More room for grading vs 7D?

[Alvise Tedesco]

Hi all.
Late night here. I'm getting frustrated for a well shot, edited, sound designed video I'm looking at now. Frustrated because It deserved a little color correction to really pop. Just a little bit more than the very minimal range a 7D allow...
Before going on and loosing bit by bit, got a break just to ask here, dear dvxusers

Is there more room coloring AF100 footage before degrading IQ or you can't sincerely really appreciate a difference?
And if answer is "no", do you (sincerely) appreciate a difference with your Nanoflash, Ninja, etc. ?

 

[PaPa]

I think it corrects wonderfully, and more so than the in terms of being able to lift the shadows, but the 8 Bit posterization gets tough if you push too much. Or you can do like I do and just accept that it's there and that's all I can work with at the moment so make the best out of it.

 

[Hywel]

As PaPa says, it is the 8-bit posterisation which I've found to be the limiting factor in how aggressive I can be in the grade. Following advice from Barry, Shooter and others, this is my current "shooting practice" to optimise:

1) Use the whole of the luma range. Push the highlights up to 105% IRE rather than 100% IRE, but don't go over 107% or you'll clip and it may get ugly colour casts. But you'll get much cleaner signal using as much of the range as possible and that'll give you maximum leeway in the grade too. This is tricky, but worth doing your absolute utmost to achieve. Adjust the lighting as much as possible to support it, too.

2) Turn the Chroma level down in camera. I'd say -2 absolutely, maybe as low as -4. This helps to avoid clipping on the individual RGB channels on desaturated bright areas like skin tone highlights or pale walls. The colour information will be much better protected this way, allowing you to push saturation up higher in the grade as desired but to do so in a controlled way without clipping. The practical difference is that skin tones hold up to much more aggressive grades before you start seeing colour shifts to yellow in the highlights. This was absolutely vital for me.

3) Based on some footage shot for me by Barry with the on-board codec and a Nanoflash, I decided that for the relatively tranquil shots I usually have, the posterisation is the limiting factor in how hard I can push the footage in the grade, and the external recorder doesn't dramatically improve this particular issue. There's lots of other reasons you might want the higher bit rate i-frame only codec. (Try a codec-stressing hand held running cam shots in a forest or if you are doing chromakey or a convenient ready-to-edit-in-FCP second copy of the footage recorded live). But for the specific issue I have with grading the footage, it didn't seem like it would bring instant dramatic improvements.

4) A little noise helps takes the steps out of the posterisation. So I find Cine_V to be more grade-friendly that B-Press, for example (Cine_V also crushes the blacks less, which is
something I prefer to be able to fine tune in the grade even though I usually end up with something like the B-Press look). Don't use high detail coring settings as this will tend to smooth everything out and give more posterisation issues. The higher bit rate codecs may help here by recording the noise more faithfully and breaking up the posterisation bands, but this wasn't evident in the static test Barry shot for me.

I decided not to get an external recorder at this point in time, but to live with the grading limitations. At least one has a lot more fine control over the camera settings than one does with the 7D, and I find the footage holds up better to grading than the 7D too (which really does fall apart very quickly in my experience).

Cheers, Hywel.

 

[jsauce]

I just finished color grading a project with 7d and AF100 footage intermixed. The AF100 was MUCH MUCH MUCH worse in terms of its ability to hold up to tweaking highlights, mids and blacks. If I as much as touched the mids, the entire image went grainy. The 7D far out-performed it.

 

[PaPa]

I just finished color grading a project with 7d and AF100 footage intermixed. The AF100 was MUCH MUCH MUCH worse in terms of its ability to hold up to tweaking highlights, mids and blacks. If I as much as touched the mids, the entire image went grainy. The 7D far out-performed it.

you must have a magical 7D I agree about he hilight handling, but this has been gone over many times and the AF100 is capable of getting a good amount of detail back in the hi's.

Saying it was worse in tweaking mids and lows, well.. I don't know how else to say it but that's wrong. Perhaps given the individual screen shot you were working on, maybe. But the AF100 has higher bit rate, more detail in the lows, and less noisier overall, thus it can't be more grainy given the appropriate settings. And that's really the key word, appropriate settings.

But anyway, that's just given my experience with the two.

 

[Shooter]

I just finished color grading a project with 7d and AF100 footage intermixed. The AF100 was MUCH MUCH MUCH worse in terms of its ability to hold up to tweaking highlights, mids and blacks. If I as much as touched the mids, the entire image went grainy. The 7D far out-performed it.

I cc'd and graded 14 TVCs in Da Vinci Resolve Suite last month and I specifically asked the colorist if he had any issue with the material. ( He was un aware of what we shot on at this point in time).

Absolutely no issues.

Sub grade and cc were done in the Flame suite. Same question was asked of the Flame Op. No issues.

Good enough for me and my client.

Yes ... I will be getting an external recorder ... but for now it works perfectly well.

 

[KyleProhaska]

I agree with much of what's said. The only thing I don't necessarily agree with is dropping the Chroma Level too far. Raising the Chroma in post can bring out more color in the noise then would be there if it was done in camera. Just my experience in shooting digital in general.

Also adding noise as previously stated helps a great deal. Depending on your delivery format (DVD for instance) you can push the noise addition much higher to help out certain shots. In serious problem shots adding two instances of the noise filter at half the amount each of what you'd set it for one instance can help even more. I actually prefer adding noise in After Effects since it's Film Grain filter is very advanced and (to me) matches 35mm much more. I realize not everyone can do this though.

I just thought of this randomly...but isn't it possible that while shooting with an external monitor, you could turn the contrast on your monitor up to check or hypothesize how a CC filter will handle it later (the bit depth and banding). I never thought of that LOL.

 

[maranfilms]

Perhaps given the individual screen shot you were working on, maybe. But the AF100 has higher bit rate, more detail in the lows, and less noisier overall, thus it can't be more grainy given the appropriate settings. And that's really the key word, appropriate settings.

This statement hit the nail on the head. I think your exactly right. How the footage was shot, what settings were being used. And how it was lit. Will play a major role in how well the footage holds up. If the 7d footage was shot in low light, you could potentially push more on the grade than the Af100. I think it's safe to say the 7d has a little better ability in low light. If it was normal daylight, the af100 should be able to hold up a bit better.