Not liking cinestyle

roxics

roxics

Veteran
Having a hard time getting natural skin tones when shooting with cinestyle. They just come off looking plastic even after correction. I use premiere pro or after effects because it's what I have.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Here is an example:

cinestyle-skin-tones.jpg

I just feel like a get better results with the standard Canon profile. But cinestyle is supposed to be better because it's flatter and should allow more options in post. So I have to be doing something wrong.

This example above has a subtle s-curve and a three way color correction on it. Everything else in the frame appears correct, but the skin tones, argh!
 
You should expose for the flatter profile with lower exposure on faces as a result. If they do become to hot you can't save it and get a good looking skin tone.
 
Flatter is only better if you have the bits to back it up (hint: more than 8) and the time to work it in post, or when you target a low contrast look in the first place. Assuming you've exposed correctly, good, rich and detailed skin needs fat mids in the toned output. And you need tonal resolution to stretch flat images for fat mids. Not enough tonal resolution = banding or plastics, depending on how much you push the result.

edit:
this old article on flat curves might help
 
I have not found 8 bit encoding to be an issue with broadcast grade high bit rate codecs and 4:2:2 or higher chroma sampling. 4:2:0 low bit rate AVC-mpeg flattens small value differences in the compression process. When you further flatten the tonal range it makes it worse. There is no data to recover for post grading to any great extent with highly compressed AVC/H.264 video.
 
I was pretty excited by the Cinestyle and Flaat options at first but stopped using them after they clogged up my workflow without much noticeable result. Explaining to clients that it will look better after color correction isn't always easy, and I still had about 1/3 of my shots just look "wrong."
Now I do Neutral cranked down for projects where I know the editor will grade it and send a lot of stuff ready-to-air if I don't know the editor and they haven't made a flat request. I'd rather use my 8 bits to get it right instead of giving them to the editor to try to "fix."
 
Flaat_10 has about the same contrast as Prolost Flat (Neutral dialed down). But skin tones are better out-of-the-camera, because it's based on portrait. There are tradeoffs to this, though: other colors are shifted. But for me skin goes first.

Flaat_10:
flaat_2.jpg


Neutral dialed down (Prolost Flat):
neutral_4.jpg


Color accuracy test (Flaat vs Neutral vs CineStyle):
http://vimeo.com/47394255
 
Samuel H said:
Flaat_10 has about the same contrast as Prolost Flat (Neutral dialed down). But skin tones are better out-of-the-camera, because it's based on portrait. There are tradeoffs to this, though: other colors are shifted. But for me skin goes first.

Flaat_10:
flaat_2.jpg


Neutral dialed down (Prolost Flat):
neutral_4.jpg


Color accuracy test (Flaat vs Neutral vs CineStyle):
http://vimeo.com/47394255
Click to expand...

Samuel. Your flaat 11 seems to be much less red saturated than flaat 10 in these tests. Is that the case?
 
I got over the flat profiles for Canon pretty quickly. Working on an edit where the client supplied footage - two 5d's shot with someone's idea of "log" and a third video camera with full saturation and contrast (at a different frame rate, no less).

I'm supposed to match the whole mess. Pushing a flat profile to match the look they want - the reds are crunching up first. Lots of dirty posterization.

Unless you want 100% leeway, get close to the look you want on set. Sure, open up the shadows with some soft fill and you can crush 'em back down if you want. I feel like - with 8 bit DSLR footage anyway - you're just making more work for yourself.

I did grab Samuel's Flaat for my newish D7100 and I'm liking what I've seen so far, but haven't done any serious tests yet.
 
ROCKMORE said:
Samuel. Your flaat 11 seems to be much less red saturated than flaat 10 in these tests. Is that the case?
Click to expand...

They are identical except for a curve. So colors are the same. But since contrast affects saturation, well, they are not. If that makes sense.

And yes, you can screw big time if you play with the picture profile editors without knowing what you're doing. Same if you go crazy with the sliders for the built-in profiles. This is what the NEX-5N does if you push all the sliders to try and get maximum DR in video mode:
p_c3_dr5.jpg
 
Michael Carter said:
get close to the look you want on set.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately my set the last few months is a formula 1 race track shooting at high noon opening shot subject starting from 1000 meters in the haze.
The only control I have is a flat picture style.
But I can agree on a controlled shoot with lighting, talent, hair & makeup there are many roads to Rome.
 
Last edited:
For NBC, we use Neutral with the following settings:

Sharpness: +2
Contrast: all the way down
Saturation: -2
Color tone: 0

We've tried many different combinations and several downloadable profiles, but this is the setting that has been decided as best for our broadcast workflow from the network. We have not tried the Canon X profile, though, and I'm keen to give that one a shot.
 
Those were my settings before CineStyle and then Flaat. Basically, prolost flat with some built-in sharpening. I prefer the skin tones of Portrait, but if you don't play with custom picture styles that's the closest you can get to log with Canon DSLRs: the light-response function is nice and flat (as seen in the graph in the previous page).
 
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