[Joseph Owens]

Well its all about context.

If you wanted to convey a depressed, world-is-weighing-down-on-me, Shawshank-blue… you’re on the right track.
People who are altering their image fascinate me when they are trying to hit some numerical value. Like the In-phase vector, which — the person who referred to it as the “I-Bar” and sort of instituted it as a general flesh-tone reference may never live down — does have a *very* ball-park value, and only because the NTSC engineers chose it as an important hue when designing the YIQ encoding system. It is virtually meaningless now.

About 15 years ago, there was a TIG (Telecine Interest Group) discussion about grading fads and styles n which the takeaway boiled down to — at some point when film historians are looking at treatments, they will be able to determine what year the film was produced in by the “look” that was prevalent at the time. One item that was discussed that re-appears often is the pre-occupation that “fleshtone” be a certain value, regardless of the ambient lighting or environmental feel. And we can do it, because “Power Windows.” And so you get… in a green room, where all the lighting is green, the “battle control room with radar displays and stuff is green, green green… and the actors faces are all a lovely tan-amber. Sure. Teeth like a Colgate commercial. Audience don’t necessarily register that stuff, but in the back of their minds they start getting the idea that they are being had. Does that take them out of the movie? Suspension of Disbelief is a delicate thing.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Patrick Slee] “As I’ve moved over to Windows (and have been editing and grading in Resolve), I can no longer make ProRes files (though I am thinking of emailing to ask whether they could handle a DNxHR) and thought maybe I should look into it.”

It would be rare for a festival to accept anything other than what they specify, as it makes work for them — 99 times out of 100 its all volunteers with very little technical knowledge.

If you can’t make a ProRes directly, then it would be incumbent to find a way. If you still have an Apple product kicking around, it would still make sense to load something like Compressor4 on it — pay the $40 or whatever for the ProApp, and transcode.

If you have no experience making and testing DCP, its not a thing to try to deliver under a deadline. There are plenty of open source offerings, but it takes some trial and error to arrive at a bullet-proof deliverable. Rewolve will opene and play a DCP for evaluation — for 15 seconds. Then it’s unusable unless you invest in the easyDCP player from Fraunhofer, and that is not cheap.

f you are unclear on the matter of working and delivering in a variety of colorspaces and the notional differences between what is encoded as RGB and YUV, then there is a lot of background research still to do. YUV is a color encoding strategy that is based on luminance and color-difference, rather than Red/Green/Blue primary components. Sometimes you will see it expressed as Y’CbCr. The Y’ means it is also indexed to a gamma coefficient.

Keep It Simple.

jPo,CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Sean Sartori] ” I don’t love the fact that I’m taking raw CinemaDNG down to 709 422.”

This is a bit like exporting a low-quantized codec into a higher one in the hopes that the quality will improve, except going the other direction. For the “down to 709” to be valid, you would be assuming that your scene gamut contains values that would be outside the 709 colorspace to begin with. Otherwise, they just remain what they are.

The ability to keep things in RGB, rather than Y’CbCr is not a visual impairment, since human eyesight is not as critical in chromaticity as it is in luminance. It’s how we’ve been getting by for the past several decades, before tankerloads of storage and bitrates came available. But now we think we need the Valdez to deliver a litre of anything… besides even bigger disasters.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Code -18?

There used to be an Enable Audio checkbox in system config before there was Fairlight. But now there are multiple locations to intervene in how audio is presented to the system.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

If you are not grading in context, just on a “here, grade this clip” basis… next, next…

I’d consider an edit page strategy… or a new timeline based on a C-sort (ascending source code) and a Master Timeline grade.

Check the manual entries with the search term “Finding media using Match Frame Operations”, matching from a Source Clip, actually sort your media source bin by source code and rebuild… &c.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

If you want to work from a colorspace that lends itself to various export standards, then that is what the ACES color management approach offers.

You will not be working, strictly speaking, in any specific release format — what you will be doing is monitoring in the colorspace currently selected. Picking 709 under that system is perfectly acceptable if you are monitoring the output on a 709-calibrated display. The same would be true if you picked P3 and you were working in a projected P3 environment. That’s how it is supposed to work.

To learn more, search for “Display-referred” color management practices.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Version 12.5 and forward do have a working 3:2 23.98 –> 29.97 conversion. It only works when exporting a “Single Clip” as opposed to “Individual Clips” for (what to me anyway are) obvious reasons.

If there is a scene including 23.98 fps clips within a 29.97 sequence, the you would export that entire scene, if what you are attempting to do is re-imbed that scene into a broadcast assembly.

Glenn makes a good point regarding keeping projects at their native frame rate until delivery. I have seen many 23.98-source projects edited in 29.97 (NDF and DF) timelines because the editors could not deal with the clock-time calculations. This is a deadly practice that can close many doors that you want to keep open, and can be a deal-breaker when going to international delivery or DCP, which will also change the actual running time if you have to go to 25 or 24.000 fps. (And then you will also have to re-clock the audio.)

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

While I was reviewing CineX-Tools, I started running into the VBR/CBR nature of ProRes a bit more often. Yes, ProRes is native VBR, unlike Dnx, and of course a CBR ProRes file is bigger because there is no packet-reducing efficiency.

I suspect it is also why some applications baulk at third-party-originated exports, since there are likely some departures in how the VBR-packing is accomplished. I expect anyone reading this has encountered the FCP warning “This media is not optimized for use,” &c., &c.) and its usually because the media has been cross-coded in a different way.

CBR does have the advantage of a consistent bit-word correspondence — for sure, an application for splicing within a Quicktime mov (like CineXTools) absolutely has to have that one-to-one in order to do the content insert.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Marc Wielage] “a lot of noise reduction and sometimes frequency-selective blurring”

There’s also an old green-screen trick of converting the color-encoding to YCbCr and blurring the color components (leave the luminance alone or sharpen it) that will trick the eye and some compositing processes into thinking it is dealing with a higher bit-depth image. This only works when you are working within a floating-depth application.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

I’ve got the feeling that anything-Pro is going to go the way of the 3.5″ floppy disk and the optical drive and the FireWire port and the list of other things that consumer Apple management deemed unprofitable. This move to a sealed unibody is another step backwards, even from the 2013 coffeecan. Always good to evaluate — going in, the model introduced yesterday seems four-walled to the Apple application ecosystem, ie FCX, Compressor, Motion.

And $16,000.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.