[Bruce Greene]

[virgilxavier] “WoW
that file is dead on what I’m looking to achieve. As I said–I’m not always a fan of this look but that shot of the barn with the suv next to it was beautiful. Are there any other tips you can give me. How do you keep the background from being washed out or is the back light not to to much brighter than the key? what effect does the slightly telephoto lens have on the image and what do you mean by slightly telephoto?”

Think of the backlight as the key light… and “slightly telephoto” means kinda zoomed in. Zooming in and moving the camera back helps make people photograph more attractively and also helps make the background out of focus to seperate the subjects from the background. And large pieces of styrofoam make good reflectors. You’ll just have to have some friends help by holding and aiming them.

The shot of the SUV was in overcast light (cloudy), and was done with a wide lens (zoomed out).

And lastly, thank you for your service in Afghanistan.

[Bruce Greene]

To keep things pretty simple, I think the “look” that you’re attracted to involves just two techniques:

1. The strongest light comes from behind the subjects.
2. The use of a slightly telephoto lens.

That’s pretty much it. To do this for interior shots may require a crew and lighting equipment, but for a simple day exterior, perhaps just the right weather and a reflector.

As far as the camera, I think you can acheive your look on a good mini-dv camera. It will just start looking soft as the screen gets bigger:)

I shot a feature a couple years ago on a $3000.00 panasonic dvx-100 camera. It certainly is not “Barry Lyndon” but on a small screen it looks pretty “hollywood” (it was made for a dvd release). You can see a small clip at: https://brucealangreene.com/LYtheater.html

Note: the jerky motion is due to the quicktime being made at 15fps instead of 30 for those with slower connections to the net.

And just a quick story. A number of years ago, a cinematographer whom I admired showed me the best looking film he ever shot. It was a short 16mm film, B&W. The director made the ground rules for the shoot: The cinematographer could only use as much lighting and grip equipment as he could carry in his own two hands at the same time. The picture looked spectacular.

[Bruce Greene]

If this will make you feel more at ease…

I shot a project in Vid Rec at zero DB gain for very low light situations. It was noisey for sure in HD.

I made a DVD from the DVCproHD capture and the noise pretty much disapeared.

Varicam/Steadicam Owner
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.brucealangreene.com

[Bruce Greene]

Keep the monitor at normal gamma.

The “film” gamma is for previewing film rec mode on a varicam. Don’t use it to view what the final output will be. Keep the monitor in normal gamma.

If the image doesn’t match your on set image, perhaps on set the monitor was accidently set to “film” gamma?

Or, perhaps you might have a workflow (editorial) issue?

[Bruce Greene]

I own the panasonic 17 in monitor and still ask myself the same question. How good is it for critical image judgement?

Last week I had an chance to place a 17in Panasonic next to a small Sony HD crt, an E-Cinema display, and a large Panasonic HD CRT display. We did not have time to critcally white balance all the monitors, but they looked quite close to each other, except the E-Cinema which looked slightly red.

What I was most interested in was how the 17 in Panasonic handled colors compared to the CRT and the E-Cinema.

At first glance a scene through the camera looked quite similar on all the monitors ( we did match the black and white levels) except of course the e-cinema dislplay was slightly redder. Putting up color bars revealed a different story. Each monitor looked different even after confirming the adjustments the via the blue only buttons. The intensity of the color bars on each display was different with the Panasonic LCD having most noticably less intense reds than the CRT’s. The E-cinema (I think!) was somewhere between the CRT’s and the panasonic. But note that the CRT’s did not match eachother either.

So what’s the “Standard” to color correct to? Well considering that all the viewers use a wide varitey of displays, I would say from my personal experience that as long as the entire project is color corrected on the same well adjusted display(any of the four mentioned above), it should be consistant enough in look and close enough to standard that viewers will see the image that they have become accustomed to viewing.

My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that monitors like the e-cinema and the cinetal have the best chance of meeting the REC-709 standard as they can be calibrated using look-up tables to correct for deficiencies in the LCD panel. But then, if the LCD cannot ever display a true CRT RED for example, then no look-up table can fix that completely.

For practical reasons, I’ve been shooting and using my 17in panasonic as my on set reference monitor and I have not been disapointed in the results yet.

I hope this helps and is not just futher confusing the whole issue….

[Bruce Greene]

Nick,

Based upon an assumption that the camera with viewfinder will be $30,000…

I estimate that a complete package with tripod, one lens, batteries, chargers, matte box, filters, cases, monitors will be about $90,000 – $100,000. Maybe a little less with a cheap eng lens, no matte box, no follow focus knob, no zoom control.

I would also suggest allowing yourself at least 4 weeks to select and get delivery of all this stuff.

I based my estimate on my purchase of a Varicam package in November using a $56,000 price of the Varicam body.

Best of luck with your up-coming show.

[Bruce Greene]

[Kevin Schumacher] “Is anyone else having these thoughts too, or am I alone in trying to save a few bucks?”

