F3: Corporate look with F3 and Impulz LUTs

S

stokstad

Well-known member
Just did my first corporate gig with the F3. Bought the Impulz LUTs beforehand and decided on the Kodak 250D.

First day I recorded internally but the footage looked a little weak when pushing the grade into saturation so I recorded the rest in ProRes HQ.

A lot of mixed lighting, very quick workflow and some hard work. This is almost final version, will do a final grading touch before release. Would love some feedback on what you think about the colour.

Recorded in Slog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQP9tN62fuU

Thanks!
 
I liked the look and the pace. Those early slow motion shots get released nicely when you show the people climbing in what seems to be real time. Nice work!
 
Impulz is the best solution going for original SLog, I think. There never was a good LUT for S-Log 1. Just numbers and formulas from Sony, and a "good luck".

I think your color is on-point and looks terrific.
 
Thank you for the comments!

One concern with the Impulz LUTs for me is that they seems to "lock" the contrast of the image ie. they will never go higher than say IRE70 or lover than IRE15 so for slog it can mean that the image gets even flatter. For this I used the FC (Film contrast) so the image is set to about IRE90 and IRE5 as the highest and lowest. The problem with this seems to be that the highlights gets a very steep roll-off and I hade to work alot to get it make it more gentle. It also means that the workflow of adjusting exposure and contrast in a node or layer before the LUT does not work since the LUT is forcing the contrast to these set IRE values. Therefor I adjust contrast in a layer after the LUT, making me a bit unsure if it is the right way.

Will have to read up on this!
 
stokstad said:
Thank you for the comments!

One concern with the Impulz LUTs for me is that they seems to "lock" the contrast of the image ie. they will never go higher than say IRE70 or lover than IRE15 so for slog it can mean that the image gets even flatter. For this I used the FC (Film contrast) so the image is set to about IRE90 and IRE5 as the highest and lowest. The problem with this seems to be that the highlights gets a very steep roll-off and I hade to work alot to get it make it more gentle. It also means that the workflow of adjusting exposure and contrast in a node or layer before the LUT does not work since the LUT is forcing the contrast to these set IRE values. Therefor I adjust contrast in a layer after the LUT, making me a bit unsure if it is the right way.

Will have to read up on this!
Click to expand...

The Impulz LUTs were never intended as a one-click solution.

To get anything out of them, you sometimes have to modify the image before it gets processed by the LUT, sometimes in-between the 2 stages of the stock to Cineon, then cineon to 2383/93 stage, and then again after to normalize values to video values like you mention.

But you're rewarded with some very, very good images if you take the time to understand what's going on. Remember that the LUTs are created by scans via chip charts photographed by the film in question, the film is scanned, then the color patches being read out numerically to a LUT. So the outputs of some/all of the LUTs are not normalized for video. The creator (Jonathan Ochmann) used a 30,000 color chip chart to create the 64x64x64 LUTs. If you email Denver Riddle or Jonathan, he might explain his process. It was not tweaking things by eye.

Myself, it's only taken me a few seconds to get a good look out of Impulz, but you gotta know how to use them and be willing (use them in nodes or layers, not as input or output LUTs).

I liken LUTs to guitar pedals. You have to know what order to modify things in to get what you want!
 
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Those shots around .12 and .17 have weird skin to me. It looks very washed out and without natural variations, which most digital cameras do of course, but it seems a little worse than usual.
 
I agree with Nate, Impulz luts added some life to my F3/SLog files.
Looking back, I got some great S-Log imagery from that camera. Always recorded 10bit ProResHQ to a Ki Pro mini.
 
VinceinLA said:
Those shots around .12 and .17 have weird skin to me. It looks very washed out and without natural variations, which most digital cameras do of course, but it seems a little worse than usual.
Click to expand...


Yes I agree, Im gonna have a last go at those shots but the mixed lighting really warmed everything to a yellowish tone and the skin got very smooth for some reason. Will try a secondary on those. Thank you for the input!
 
Nate Weaver said:
The Impulz LUTs were never intended as a one-click solution.

To get anything out of them, you sometimes have to modify the image before it gets processed by the LUT, sometimes in-between the 2 stages of the stock to Cineon, then cineon to 2383/93 stage, and then again after to normalize values to video values like you mention.

But you're rewarded with some very, very good images if you take the time to understand what's going on. Remember that the LUTs are created by scans via chip charts photographed by the film in question, the film is scanned, then the color patches being read out numerically to a LUT. So the outputs of some/all of the LUTs are not normalized for video. The creator (Jonathan Ochmann) used a 30,000 color chip chart to create the 64x64x64 LUTs. If you email Denver Riddle or Jonathan, he might explain his process. It was not tweaking things by eye.

Myself, it's only taken me a few seconds to get a good look out of Impulz, but you gotta know how to use them and be willing (use them in nodes or layers, not as input or output LUTs).

I liken LUTs to guitar pedals. You have to know what order to modify things in to get what you want!
Click to expand...

Yes, I wanna be clear that Im not criticising the LUTs but rather Im not really sure how they work when they lay out the gamma-curve. But I think I got an idea now of where to adjust what for the one LUT workflow:

1st layer: Exposure (lifting/darkening the whole image) and color correction

2nd layer: Impulz LUT with Film Contrast or Vision Space gamma

3rd layer: Contrast adjustment

4th layer: Grading
 
BE AWARE

I just found that ALL Sony LUTs by Vision Impulz are 32step only (32x32x32) instead of the much finer 64 step ones that are offered in the same bundle with Arri/Red/BMD etc.

