Color Pseudoscience

Mitch Gross said:
Roger Macie was the king of tweaking those pots to "fix" the Sony betacam look, which basically meant taking it away from the preferred Japanese look to the preferred American look (the Japanese like things COLORFUL and SHARP). I worked at AbelCine, which did in fact conquer the VariCams with excellent scene files, including the famous "JR45" look, which was simply Jesse Rosen's 45% gamma settings in both FILM REC and VIDEO REC. You should have sent your 2700s to AbelCine -- I must have loaded those looks 100 times and helped translate the original JR45 Scene Files to a dozen differnt camera models, including the 2700s.
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I probably have them somewhere, either on a card or in one of the cameras(I only run one of two files 99% of the time with "my" file being 99% of that 99%). Both of my 2700's came from Abel and my 27H from Fletcher, before Abel bought them/merged with them. I remember when you were there, I was just curious if you were at Macie before that. Macie's VariCam files were just WAY too magenta and low contrast. They weren't anywhere close to the 'Macie Look', IMO. My iPhone looks better than those Macie Vari looks. It was honestly surprising and disappointing considering what he did for all of us before that. The one thing you could say about Macie's Looks, each one was tailored/tweaked for each individual, specific camera that was sent to them, they weren't just "generic" scene files loaded off a memory card, which is what is done with every other scene file today.
 
CharlesPapert said:
I had my own secret sauce with analog then digi-beta that involved endlessly twiddling the outboard CCU unit plus filtration like pro-mists and Ultra-cons (I just sold my set of 4x4 Ultracons that dated back to somewhere in the early 90's, hadn't touched them in many years) and when possible I used to send stuff to Filmlook for the 24 frame conversion. . Everything was in the service of trying to get more latitude, softer rolloff and overall just less video looking. I can also remember the very first tape-to-tape session I was in that had a rudimentary version of color correction (cannot remember which desk they were using) and the first thing the colorist did was apply magenta to the image, they said "all Sonys shoot green". I was shocked to realize this. From that point on, I added an 1/8 and 1/4 plusgreen to my little book of CTO/CTB filters I'd carry around to cheat the white balance (remember those?). That alone was a huge difference, I remember clients saying "how do you get the skin tones to look so good?" and it was because they weren't slightly green! Amazing to think, baked-in color and few people doing any kind of color correction--such a different time.
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I still have a set of Warm Balance cards, somewhere. Everyone had a set of those in the late 90's/early 2000's.(I think mine had both blue and green). Ironically enough, with my VariCam, I'd have to try to get a lower balance at times, especially outside in high color temp situations, because the Vari's would go yellow in those situations. Instead of balancing on white, you'd be better off on pavement/concrete.
 
Run&Gun said:
I still have a set of Warm Balance cards, somewhere. Everyone had a set of those in the late 90's/early 2000's.(I think mine had both blue and green). Ironically enough, with my VariCam, I'd have to try to get a lower balance at times, especially outside in high color temp situations, because the Vari's would go yellow in those situations. Instead of balancing on white,you'd be better off on pavement/concrete.
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I remember being shown how to get a passable WB on clouds for outdoors. Old B&W EVF, had to just trust manual WB with experience.

For more obscure WB, i raided the paint store sample cards.

Never used concrete, afaik, that is a good one!
 
James0b57 said:
I remember being shown how to get a passable WB on clouds for outdoors. Old B&W EVF, had to just trust manual WB with experience.

For more obscure WB, i raided the paint store sample cards.

Never used concrete, afaik, that is a good one!
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Oh yes the clouds. Used them often but you can't always count on having any in sky down here in summer. Blue, blue skies everywhere a lot of the time. Sports stadiums plenty of concrete. "All balance on a sunny piece of concrete on the western grandstand please." Forgotten how many times I've white balanced on the cassette labels in a Betacam case. For warmth we used to balance quite often through a 1/8 blue gel If you didn't have warm cards.

