Technicolor CinemaStyle: Best Practices

wjm said:
I agree with you - the original files will ultimately end up having more actual/true data, but less WORKABLE/PUSHABLE data unless you have 4-5 filters stacked in the correct order. I render often during editing, since I mainly use a laptop, and I would really rather edit proxies, but I don't know a good workflow for this yet.

My goal is to 'smooth' the gradient transitions of the existing footage in the larger color space through the use of filters (NeatVideo, Reduce Banding, etc.), and once this is done, go to work on the cleaned up footage without having to render the time-consuming filters each time. In my brief testing, the results are good, and the footage doesn't seem to visually suffer at all - in fact, it seems to be much improved.

I am still performing my own tests, so take all this with a hefty grain of Sodium Chloride. Thanks for everyone's input!
Click to expand...

My own pipeline suffers from the fact that it's not real-time online. The quality gains I get are worth it. I'm on a 7D and an HD-100U, both highly compressed. AE has never been real-time, so after fifteen years with it, I'm guess I'm used to the workflow.
 
Yeah, I took the same thing away - "under the s-curve" means apply the LUT and THEN grade.

Think about it this way - when you apply the LUT in Color or Resolve, the LUT gets applied in front of any grades you make. When you use a custom LUT with a monitor, it changes the monitor's gamma. Why would you grade with the normal gamma, then apply another gamma after you get the image tweaked to your liking?
 
well, maybe I got it wrong, but I thought putting a filter under another one is to make the first have its effect before the second one; probably because I've worked much more with photoshop than with AE or premiere, where the language may be different (I moved to video just about a year ago)

anyway, "under" is the master's advice, now we can endlessly debate what it means :)

now, on something that I hopefully can help a bit more with: here's an adobe curve that's basically the same thing as the LUT:
http://www.similaar.com/foto/picturestyles/TechnicolorCurve4.ACV
 
His tweet was in response to this:

timobryan
@5tu is Technicolor's LUT designed to just give a ready-to-view clip? or a clean slate to begin correction/grading?

5tu
@timobryan Both. Best to grade under the s-curve though, not over it.

The correct workflow would be to apply the LUT to your clean clip in FCP/Premiere/AE (or apply the LUT to your ungraded project in Color), then grade. In FCP (and I assume Premiere) the effects render in order from top to bottom - grading under the s-curve means that you apply the LUT first.
 
Hum... From my understanding and as explained in this article on Nofilmschool (http://nofilmschool.com/2011/05/what-is-a-look-up-table-lut-anyway/), applying a LUT as a color grading filter isn't the usual way to use a LUT. This article is very interesting, it explains a lot about LUT and how colorists us these.

In fact, since we know that this LUT is just a S-curve function applied to the data, it would be easy to recreate exactly the same thing with the Curves filter in After Effects.

So did I, I added the Curves effect on the footage and created two points on the curve to shape it as a S, the result was instant, one couldn't tell the difference between the same footage with the LUT applied and the one with the Curves filter.

NormanBates :
I realised that when I click save, it saves it as an ACV file, did we do exactly the same thing ?!

Then I wonder : what is the purpose of this LUT provided by Technicolor ?
It gives good results instantly.

Basically what an S curve does is that :
Values between 0% and 30% are logarithmically lowered, adding contrast to the picture, making it darker.
Values between 30% and 70% are not affected.
Values between 70% and 100% are logarithmically "heightened", making the picture brighter.

My personnal opinion is that, while the LUT provides instant and perfect results, it can not be controlled as you wish, it may happen that it fails in some situations especially in low light or close-to-over-exposure shots. Therefore the next idea I think of is to use a custom curve inside your application, for example the one that NormanBates provides.
Alternatively, all color grading tools have a Curves section in which you can recreate that S shape and control it as you wish, depending on the shot.
 
SvenL said:
Basically what an S curve does is that :
Values between 0% and 30% are logarithmically lowered, adding contrast to the picture, making it darker.
Values between 30% and 70% are not affected.
Values between 70% and 100% are logarithmically "heightened", making the picture brighter.
.
Click to expand...

