ASC CDL worflow with the Alexa camera

[John Sharaf]

Just reading this thread now (many months later) but here are a few pertinent things to wrap it up:

The DP on the shoot went to some effort in convincing production to spend extra time and money for the Truelight SDI box to preview the look that they all intended to carry into the dailies. Post should honor that effort and expense.

At that time (last April) one would have to have processed the dailies outside of their edit platform to burn in the look established by the ASC CDL, most likely by sending it out to a color correction facility (although it would not necessarily be an expensive nor time consuming thing to do).

It is now possible for almost anyone with computer skills to download a free copy of DaVinci and apply an ASC CDL to each clip referanced by TC to process the dailies with the on-set color decisions. It’s free, only takes a little time.

Unfortunately the Alexa, with it’s importable “Look” tool can only accommodate a 1D not full 3D LUT, so while the gamma, lift and gain will match, the color saturation will not.

ASC CDL is becoming more of an industry standard way of moving the onset looks to post, but it seems that with the Alexa it will always require a little processing. For that matter if they’re editing on Avid a transcode to DnXHD is often required too and the LUT can be applied at the same time.

Eventually the ASC CDL will be able to be embedded in each clips metadata and editing platforms will be able to interpret and make the corrections in real time. This is the “Holy Grail” of on-set color management and is still a work in progress.

John Sharaf
IA600 Cinematographer
Alexa Studio/4×3 Plus/EV Owner/Operator
Pacific Palisades, Ca.