Hi All!
Been a while. Been busy! After about a year of messing about I have FINALLY come across a good match settings for the DVX200 and my Canon C300mkII. I’ll post up here and on the C300 board in the interests of paying it forward for the next guy. Now, I’m not a colorist! So be warned! A lot of this was done by empirical testing, retesting, frustrated temper tantrums, and going back to square one many times. The goal was to get a set of baked in profiles for each camera that would allow for cutting back/forth with minimal, if any, grading. Why not do it all in log? Well hell that would be too easy! Besides, sometimes this stuff gets handed off, fast turnaround, or the job doesn’t have enough room in it for grading (read, being done cheap). It would be great if someone who is way more skilled in colorizing stuff could try these and give feedback. I’ve gone as far as I can without scopes, graphs, etc. Hopefully it can be of some use to someone in the future.
First, a quick and somewhat limited definition of the stuff I’m tweaking: Gamma; controls how the camera sees light and dark. Matrix; where the colors end up sitting and the overall color look. Matrix Gain; think of it as overall saturation.
DVX200:
I’m using TDCatTech’s profile which he described here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTfvahwXsCk He’s done a super job on this and it’s become my go-to file for baked in work. This file is unmodified. Really nice skin tones, realistic color renditions with a lovely balance of contrast and saturation. It is this profile that I tried to match my Canons to.
C300MkII/C100mkII
Start with the EOS Standard picture profile. Yeah…. That one. The one with the GoPro like pop. Why? It has very, very good color rendition, even if the saturation is up too high as standard. But I was just after the color rendition and accuracy, we’ll take care of the rest in a minute.
The Gamma is going to be changed from EOS Standard to the Wide Dynamic Range setting. Why? Wide Dynamic Range pretty much gives the best “spread” of range without going to a true LOG type setup. It’s going to stretch the highlights more than the regular gamma “EOS Standard” AND it gives better tones in the darker/shadow bits. It’s about as far as the dynamic range can be stretched with a baked in profile knowing that grading at the end of it all isn’t desired. Why not use Canon’s LOG Gamma? It does weird things… I think because it has narrower range it seems to compress stuff more. The range is somewhere from around 10-15 IRE to something like 85-90 whereas the Wide Dynamic Range setting seems to be functional from darn near 0 to 100. The extra 10-20 IRE’s you pick up with it, and its flattened upper curve, really make the best of the baked in colors (which are REC709 ish. Mostly.) and gets about as many baked in stops of dynamic range as you’re going to get away with using this thing.
Sharpness is set to 0. It was originally 15. “0” in Canon picture profiles seems to be relative to the profile being used. So 0 in this profile may equal -15 in another. 0 in the EOS Standard profile is pretty sharp without being overly so. Changing the Gamma may have an effect on this, but after messing about with the setting I settled back to 0.
Noise Reduction 1. A little helps perceived sharpness and contrast without really adding any contrast or sharpening!
Matrix is the EOS Standard BUT with Matrix Gain turned down to -15. You can go down further to around -20 to fine tune the look, but for TDCatTech’s DVX profile -15 gets both my C100/300 really close. This reduces the saturation fairly equally, but if you go too low the greens start turning blue.
-15 does a good job of knocking down the Canon “red” super pop florescent look to more of a rich pastel and overall the colors look spot on with no oversaturation or high contrast look.
In post the only thing that I tweak is a lens profile for the Canon’s and overall scene brightness (very, very minor).
This all works for daylight or daylight lighting, and the Canons seem to work better about 1/2 to 1 stop overexposed (yeah, that ETTR thing, just in this case keep it below 100ire). Not so great in really low light.
One last note: You MUST black balance the Canon’s at the start of shooting AND if you mess with the ISO. Also, the Canon’s work their best (it seems) with the daylight WB preset. Odd things can happen on a custom white balance that ends up below about 4300k. And auto WB can be scary as it ADDS SOME KIND OF COLOR CORRECTION ON ITS OWN and can create a pink hue. Actually, WB on this series camera is pretty clunky, unlike Canon’s DSLR’s which actually works very well.
