developing practical understanding in the professional realm is counter to arguments that circulate within media theory – for instance: New Media A Critical introduction latest publication 2009, Lister, et al, claims an essential virtuality to new media where the precise immateriality of digital media is stressed over and over again.
However, industrial and professional expertise now challenges academic convention by seeking to re-inscribe digital image making as a material process.
One of the first films that took a material film base and dealt with colour in the electronic realm was ‘O Brother Where are thou’. When Roger Deakins was asked by the Coen Brothers to shoot this, being a creative and intuitive cinematographer, he knew that he was being offered a chance to cross the bridge between the ‘convergent’ and the ‘integrative’ paradigm. Deakins job as he saw it was to enact the kind of colour space seen in the faded, poignant, postcards of the twenties. Deakins knows his film colour space. He’s had enough practice.
I want to tell you the kind of method that a practitioner like Roger Deakins employs to understand the function of colour in the world when faced with a multi-million dollar set of technologies - also adopted by a friend of mine when shooting a quarter of a billion dollar production recently.
If you decide that you’re going for a certain look, because intellectually you’ve justified to yourself that this look in some way underlines the intention of the director - and after you and he or she has toured the galleries, looked through the books, seen the movies that seem to relate to the project – and after you’ve jettisoned all of that because you know that referencing is mostly an act of creative failure and after every residue of resistance has gone, then and only then you turn to your intuition about the way you must proceed.
It might be that that intuition is to evoke green as a colour - or maybe it’s a magenta cast - or it has a warm glow which at the dramatic end you feel has to be taken away from the audience and supplanted by its opposite....
Which ever of these tactics you decide to embrace to achieve your goal, you accept the fact that you have to enter a colour space and live in that space until you know it fully - so fully that you can reveal its nature to both yourself and then the audience.
So you buy yourself some sunglasses.
If the world you need to reveal is green, you find the right colour green and wear those sunglasses for a month or for however long you need to wear them to know the world that has that particular shade of green.
Conversely, but with a little more risk, you can take the opposite approach and buy a pair of sunglasses that are the complimentary opposite colour of the world you eventually wish to invoke.
In so doing you exposure yourself to the opposite world of colour so that when you take the glasses off, the complimentary opposite of the world is revealed with even greater intensity – more so than the continuous appraisal of the world by seeing the correct colour continuously. That moment is a moment of incomparable intensity.
HISTORY
I now want to give you a brief idea of how we began to systematise the idea of colour:
Aristotle developed the first known theory of colour. He postulated that God sent down colour from the heavens as celestial rays. He identified four colours corresponding to the four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water.
Leonardo da Vinci was the first to suggest an alternative hierarchy of colour. In his Treatise on Painting, he said that while philosophers viewed white as the 'cause, or the receiver' of colours and black as the absence of colour, both were essential to the painter, with white representing light, and black, darkness. He listed his six colours and within this is the age old symbolic system of alchemy.
The Enlightenment project then later stimulated a material examination of our physical state so that eventually theories developed that began to mirror and explain how we next believed that we ‘really’ perceive colour.
Isaac Newton created a colour wheel of perception in response.
Moses Harriss wrote the Natural System of Colours in 1776.
J. W. Goethe developed a colour harmony theory on the basis of his hue circle. In this circle, colours are categorised into two sides, the positive and the negative.
Ewald Hering (1834-1918) devised the first accurate theory of colour vision. And so on and so forth until we truly enter the physiological description of ‘reality’:
“Colour is a response of the eye and brain to data received by the visual systems evolved from the immediate environment. Objects emit light in various mixtures of wavelengths. Our minds perceive those wavelength-mixtures as a phenomenon we call colour, and this perception creates questions that current colour theory tries to explain”.
Vertebrate animals were primitively tetrachromatic. Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying colour information, or possessing four different types of cone cells in the eye.
With the trichromacy normal in humans, the gamut of colours construed by our perception will not cover all possible colours. Human trichromatic colour vision is a recent evolutionary novelty that first evolved in the common ancestor of the Old World Primates. Placental mammals lost both the short and mid wavelength cones. Human red-green colour blindness occurs because the two copies of the red and green opsin genes remain in close proximity on the X chromosome.
So we humans have a weak link in our chain with regards to colour - we are not 4 cone tetrochromats, we have three and in some cases only two - in extremely rare cases we have one!
We are now within a profoundly material description of our experience, yet this is incomplete, especially in terms of emotion and intelligence as has been brought out in other papers - I want to bring in another idea that relates to this description which is called: the Modular Transfer Function.
MODULAR TRANSFER FUNCTION
We humans value detail and sharpness more than resolution in an image. High resolution is synonymous with preservation of detail and sharpness, but high pixel count - which is generally regarded as being a measure of how good an image is - does not always translate into high resolution.
“As you try to increase the amount of information on the screen, the contrast that you get from a small resolution element to the next smallest resolution element is diminished. The point where we can no longer see contrast difference is called the limit of visual acuity. It’s the law of diminishing returns, and a system’s ability to preserve contrast at various resolutions is described by the modulation transfer function (MTF).“
The point of this technical description is that, as Alice observed on traveling through the looking glass, the smaller you go, the rounder you get. As Ivan Illych noted in his analysis of the creation of systems, there are drawbacks within the actual material construct of the system that you design. And this is especially so with colour: for instance a camera might be at 4k resolution in red – but it might only be 2k resolution in blue.
What I’m trying to come to here, is that I regard the area that each colour space covers as being a footprint of understanding, demonstrative of a world view - and world views, as we know, have many ramifications.
COLOUR AND CULTURE
In film alone, compare Technicolour of the '50's with Colour film in the Eastern Block in the 80's and Chinese colour film in the 40’s. Surely a statement about national psyches and all existing within different film colour spaces.... The dominant colouration of these spaces speak about the state of the nations zeitgeist at the time of production.
The recent electronic and data based colour space is a statement about this particular time and the new possible epistemologies of understanding that are developing beyond the simple systems of materialist thought and materialist theory.
BRINGING CONCEPTS TOGETHER
Using the metaphor of ‘modular transfer function’, that a chain of information and in this case a chain of understanding, is only as wide and as deep and as strong, to mix my metaphors, as the weakest link in that chain. Then only in the narrow optical region, just that region to which the human eye is sensitive, is the energy of light well attuned to the electronic structure of matter from which colour derives.
But we must not confuse this attunement as a metaphor of complete meaning - there are many meanings to be obtained within the concept of colour space, many emotional spaces, many spiritual and many intellectual spaces – and above all, many experiential spaces.
We see within a matrix of words when considering the subject, but when simply experiencing it, we do so on a different level of comprehension.
1 With the advent of the digital and our necessary remediation of it via older analogue understandings, we are upon the brink of constructing new concepts, to utilise the metaphor of colour, that will enable us to see outside of our current visible spectrum and therefore gain understanding to illuminate our intellectual world with greater intensity and detail. In this ‘seeing’, new language will be generated, new ideas, new uses of light and new concepts of colour and understanding that will begin to match what is now intimated through the development of digital colour space.
To effect this change at a more rapid and experiential pace – to achieve revelation: let us all buy a new pair of sunglasses.
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