Here are some tests:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/usy3s1bl6b3i1f3/AAACkH7TmlAncPutpNRlQJ0ga?dl=0

At least we found heavy bandings when using the SLOG3 LUTs - and tried ARRI LOG LUTs (64) instead (wrong colors, but MUCH better banding behaviour).
I´ll contact Denver Riddle how to get the 64er versions...

ULi
 
ulimors said:
BE AWARE

I just found that ALL Sony LUTs by Vision Impulz are 32step only (32x32x32) instead of the much finer 64 step ones that are offered in the same bundle with Arri/Red/BMD etc.

Here are some tests:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/usy3s1bl6b3i1f3/AAACkH7TmlAncPutpNRlQJ0ga?dl=0

At least we found heavy bandings when using the SLOG3 LUTs - and tried ARRI LOG LUTs (64) instead (wrong colors, but MUCH better banding behaviour).
I´ll contact Denver Riddle how to get the 64er versions...

ULi
Click to expand...


Hm, sounds worrying.. This should definitely be mentioned before you buy these..
 
VinceinLA said:
Those shots around .12 and .17 have weird skin to me. It looks very washed out and without natural variations, which most digital cameras do of course, but it seems a little worse than usual.
Click to expand...


It's the LUT. All of the Impulz film stock LUTs do this, some to large degrees, some to lesser. This, to me, is a big part of what film does to colors, any colors from red to yellow are all pushed towards an idealized skintone hue. Film does it, the original Varicam did it, Canon does it, Alexa does it, but they all do it slightly differently and to varying degrees. The Vision3 250D Impulz LUT (which I think OP said he used) does it a LOT...many colors recorded by the camera in that LUT get simplified down to greens, cyans, and warm tones. It's really cool for warm landscapes and blue skies (which go cyan), but I personally have not used that particular Impulz LUT on much of my stuff because it does modify colors more than most of the Impulz set.

The most "normal" of the Impulz Kodak LUTs, IMO, are 50D and 500T.

The Impulz LUTs are and continue to be a huge eye-opener for me. Lots of "looks" I've seen my whole life from film I now realize are the inherent responses of certain Kodak stocks, and were less attributable to the colorist. At the end of my time ACing around 99-2000, I shot some film, but was not in tune enough with what the colorist did vs what the film itself was doing...
 
stokstad said:
Hm, sounds worrying.. This should definitely be mentioned before you buy these..
Click to expand...

Most LUTs are 32 cubes.

When you export a .cube from Resolve it's a 32 cube.

I've run into odd color banding once or twice from the Impulz LUTs with Sony material, and it is probably due to this, but in practice I've used them a lot and it's generally not been an issue. But it is something to keep an eye out for.

Since some of the LUTs modify colors and contrast curves quite a bit, it also depends on the quality of the footage you're feeding into it. 10 or 12 bit fares much, much better than 8 bit. Same with noise level.
 
New and final version. I tried to get the skintones a bit more dialed back and natural in those tricky shots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTyROaahqCU

I actually choose the Kodak Vision3 250D LUT because I found it to be the most natural. The blues and skin had a neutral feel to it and whites kept very white. The 50D had an incredible amount of cyan in the blues by my account. I guess they are complex and can behave differently for different occasions.

I also out checked out what Kodak said about their stock and the 250D was a good daylight, indoor-stock which seemed appropriate for quick, documentary workflow-images: http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Products/Production/Color_Negative_Films/5207.htm
 
stokstad said:
I guess they are complex and can behave differently for different occasions.
Click to expand...

I can't stress enough about how much this is true. When I first got Impulz, I loaded up samples from a year's worth of shooting; interior, exterior, warm, cool, etc etc to see how each "stock" treated the image. While 250D might have done the least to the initial color balance (i.e. warm vs cool) of your interior rock climbing images, it simplified what colors are in the actual image much more than some of the other "stocks". 50D probably does this the least. But really, it depends on what colors are present in your source material to begin with.

The next step, if you decide to get crazy, is start experimenting with what the various "stocks" do to your colors after you balance out the obvious color casts/balances inherent to each one. 200T puts some blue in your blacks which is pretty for a lot of stuff, but even if you take that blue-in-the-blacks back out, it still looks different and has a use than say, using 500T on the same image.

stokstad said:
I also out checked out what Kodak said about their stock and the 250D was a good daylight, indoor-stock which seemed appropriate for quick, documentary workflow-images: http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Products/Production/Color_Negative_Films/5207.htm
Click to expand...

Well, yeah, but they say that simply because it's the right film for when you're shooting indoors during the daytime and there's sunlight coming in. The only stock, in fact. Kodak just explaining the basics. Not because the color rendition was perfect for the subject matter.

Much of the time when shooting film, what stock you used was a product of the conditions you were in. Occasionally you had the choice of using 500 or 250 tungsten based film for daylight exteriors with an 85 filter (comboed with a ND, aka 85N6, 85N9) but most of the time that was just because you didn't have the right film at the right moment.
 
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