Been a while. Been busy! After about a year of messing about I have FINALLY come across a good match settings for the DVX200 and my Canon C300mkII. I’ll post up here and on the C300 board in the interests of paying it forward for the next guy. Now, I’m not a colorist! So be warned! A lot of this was done by empirical testing, retesting, frustrated temper tantrums, and going back to square one many times. The goal was to get a set of baked in profiles for each camera that would allow for cutting back/forth with minimal, if any, grading. Why not do it all in log? Well hell that would be too easy! Besides, sometimes this stuff gets handed off, fast turnaround, or the job doesn’t have enough room in it for grading (read, being done cheap). It would be great if someone who is way more skilled in colorizing stuff could try these and give feedback. I’ve gone as far as I can without scopes, graphs, etc. Hopefully it can be of some use to someone in the future.
First, a quick and somewhat limited definition of the stuff I’m tweaking: Gamma; controls how the camera sees light and dark. Matrix; where the colors end up sitting and the overall color look. Matrix Gain; think of it as overall saturation.
DVX200:
I’m using TDCatTech’s profile which he described here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTfvahwXsCk He’s done a super job on this and it’s become my go-to file for baked in work. This file is unmodified. Really nice skin tones, realistic color renditions with a lovely balance of contrast and saturation. It is this profile that I tried to match my Canons to.
C300MkII/C100mkII
Start with the EOS Standard picture profile. Yeah…. That one. The one with the GoPro like pop. Why? It has very, very good color rendition, even if the saturation is up too high as standard. But I was just after the color rendition and accuracy, we’ll take care of the rest in a minute.
The Gamma is going to be changed from EOS Standard to the Wide Dynamic Range setting. Why? Wide Dynamic Range pretty much gives the best “spread” of range without going to a true LOG type setup. It’s going to stretch the highlights more than the regular gamma “EOS Standard” AND it gives better tones in the darker/shadow bits. It’s about as far as the dynamic range can be stretched with a baked in profile knowing that grading at the end of it all isn’t desired. Why not use Canon’s LOG Gamma? It does weird things… I think because it has narrower range it seems to compress stuff more. The range is somewhere from around 10-15 IRE to something like 85-90 whereas the Wide Dynamic Range setting seems to be functional from darn near 0 to 100. The extra 10-20 IRE’s you pick up with it, and its flattened upper curve, really make the best of the baked in colors (which are REC709 ish. Mostly.) and gets about as many baked in stops of dynamic range as you’re going to get away with using this thing.
Sharpness is set to 0. It was originally 15. “0” in Canon picture profiles seems to be relative to the profile being used. So 0 in this profile may equal -15 in another. 0 in the EOS Standard profile is pretty sharp without being overly so. Changing the Gamma may have an effect on this, but after messing about with the setting I settled back to 0.
Noise Reduction 1. A little helps perceived sharpness and contrast without really adding any contrast or sharpening!
Matrix is the EOS Standard BUT with Matrix Gain turned down to -15. You can go down further to around -20 to fine tune the look, but for TDCatTech’s DVX profile -15 gets both my C100/300 really close. This reduces the saturation fairly equally, but if you go too low the greens start turning blue.
-15 does a good job of knocking down the Canon “red” super pop florescent look to more of a rich pastel and overall the colors look spot on with no oversaturation or high contrast look.
In post the only thing that I tweak is a lens profile for the Canon’s and overall scene brightness (very, very minor).
This all works for daylight or daylight lighting, and the Canons seem to work better about 1/2 to 1 stop overexposed (yeah, that ETTR thing, just in this case keep it below 100ire). Not so great in really low light.
One last note: You MUST black balance the Canon’s at the start of shooting AND if you mess with the ISO. Also, the Canon’s work their best (it seems) with the daylight WB preset. Odd things can happen on a custom white balance that ends up below about 4300k. And auto WB can be scary as it ADDS SOME KIND OF COLOR CORRECTION ON ITS OWN and can create a pink hue. Actually, WB on this series camera is pretty clunky, unlike Canon’s DSLR’s which actually works very well.