As the original poster, I thought I should say how these concerns came to me.

I’m a cinematographer, and not a professional editor. I use FCP for creating sample reels for DVD and web streaming. Also recently, I shot a couple of small pictures that required that I color correct myself, rather than at a professional post facility. While not a professional colorist, I’ve transferred my Photoshop expertise to the moving image and am quite comfortable with it. Through Photoshop I’ve learned that it is quite possible to color correct for many different outputs on a properly calibrated and profiled computer display, hence my musings in the thread.

Kevin has brought out some good points in his post about the type of viewing device now used by the people who watch our work as the CRT fades into history.

As I went through the color grading of these recent projects it became very apparent to me that what looks wonderful on a professional CRT does not always look so good on other display technologies.

Two fundamental observations:

1. Professional CRT displays hide, or rather, do not easily reveal image noise and digital artifacts that become very obvious on other displays, especially LCDs and LCD projectors.

2. Dark images that look rich and satisfying on a Professional CRT can look like mud on an LCD where the black level is a dark gray at it’s best. Also highly saturated colors that look wonderful on the CRT can look clipped and artificial on an LCD as well.

I’ve learned this looking at footage shown on $3000+ large screen HD consumer displays. And it does effect how I color correct (and light and expose) images now. I’ve learned to avoid making a scene dark for CRT display unless there is a significant highlight in the frame to give the illusion of darkness, and ironically, avoid lightening scenes in post because it exaggerates the noise and digital artifacts to excess on LCD monitors. I think this has mostly to do with the light colored blacks in the LCD not hiding this stuff the way it was on the professional CRT. Plus, the LCD’s are sharper and show the noisy stuff more. Not to mention the image “enhancement” circuits that are on by default on consumer displays.

Until such time as the typical audience display catches up with the good ol’ Professional CRT, I’m also looking at an LCD for color correction and, for other practical reasons, on the set when shooting HD.

[Bruce Greene]

You are trying to output HD through a standard definition only dv device, the Canopus. That you can see a still frame is pretty good!

You’ll need to get a HD input/output card for your mac and (to see your footage in HD) an HD monitor.

I’m not an expert on theses cards, but I’m sure someone with good knowlege here will advise you or look at all the ads on the sides of this webpage from Blackmagic and AJA etc.

[Bruce Greene]

Bruce,

You are spinning your wheels trying to find a cheap solution to an expensive problem.

High end LCD which are considered equal to color grading CRT monitors are well into the 20-30K price range.

Spinning my wheels, yes. I cry uncle.

However, the “high end” LCD’s, from what I’ve seen of the Cinetal montior, it’s a good quality LCD housed in a box with a pc (kind of a windows imac). The PC is used only to adjust the color of the screen and provide i/o connections and sofware waveform/vectors and such. The monitor is kept in calibration using a $200 iOne probe from the pc world. It’s a very nice solution and for the right jobs, worth the money.

From my original post, I just wanted a compromise, approximate solution, to seeing something in the canvas that was ball park accurate and it got a little speculative from there…

That said, I still think there is no reason Mr. Jobs could not make the Final Cut Pro application color sync aware (like photoshop). It would be a great option for many users.

Thanks all.

[Bruce Greene]

Thanks Glen, your link to the shake info at apple helped a bit.

From the Apple support site:
Final Cut Pro assumes that QuickTime movies for codecs that support the YUV color space (including DV, DVCPRO 50, and the 8- and 10-bit Uncompressed 4:2:2 codecs) are created with a gamma of 2.2. This is generally true of movies captured from both NTSC and PAL sources. When you eventually output the sequence to video, or render it as a QuickTime movie, the gamma of the output is identical to that of the original, unless you’ve added color correction filters of your own.

However, during playback on your computer’s monitor, Final Cut Pro automatically lowers the gamma of a sequence playing in the Canvas to 1.8 for display purposes. This is to approximate the way it will look when displayed on a broadcast monitor. This onscreen compensation does not change the actual gamma of the clips in your sequence.

So FCP assumes that one’s computer monitor is set to gamma 1.8 (mine has been set to gamma 2.2 for viewing stuff on the web like the majority of web/windows users) and I incorrectly assumed that since NTSC and HD color is set to gamma 2.2 that I should match my computer display to that standard. But Apple has assumed I’m not that clever and made the conversion (in FCP only) automatic.

So, for now, I should set up a computer monitor calibration to gamma 1.8 just for FCP use D65 for the white point as the best compromise solution.

This however leads me to another question: Does quicktime make this gamma conversion as well? This is important as I want my QT files on the web to display correctly for the most possible viewers. If any application should be colorsync aware, it should be quicktime! Assuming all Mac computers today run at gamma 1.8 is a big mistake. Making the assumption in FCP and not in quicktime would confound the confusion. Not knowing what Quicktime assumes is even more confusing.