Steve Yedlin: Don't worry about your camera's built-in look

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combatentropy

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Steve Yedlin, the cinematographer for Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, runs side-by-side tests between 35mm film and his own grade of Alexa footage. I agree with everything he says. And he says a lot.

He is not promoting the Alexa. His premise is that any camera with enough dynamic range and sensitivity for the shot could also be graded to match.

The Alexa, like all other digital cameras, can also be graded (or left ungraded?) to look washed out and plasticky, as I have seen in most digitally shot movies.


His accompanying paper, On Color Science.
 
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Steve deserves a lot of credit. He's been putting work over the past two or three years conducting super detailed scientific research on the gap between 35mm film and digital and has come to some really great conclusions that only a few people (some of 'em here on this board) would ever read or utilize. The audience for this type of work you could probably count on two hands, and yet here he is doing it, and doing it well!

Side note: his other studies echo the same gist of a conclusion, which is that any camera of adequate quality can be graded to evoke the spirit of film in a way that is almost imperceivably different. In other words, an Alexa or a RED can be graded so well that to even a trained eye it looks like what we imagine or remember 35mm to look like, even if side by side there are minute differences. Differences which, Yedlin notes, will always exist because they're different formats and different image capture processes entirely.

Good studies. Interesting conclusions. Super nerdy **** that I love.
 
I would love to hear his thoughts on the film-convert plugin and it's look as compared w/ printed film. After all- that's exactly what that company has tried to emulate and even gives you film stock options. Because I'm not a colourist, 80% of the time I use that software.
 
Although these were posted a while ago, it's really good to see Mr Yedlin's truly informative tests posted here. Thanks for putting them up.

For anyone discovering them for the first time, I'd really encourage giving a thorough read to the 'On Color Science' article and downloading the higher res footage and analyzing the scopes in your color correction software of choice.

Favorite take-away from the article:

"When it comes to the photographic look that has traditionally been attributed to merely selecting one of several existing formats, we can, by isolating variables and deliberately authoring our mathematical transformations, take command of these tools. We can become authors instead of shoppers."
 
More gold from Mr Yedlin. A highly refined explication on the ubiquity of confirmation bias related to overvaluing resolution in the industry. A valuable learning opportunity for anyone so inclined. Parts one and two:
http://yedlin.net/ResDemo/#
 
DBP said:
He posted an email exchange between him and Mario Carvalhal, discussing digital/film and inherent looks: http://www.yedlin.net/160105.html

It's great stuff.
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Haha. One of them reads philosophy, the other reads comic books.

EDIT: Actually after further reading it seems both are fools. The Mario guy can't argue with banally obvious and wrong assertions of the Steve guy and the Steve guy can't see how much of what he's saying is "value-judgement" of the society he lives in proclaiming the superiority of human as a computing machine.
 
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morgan_moore said:
Great Im sold.

Now..

Which digital cameras have enough DR?

How do I expose them

Where can I get his LUT

S
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A Reply To Those Asking For My Recipe. Wow, he used his own custom-made "command line software with no graphic interface." The man is a cinematographer and a programmer.

"It's true that many of the attributes (not all, but many) could be flattened into a LUT, but the LUT would only work in a very rigid and narrow set of circumstances."

"The specific film look of that recipe, in many ways, only works if you actually light with traditional film ratios."

Long story short, he says he isn't keeping it secret on purpose. He just doesn't have the knowledge and time yet to distribute it in a way that is as solid as he wants it.
 
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Dan_ETP said:
Here's all his stuff in one place. A very good read.
http://www.yedlin.net/BoringFilmTechStuff_Index.html
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Some very good reads indeed. Thank you for posting.

Have long been tempting to take a deeper dive into the math behind good color science. Mr Yedlin's craft and efficacy certainly inspire such an endeavor. Thinking that it was not a coincidence that Shane Carruth began as a software engineer and was able to coax such elegant imagery from a hacked GH2 due in no small part to the skillset his background affords. So much to learn... only one brain...
 
No problem, Kohl.

And I feel the same desire to understand the math involved in making an image. Personally, I have no idea where to start to even begin to understand such things. Let alone know how to write upscaling and grain emulation algorithms.

Does anyone know of any resources that explains this math?
 
Had the same question. Currently researching.

This short intro from Dominic Glynn is very rudimentary, but depending upon where a person is with this stuff, it can be useful for beginning to connect various aspects of color with number values:
https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/color/color-space/v/color6-final

An interesting project might be to write a program for processing/converting Magic Lantern Raw files (MLV). There are several such converters and much of the code is open source. Would be a steep learning curve for me, but it's doable.

Does anyone else have suggestions for what/how/where to learn, apply, and thus harness the underlying math of image creation?
 
Thanks for linking those videos. Understood much of that already, though never made the spatial connection between the RGB cube and the HSL wheel.

That MLV project does sound interesting. While I have no experience writing programs, should you undertake such a project I would love to render my help any way I can, learning curve be damned. In the meantime, I'll keep researching.

Edit:

Found this: http://www.fie.us/basic-color-science-for-cinema/
 
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Some interesting history in that article. Thanks for sharing.

I'm not much of a programmer either. Occasional messing around in Terminal for geeky todo lists and stuff and basically learning to 'drive' my computer in manual as opposed to automatic. For me, that's a fun Friday night.

That said, I've dived a bit into python. It a useful language to learn. Here's a free intro course with a skilled MIT professor:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electri...and-programming-in-python-fall-2016/index.htm

Wishing you well in developing true 'authorship' skills. For my part, I'm thinking I'll need all the help I can get. Regards.
 
fatman said:
I would love to hear his thoughts on the film-convert plugin and it's look as compared w/ printed film. After all- that's exactly what that company has tried to emulate and even gives you film stock options. Because I'm not a colourist, 80% of the time I use that software.
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Was never completely happy with Film Convert...Tiffen DFX filters are much better and more malleable. Also more expensive, but you get what you pay for.
 
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