Technicolor Cinestyle Initial Tests

[Ben Denham]

So the technicolor cinestyle is now available. You can dowload it here-

CineStyle Downloads, CineStyle, Digital Printer Lights - Technicolor

Aside from the tests that I've seen elsewhere what my own testing has shown me is that the picture style retains much more detail around highlight areas that either blownout or close to it. The following is a video and couple of cropped frames from it. They compare the cinestyle with the neutral profile. In both cases the user defined settings were 0, -4, 0, 0. In the second shot (see stills) parts of the post on the left hand side of the frame were blowing out, but you'll notice with the cinestyle there is much more detail around those blownout areas. Its obviously better if you click through to vimeo to watch this in HD.

Technicolor Cinestyle vs Neutral on Vimeo

[Liam Hall]

Your test actually shows vastly improved shadow detail more than improved highlight, which is what I'm finding with this new low-contrast picture style.

[Justin Benn]

Thanks for this. It's exciting to see continued support for the 5D in what is now an established 5D ecology. I'll be trying this on a project next week.

J.

[Tim Polster]

Thanks for posting. Seems to be a large improvement. The blacks are often quite crushed with this camera and it looks like the new style really helps in this area.

[Osmany Tellez]

I'm planning on trying this out.

I have questions too, will have to search more but thought of asking here too.

I found myself having a hard time finding focus now that I use the the neutral super flat settings. I don;t have focus aids..so only using the LCD...but man...sometimes is just to dificult for run and gun. Any ideas?

also..this LUT thing..will you all use it or just go straight to grade from scratch? Can this LUT be used in FCP?

Also..I'll like is this example above..how will you grade the shots and how diferent they'll be from the neutral.... to me that neutral looks very contrasty already..ummm.

thanks for the test.

[Greg Fiske]

Whats everyone's settings to get it back to something like canon's standard. I was testing out saturation of 10 and contrast of 17 in after effects.

[Nigel Barker]

The other picture styles now all look over-saturated with too much contrast compared to the Technicolor CineStyle. I quite like this look straight out of the camera as it has a sort of cool pastel tone however it is not meant to be used like that. The idea is to use the provided LUT to put back the colour & contrast while retaining detail in the shadows & highlights.

I am not sure that I am using LUT Buddy (the FCP plugin) correctly however as FCP crashes if you just import & apply the supplied LUT. If you convert it to 3D 32-bit then export & re-import then it doesn't crash but does wind up with an saturated contrasty image pretty much like all the other picture styles.

The render times when applying the LUT are pretty horrendous too. Around 4-5 minutes for a 20 second clip on my 2.5GHz 2008 MBP.

[Ben Denham]

Originally Posted by Osmany Tellez

I found myself having a hard time finding focus now that I use the the neutral super flat settings. I don;t have focus aids..so only using the LCD...but man...sometimes is just to dificult for run and gun. Any ideas?

Yes this seems to be the case. The lack of contrast with these picture styles will make focusing more difficult.

Originally Posted by Osmany Tellez

also..this LUT thing..will you all use it or just go straight to grade from scratch? Can this LUT be used in FCP?

From what I've read the LUT doesn't really have any advantages for grading over creating your own curves profile. I don't plan to use it.

Originally Posted by Osmany Tellez

Also..I'll like is this example above..how will you grade the shots and how diferent they'll be from the neutral.... to me that neutral looks very contrasty already..ummm.
thanks for the test.

Yes it is constrasty by comparison. This was however shot in full afternoon sunlight, in situations that don't have as much variation between the shadows and highlights, neutral with -4 contrast can appear quite flat. In terms of grading one of the strengths of this profile that I see is working with tools like Colorista II which has power masks so that you can selectively "relight" a scene. So in the footage posted above you may not want to keep the extra shadow information across the entire frame but you might want to hold on to the moss under the tree while you push some of the other shadow areas towards black.

[Jon Fairhurst]

I agree that the LUT isn't technically required. Any picture style will provide 8-bits of information on the card. The key point is to decode this properly. In other words, don't use Quicktime or any NLE that relies on QT for its h.264 decoding. All you need to do is decode the 8-bits properly into a 16-bit or 32-bit NLE at which time you perform grading. For even better results, insert a noise reduction plugin right before your color corrector as it can smooth out gradients and provide an output with more than 8-bit resolution. (Yes, the resolution is "fake", but can work really well on smooth surfaces like the sky or a balloon.)

My workflow is to transcode to Cineform for my initial edit. Once I know which clips I will use, I process the original MOVs in AE in a deep-bit mode with NeatVideo and Colorista II. I render the result to Cineform and replace my initial Cineform files. Open up the NLE and your edited footage is now graded. Continue editing, compositing, and re-grading to taste. Render a final Cineform master. Encode to your delivery formats and distribute.