Chris Young
 
Run&Gun said:
The one thing you could say about Macie's Looks, each one was tailored/tweaked for each individual, specific camera that was sent to them, they weren't just "generic" scene files loaded off a memory card, which is what is done with every other scene file today.
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That's because back in the day you HAD to, not just because you couldn't load in stuff on a card (no such thing back then) but also because there was so much variation in the devices themselves. The level of precision control in manufacturing available today is worlds apart from what was possible in the 80s.
 
cyvideo said:
Oh yes the clouds. Used them often but you can't always count on having any in sky down here in summer. Blue, blue skies everywhere a lot of the time. Sports stadiums plenty of concrete. "All balance on a sunny piece of concrete on the western grandstand please." Forgotten how many times I've white balanced on the cassette labels in a Betacam case. For warmth we used to balance quite often through a 1/8 blue gel If you didn't have warm cards.
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For warmth, did anyone balance on something in the shade instead of in direct sunlight?
 
combatentropy said:
For warmth, did anyone balance on something in the shade instead of in direct sunlight?
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Yes, I always did that.

Never owned the Warm Cards, although I thought they were always a good idea! They came along a little late for me, I stopped shooting Betacam stuff around '96 when I started working on bigger productions that were all 35mm. I thought tape was fully behind me after a few years, but then it crept back in via F900 (and DV for smaller stuff). It's interesting to look back at how it evolved over the 2000's--most of work was still film but gradually the digital stuff got more and more serious. I think my last time shooting film was on Act of Valor in 2009 where we used 35mm and 5DMKII in alternating scenes!

It was really fun to get back to my roots when I brought in 80's tube cameras to shoot some of the retro material on Key & Peele. Drew up an ad hoc registration chart and showed my AC's how to field register a camera with a "tweaker", but also had to take the sides off the camera and twiddle some of the pots to get them to match better which was wading into the deep waters. Eventually I enlisted an old school video tech who spent a few nostalgic hours painting the cameras as best as he could--he didn't even charge me because it was such a trip down memory lane for him! Below was from the set of a 70's era recreation--we were invited to dress to the theme but apparently the rest of my department didn't get the note...

workingonKY1900s.jpg
 
combatentropy said:
For warmth, did anyone balance on something in the shade instead of in direct sunlight?
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Totally. I often angled the white card towards the shade. Also, mixed light situations were always that hunt for the right patch of light to fall on the card.
 
CharlesPapert said:
Yes, I always did that.

Never owned the Warm Cards, although I thought they were always a good idea! They came along a little late for me, I stopped shooting Betacam stuff around '96 when I started working on bigger productions that were all 35mm. I thought tape was fully behind me after a few years, but then it crept back in via F900 (and DV for smaller stuff). It's interesting to look back at how it evolved over the 2000's--most of work was still film but gradually the digital stuff got more and more serious. I think my last time shooting film was on Act of Valor in 2009 where we used 35mm and 5DMKII in alternating scenes!

It was really fun to get back to my roots when I brought in 80's tube cameras to shoot some of the retro material on Key & Peele. Drew up an ad hoc registration chart and showed my AC's how to field register a camera with a "tweaker", but also had to take the sides off the camera and twiddle some of the pots to get them to match better which was wading into the deep waters. Eventually I enlisted an old school video tech who spent a few nostalgic hours painting the cameras as best as he could--he didn't even charge me because it was such a trip down memory lane for him! Below was from the set of a 70's era recreation--we were invited to dress to the theme but apparently the rest of my department didn't get the note...

View attachment 137808
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The guy behind you in the Mickey shirt could pass. There's a pic of me when I was a little kid from the late late 70's/early 80's in a Mickey T-shirt shirt like that.
 
Mitch Gross said:
That's because back in the day you HAD to, not just because you couldn't load in stuff on a card (no such thing back then) but also because there was so much variation in the devices themselves. The level of precision control in manufacturing available today is worlds apart from what was possible in the 80s.
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Early on, yes. But by the time I started using Roger, we did have cameras with set-up cards and deep paint menu's, like D-600's. And when I got my second Betacam, a D-50WS, it had a deep paint menu and scene files could be stored and transferred on cards, as well. I remember one of my buddies taking my scene files after I had my 50WS does and he loaded them. The cameras were dead-nuts on, until several years later after he had to have his Green CCD replaced. So yes, by the early 2000's the camera's were much better out-of-the-box and closer together, so you could take a scene file and transfer it one-for-one to another same model camera and they would be identical or almost identical, at least to the eye. Another great thing about the deep paint menu's instead of analog pots inside, you couldn't F the camera up. If it got too far off, you could just reset it and start over.
 
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