You'd think it'd want to do the opposite - if I were an S-Curve, I'd make my blacks black (or grey), I'd make the 30%-70% range all saturated and contrasty, and I'd make the whites sure as heck reduced.
 
In my opinion, when you're shooting with flattened DSLR footage you should deliberately underexpose so that you never run into clipped highlights. Cinestyle sort of solves the problems of clipped shadows by lifting the entire bottom end of the spectrum by like 15 IRE.
 
is there an ISO 160? Mine only goes as low as 200. what am i missing here

figured it out. nm
 
SvenL said:
Hum... From my understanding and as explained in this article on Nofilmschool (http://nofilmschool.com/2011/05/what-is-a-look-up-table-lut-anyway/), applying a LUT as a color grading filter isn't the usual way to use a LUT. This article is very interesting, it explains a lot about LUT and how colorists us these.

In fact, since we know that this LUT is just a S-curve function applied to the data, it would be easy to recreate exactly the same thing with the Curves filter in After Effects.

So did I, I added the Curves effect on the footage and created two points on the curve to shape it as a S, the result was instant, one couldn't tell the difference between the same footage with the LUT applied and the one with the Curves filter.

NormanBates :
I realised that when I click save, it saves it as an ACV file, did we do exactly the same thing ?!

Then I wonder : what is the purpose of this LUT provided by Technicolor ?
It gives good results instantly.

Basically what an S curve does is that :
Values between 0% and 30% are logarithmically lowered, adding contrast to the picture, making it darker.
Values between 30% and 70% are not affected.
Values between 70% and 100% are logarithmically "heightened", making the picture brighter.

My personnal opinion is that, while the LUT provides instant and perfect results, it can not be controlled as you wish, it may happen that it fails in some situations especially in low light or close-to-over-exposure shots. Therefore the next idea I think of is to use a custom curve inside your application, for example the one that NormanBates provides.
Alternatively, all color grading tools have a Curves section in which you can recreate that S shape and control it as you wish, depending on the shot.
Click to expand...

Interesting- can you share some side-by-side screen shots, and perhaps the details of what values you applied to your S-curve?
If that is indeed all this LUT is doing, it should be relatively easy to then apply to just about any NLE with basic CC tools out there. I like that.
 
My experience is exactly the same as SvenL. The LUT for CineStyle is nothing more than an s-shaped color curve. If your original is under exposed you will have the top and bottom parts of the s pulled up a bit to compensate. If your original footage is over exposed you will have them pulled a bit further down. If your original is a very contrasty scene you will flatten the curve some. Conversely if your image is flat on a dark overcast day you'll pull the top up a bit more to excentuate highlights. To me the CineStyle profile and it's corresponding LUT is nothing more than an average looking non linear s-shaped color curve.

It all makes perfect sense, the profile takes away contrast and some of the black range. The corresponding s-shaped color curve (LUT) adds it back and then some in the black range to give more in your output potentially than what you brought in. I'm finding it to be super easy to do color correction with and it's producing spectacular results.

Here's my latest test with it. The first three dates are with Marvel Cine 3.3 and the last two, May 3rd and May 10th are with Technicolor Cinestyle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QYakJEUd4M

Cheers,
PEte
 
is there an ISO 160? Mine only goes as low as 200. what am i missing here

figured it out. nm
Click to expand...





you probably have highlight tone priority enabled this will set the min. iso at 200.
go to c.fn.II:image and select disable
 
SvenL said:
NormanBates :
I realised that when I click save, it saves it as an ACV file, did we do exactly the same thing ?!
Click to expand...

yes, it's exactly the same; to use this ACV file, just apply a curves effect and hit load, search for the ACV file, and you get the same effect as applying the LUT (minus very small differences that I can't catch by eye alone); also, you'll see it's an extremely simple two-point S curve, nothing fancy here, just a more convenient way to apply the LUT

again, here's my adobe curve that's basically the same thing as the LUT:
http://www.similaar.com/foto/picturestyles/TechnicolorCurve4.ACV

