[Mark Sanford]

Curiosity is a good thing.☺

[Mark Sanford]

[Tim Wilde] “there seems to be no shortage of references to 18% gray in the world of video camera color charts by companies like DSC Labs and Gamma & Density Company.
“

Tim –

That’s because there’s no shortage of opinions regarding where to expose that 18% gray card when using various LOG encoding schemes (S-Log 2, S-Log 3, C-Log, Log C, v-Log and so on). And then throw ISO into the mix and you’ve got an argument that knows no end.

That said, I would have to question why you’d want to use the RGB picker to determine gray values as opposed to a waveform monitor.

[Mark Sanford]

Nicole –

When you let Resolve determine the project settings based on the clip attributes it will make the timeline 29.97 whether the clip is interlaced or progressive.

The real question is this: Did the camera originally capture in interlace, 1080 59.94i or progressive, 1080 29.97PsF? If it captured progressive frames then there are no fields (upper and lower) to worry about. In this case what your NLE reports about upper, lower, unknown dominance is not relevant.

If the camera did capture in interlace then my answer is this: Resolve needs to work with frames, not fields, so your timeline (29.97) is de-interlaced. Now when it comes to rendering and output you said you chose an uncompressed format. The QT uncompressed formats would not re-interlace the output and thus there’d be no upper and lower fields.

The only way that you’ll get a true interlaced output is to chose an interlaced codec like DNxHD 1080i 220/185/175 10bit for instance. You’ll note that when you do that the “field rendering” box will be automatically checked.

Honestly, given your description of the workflow, I don’t think it matters right now what the NLE reports. I’m betting that the camera (Sony 1500r) was set to interlace because it’s a broadcast camera and that’s the common format. I see no reason to change your workflow though unless that dominance thing is causing some grief in Premiere. If it does, you’ll have to export in a codec that is interlaced as I said before.

-Mark

[Mark Sanford]

In Resolve I have my “enable video field processing” box checked in the project settings window, but the “field rendering” box is grayed out in the Deliver tab.

The field rendering box is grayed out because you’ve defined the project as 29.97 (progressive) and thus there wouldn’t be any fields, upper or lower, in a progressive output. You de-interlaced the camera original when you brought the footage into a progressive timeline.

[Mark Sanford]

Yes, the pre-conformed edl will get confused by other clips in that bin, especially if they’re source clips of the same project. It only wants to see one flat file and parses the edit points from that file.

-Mark

[Mark Sanford]

Did you place the flattened file in it’s own bin in the media pool before importing the pre-conformed edl? And then, when prompted, did you point the edl to that bin? It should work.

Mark Sanford
SanfordColor
Los Angeles

[Mark Sanford]

Seth –

First of all, if this is camera original footage then I can say with certainty that the camera is in need of a black balance. Your red channel is sitting at baseline where it should be but red and blue are lifted substantially. Also blue is very noisy. If you were to lower the blacks in the red and blue channels then you’re white bal will be very much plus red. The scope doesn’t lie; that’s not a pretty picture it’s depicting.

As for the monochrome display, that’s Luma, which in low pass mode, will show you the brightness of the picture displayed in IRE or milivolts or percent or what have you. It’s useful for establishing where the exposure window and gamma curve should be but can’t help you with color.

Tektronix has some very helpful tutorials and white papers online. You might go to their site and check them out.

[Mark Sanford]

Robin –

Sorry for the late reply. I had a similar problem installing the same 2 cards in an Echo Express II connected to an iMac.

A closer inspection of Sonnet’s site revealed that the Allegro series cards are meant for older Macs (G3,G4,G5) and behave very irratically or not at all in the newer Macs, iMacs. The Tempo SATA card has performed without incident in the Echo Express II.

I tried selling the Allegro card on ebay and couldn’t give it away.

Mark Sanford
Hollywood

[Mark Sanford]

“What do you guys rely on to decide what is pure white?”

Having come from the acquisition side of image making I think it’s very important to continually cross-reference what you see on the monitor with what you see on the scope. We all know how easy it is for the eye to alter it’s perception of the white point as the surrounding content changes.

For this reason I am sold on the the two proprietary displays that Tektronix scopes are capable of, both gamut related: The diamond display and the spearhead display. You can go to their website for an explanation and tutorial but, briefly, the diamond is a very precise way of measuring the RGB component of a picture and the spearhead measures Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Put them together and it’s very hard to make an error regarding grayscale. Once you get your head around them (it takes a while) you’ll find your trusty RGB parade to be sadly lacking.

Mark Sanford
Los Angeles