Nate Weaver
Forum Replies Created
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Aww. This just makes me just all warm and fuzzy inside :-))))
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
Where did this grab come from? I assume the keynote?
At the beginning of the Apps section, I could have swore I saw a FCPX screen for about 3 seconds inset on a device shot, and it looked something like this. I remember the bin/events panel had a ton of green in it which looked odd.
[edit: I see now, It’s a new iMovie grab based on file name]
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
[Chris Kenny] “You can also have the Alexa LUT generator give you a LUT that applies the proper color matrix but retains the log gamma so nothing clips.”
As primarily a DP, I view a LUT as the other half of the camera, especially if I was using a specific LUT on set to monitor with.
I can usually tell in skintones when a colorist just put some curves on and pumped the sat, and I politely ask to use a correct and vetted LUT to get the color response and matrix where I want them, and where I expect them.
As I view it, Arri built the Alexa+LogC+provided LUTs as a system and were constructed with care and likely many revisions. When I choose the Alexa, I want that image as a baseline.
This is all doubly true with the new Sony cameras and SLog2, because SLog2 with just curves and sat on it is not nearly as pretty as what the cameras are capable of.
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
Following images were originally 5D2 clips, used the above method on them. I wanted a very heavy look on them as a contrast with the pristine Red footage they were being intercut with. Backing off the Gaussian Blur and the sharpening can mellow the look:
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
I’ve had good luck with a stack of filters, each modeling one artifact of cameras of that age. Also, do them in this order in the filter stack:
1-Add a little noise. Old consumer cameras are noisy. I mean a little.
2-Gaussian blur, maybe 3 pixels. Old cameras are low resolution. Really low. Maybe even 4 pixels.
3-Color correction: Clip the whites, and clip or raise blacks to taste. Bump saturation. Maybe add a orange or blue color cast to make it look like operator screwed up white balance.
4-Sharpening: Add a lot of sharpening. Old cameras were really low res and added sharpening to try to cover it up. This might seem stupid after softening the image with a blur two steps ago, but it’s key to the look.
5-Bad TV filter: Now you can add static, bad tracking, FX because they were coming from the VHS tape and not from the camera, so those artifacts should be last. In particular, look for a slider called “Color Sync”. Lot of VHS players had chroma sync issues, this will replicate that.
6-Crop to 4:3 aspect. Duh. 🙂
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
Green flashes has always indicated a problem with the graphics card or it’s drivers, in my experience.
Anything non-standard about the card you have, or the way you arrived at your installed system? Clean installed lately (as opposed to a pile of delta updates?)
Are there any alternative GFX card kexts you can manually install?
Any reason your GXF card could be overheating (I had one in a Mac Pro that had collected a lot of dust and once cleaned started acting better)?
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
First, you need to know what codec the camera recorded. The F55 records four, count ’em FOUR codecs, all in MXF containers.
-XDCAM/MPEG50 422: Importable by FCPX directly, you need the Sony XDCAM PDZK-LT2 plugin installed.
-XAVC 422 10bit: Importable by FCPX directly, again need the PDZK-LT2 plugin to import
-SR codec, (aka SStP). Not directly importable yet. Must download “SR Viewer” from Sony, then re-wrap each MXF file into a .mov one-by-one. Resulting Quicktime files will import into FCPX no problem.
-Raw/MXF: Not importable, must be transcoded. This will probably not ever be importable in FCPX, since the camera can simultaneously record MPEG50 proxy files that you can edit with, and that would be the preferred method.
Additionally, if you have a machine new enough to run it, DaVinci Resolve Lite (free) can import all flavors of F55 files and export to Quicktimes of any codec, ProRes included. It works very well for this, but you will have to read the manual to set up export options to export individual files with original file names.
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
Lack of full debayer playback is a lack of hardware power, most likely.
Even though the Redrocket does the full debayer, it’s up to the rest of your computer to transport those huge frames across the PCI bus (assuming it’s not saturated), get them to the GPU, scale them down in real time, and then pump out to the display.
Lot of ifs.
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
I just found that link. I don’t see any reason for Grant to go out of his way to say something like that other than it’s really the way he feels.
I also was carefully reading the Apple new Pro pages and the way it’s worded, it looks like it might be possible that each TB2 port has it’s own bandwidth and controller. I’d expect the new school will be bonded TB2 lines to a Cubix, 1, 2 or maybe even 3 or 4 TB2 lines to an enclosure.
Either way, with his nice words about “new” OpenCL, maybe I don’t have to worry about much.
HDMI 1.4 to a 4K monitor (that is, when it gets to the point when we need such things) and off you go.
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net -
As I get bored with ultra clean looking modern cameras, I often sit down for extended spells to do the most convincing bad telecine/vintage 16/35 looks I can come up with. Spent a LOT of time doing that 🙂
Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net