M. Gilden said:
Interesting- can you share some side-by-side screen shots, and perhaps the details of what values you applied to your S-curve?
If that is indeed all this LUT is doing, it should be relatively easy to then apply to just about any NLE with basic CC tools out there. I like that.
Click to expand...

here's a comparison of the LUT vs. my curve (a previous version, the one I uploaded is even closer to the LUT):
http://www.similaar.com/foto/picturestyles/picturestyles.html
(scroll down, and see "Technicolor with contrast=-4 and then LUT" vs "Technicolor with contrast=-4 and then S curve")
 
Nice, Norman. Looks good. Going to play with this in AE and then try to replicate in Vegas. I love a good platform agnostic workflow!
 
NormanBates said:
yes, it's exactly the same; to use this ACV file, just apply a curves effect and hit load, search for the ACV file, and you get the same effect as applying the LUT (minus very small differences that I can't catch by eye alone); also, you'll see it's an extremely simple two-point S curve, nothing fancy here, just a more convenient way to apply the LUT
Click to expand...

Yes, actually I was making that curve in AE, I clicked "Save" and I saw it has a .ACV extension, just like the link I had just seen in your message.

I created another curve that is based on the LUT provided by Technicolor, you can download it here
If you open the .lut file or the raw .txt file that Technicolor provides (on the download page of CineStyle) with something like Notepad or Wordpad, you will see a list of values.
In the LUT file, there is a small header describing what type of LUT it is and then, three series of 255 values, all three series are exactly the same, they represents the RGB channels.
If you open the raw .txt file, you will just have a list of 255 numbers.
These numbers are the Output values of the Look Up Table and each line represents an Input value from line 0 to 255.
I made a small Python script to get the Output of the LUT for a given Input value and I manually recreated the curve in Photoshop. You can add only 14 new control points on the curve so I used 20 units steps : 0, 20, 40 ... 220, 240.
So I think this curve is very close to the one the LUT contains and indeed as a result I compared my curve vs the LUT and I can see a difference only at 1600% zoom.

Again, I would rather use this curve or the LUT as a reference or just as a way to get better previews and create a new preset from scratch depending on each sequence I work on.

c3hammer :
I watched your video and honnestly, what I paid attention to was the music and the content of the pictures, what you shot is nice to watch for me since I am not used to see this kind of landscape and animals. I have a question though, what is causing the heat effect on the video, I can see it in the first shots. Were you heating the lens with a lighter ?

I am still making some tests with the CineForm codec as an alternative to ProRes for Windows users. Does ProRes resample files from 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 ?
 
SvenL said:
c3hammer: I watched your video and honnestly, what I paid attention to was the music and the content of the pictures, what you shot is nice to watch for me since I am not used to see this kind of landscape and animals. I have a question though, what is causing the heat effect on the video, I can see it in the first shots. Were you heating the lens with a lighter ?
Click to expand...
It is simply heat waves in the air. Those first shots are at a distance of about 800m. I'm using a 600mm Nikkor ED f5.6 and the T3i 3x function for a 35mm equivalent focal length of 2880mm! When the air is still, the quality of the footage is unprecedented.

The Technicolor CineStyle is making it much easier to keep the image under control in post.

Cheers,
Pete
 
My initial test trying to reproduce the curve in Vegas gave very mixed results. I'm not sure I'm happy with it, but then again Vegas isn't the best at color correction. I'm going to try again in Premiere and compare to the curve you guys posted in the thread.
 
[FIXED] don't pay me attention!

I'm having an issue with my 7D and the cinestyle PStyle. My camera is on C3 with the cinestyle set up, but I don't know why it changes the shutter, ISO and aperture AUTOMATICALLY!!! All I can change is the exposure bar with the dial.
I navigated all the menu for some auto preset and cannot found what is doing this, change the lens too but still the same.
I can't even display the ISO menu to choose from.
If I can't fix this I will keep using the Marvelcine.

HELP!
 
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