I can't wait to try Cinestyle on a real project!

[Charles Papert]

Here's a question for everyone: I have often found that while these cameras have that "crushed blacks" look to them, the footage will easily open up in color correction to where it "should be" without any penalty (macroblocking or noise). I know people SAY that will happen, but my experience is otherwise. I've often wondered if it's one of those weird Quicktime quirks. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

[Jon Fairhurst]

I agree with the "where it should be" thing. If you like the look right out of the camera with a higher contrast picture style, you're golden. You don't need to apply additional gain adjustments, and it looks nice. Often, I desaturate the overall picture and tint the highs (orange) and lows (teal). As long as I didn't need to change the s-curve much, it's all good.

I think the main thing about shooting flat is that you have some elbow room if the exposure wasn't spot on. It should also work well when shooting high contrast scenes, like when backlit on an overcast day.

Regarding Quicktime, that's another issue. It's 8-bits in and 8-bits out. Because it applies its own gamma curve, you end up getting "holes" and "doubles" as you go up the scale, rather than 256 unique levels. You could shoot a smooth monochrome wash from dark to light that looks good out of the camera, but Quicktime will add some "teeth" that make it impossible to show such an image smoothly. And, because the errors get baked in at 8-bits, you can never get that information back again.

If QT worked in 16-bits - or even just 10-bits - one could recover the detail. And it doesn't just affect blacks or whites. It causes errors across the range.

Back when the 5D2 first shipped, QT was even worse. It would just clip the data below 16 and above 235. And then it would stretch the results with a funny gamma curve from 0-255. It didn't just crush the blacks, it took a jackhammer to them!

It's stuff like this that gives 8-bit video a bad name. Process it properly and it's surprisingly good. Process it badly, and it can look just terrible. Of course, capturing more bits is preferred, but 8-bits shot, exposed, and processed well can deliver the goods.

[Chris Barcellos]

Originally Posted by Charles Papert

Here's a question for everyone: I have often found that while these cameras have that "crushed blacks" look to them, the footage will easily open up in color correction to where it "should be" without any penalty (macroblocking or noise). I know people SAY that will happen, but my experience is otherwise. I've often wondered if it's one of those weird Quicktime quirks. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Charles:

This is one of the reasons I use Cinform. Originally, when 5D first came out, we were seeing loss of detail at both ends. I am a PC user, but Cineform appears to me to open up things from the initial Quicktime clipping range. This was Cineforms claim to fame early on in the DSLR revolution. Now I had heard Quicktime had done some work in that area, but it still appears to be the same for me. It would seem to me that the Canon codec in camera is what is the issue, and conversion that specifically corrects that is what is needed.


To make things more complex, when I edit the Cineform DSLR footage in Vegas Pro, I have to select the Vegas Preveiw monitor color correction filter to "studio RGB to computer RGB" in order to get a reasonable approximation for eyeballing purposes as to what the ultimate render will be.... Then you have to turn that off at render time.

[Chris Barcellos]

As to Technicolor Picture Style, I had previously been shooting a lot of stuff iwth Superflat. Later, I was convinced by posters here that super flat was creating to much noise. On recomendations, I went to neutral and turned down the sharpness, an color and contrast settings.

I have been looking at the Technicolor now, and I think it is going to be great for getting whatever dynamic range is in the camera. Couple that with false colors from Anthony Newmans version of Magic Lantern, or false colors in my Marshall monitor, and, from testing I have done, I think it I wlll be able to get some great footage in high contrast situations (bright daylight to shadow) that will react well to color correction.

[Chris Barcellos]

Originally Posted by Jon Fairhurst

My workflow is to transcode to Cineform for my initial edit. Once I know which clips I will use, I process the original MOVs in AE in a deep-bit mode with NeatVideo and Colorista II. I render the result to Cineform and replace my initial Cineform files. Open up the NLE and your edited footage is now graded. Continue editing, compositing, and re-grading to taste. Render a final Cineform master. Encode to your delivery formats and distribute.

I can't wait to try Cinestyle on a real project!

John:

Have you been successfull in getting the technicolor .lut to work in Cineform's FirstLight if you use. When I first downloaded the .lut, I just clicked on it, and it looks like Cineform automatically loaded it to the list of .luts available in FirstLight. However, in trying to apply it to a Cineform transcoded file, it was nothing but red.

For those of you that don't know Firstlight, this is a cool feature of Neo Cineform, in which you can instantaneously treat your footage to fixed .luts, or add a plethora of adjustments, without damaging original footage. That treatment can be done and will instantaneously transfer to the project you are working on in NLE.

[Jon Fairhurst]

Chris, I've got NeoScene. I don't believe that it has the LUT feature.