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These are all fantastic questions for the director / online editor that have not been addressed. This is my first time working with Arri footage so all this info is extremely helpful. It is made a bit more complicated by the fact that AE on PC cannot export ProRes. Worse comes to worse I could export lossless visuals in 10bit QT and then transcode back to prores on my MBP. Hopefully though I can export video gamma and they can deal with it on their end.
I am adding blood splatters, muzzle flashes, bullet holes and set extensions on a good deal of the footage, mostly sourced from the Video Copilot Action Essentials HD kit. There is a lot of tracking, cloning, and roto as well. There is also a fair amount of particle work, but luckily no CG on my end (that is being handled in LA). Do I need to apply any kind of color space conversion on the stock footage, or would the LUT on the plates bring them more in line with the stock footage?
And lastly I have a few annoying questions about the LUT generator
Should I choose legal or extended for Range input / output? It's an indie film so I don't think it's going out for broadcast. This has to do with black level?
normalized or photometric scaling? My gut says photometric
Do I need to alter dimension or bits for the LUT output?
On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 1:28 PM, Brian Higgins <higgins@soldesignfx.com> wrote:
No no no...you most likely want to convert the LogC footage into video gamma color space. We used to call this "linear," ala Log->Lin, but linear these days generally means scene-referred linear, which is another ball of wax entirely. Go here, go to the post-production section, and make an AE LUT:
What are you doing to the footage? Adding some CG/VFX? Adding graphics? Color correcting? And what is your client expecting as a deliverable? If you need to deliver LogC files back, then you'll need to work in a color space with high enough bit depth to hold the ~14 stops of range in that source file. I suggest working in float either way. If they want LogC ProRes files, add a LUT at the end to squish your work back down. If you're going this route, test it and get it working before you do any other work on the project. If they're fine with getting video gamma images from you, you can deliver as DPX or DNXHD or whatever.
$.02, Brian
-- OK that helps. That's sort of what I was doing already- but I'd really like to avoid having to work on the effects directly in c-log, it's gonna be a huge headache with color space conversion and preview. I was thinking maybe a round trip through dnxHD 10-bit may be the answer. The final deliverables are going to be HD5 for broadcast as far as I can tell, and maybe a DCP. Looks like I need to have another conversation with the director and online editor to figure out this workflow and how they're doing the color correct. I wish they'd just shot dnxhd in the first place...
-TGOn Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Jim Curtis <jpcurtis@me.com> wrote:
I touched on this already, but what I've done is to put a first instance of levels on the clips or an adjustment layer to get the levels on a WFM in the ballpark of 1-100. Then, I add a second instance of other plugs (I like Frishchluft FL Curves best) for fine tuning.
What you render to depends on where you're going. I was doing broadcast spots, so I rendered to ProRes422 (in RGB color space) and made MPEG2 for distribution via DG and ExtremeReach from those.
To be honest, I don't know if that's a great method, but the footage looks great, and I love the expanded dynamic range and the minimizing of clipping in the whites that I often see with lesser capture formats.
Monitoring: I have a calibrated HP DreamColor display and a Sony Trinitron CRT hooked up to a Kona for accurate monitoring. I use an Apple Cinema Display for my computer monitor, and I can attest that the images are vastly different between the computer display and the broadcast monitors. What looks right on the broadcast monitors is super-saturated on the ACD (using the default Cinema HD Apple profile - not flat).
You can check yourself by looking at the scopes in Ae bundled Color Finesse, if you don't have any other scopes available. Or, you can check your work by using the scopes in Pr, if you have that. I run Synthetic Apps Test Gear full-time in Ae.
I'm sure you're aware that home HDTVs have picture settings that alter the contrast, saturation, etc. Whether your HDTV gives you an accurate look depends on many settings and the hardware feeding your HDMI signal. But, if that's all you have, then see if your output compares favorably to what you watch on TV. If it looks right, maybe it is right.
On Nov 25, 2012, at 11:26 AM, Teddy Gage wrote: ok looks like it is 4444, 276 mbps. I wasn't aware the arri encoded directly to prores so that solves one problem, namely what I thought was a bad transcode. Looks like these clips are direct from camera.
Now what's the best way for this footage to make the round trip, FX-wise, without destroying the integrity of the 10bit 4444? I'm thinking:
- convert to log c color space / 32bpc to work in. Match all FX footage / roto / stock elements to the log c preview?
- render back out to lossless QTs in 10bit YUV from AE
- do I render in video color space or should I render out in the log c profile?
I don't have an HD monitor, I have a high-end "graphics" monitor (the eizo CG222, extremely flat response, color accurate, 99%+ of adobe RGB) but to get an accurate final preview I may throw it onto my HDTV (not ideal, I know, but at least should give me an idea what I'm looking at, right?)
Any other tips / gotchas would be greatly appreciated.
-TG
On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Jim Curtis <jpcurtis@me.com> wrote:
You can tell if it's 422 or 4444 by looking at the clip info in the Ae Project pane, or by using Get Info in QT Player.
The Alexa footage I've worked with (just three projects, so I'm no expert), the camera was connected to a cinedeck via 2 BNC cables, and the native footage was ProRes4444+, or IOW, no transcoding was done or necessary.
If it was recorded to ArriRaw and transcoded with settings "baked," you have been robbed of the post-production benefits of recording in RAW.
On Nov 25, 2012, at 9:40 AM, Teddy Gage wrote: OK so j. Penzer said the arri is using log c color space. This is the answer I was looking for. Here's my concern. I am ingesting prores transcodes, not the original camera files. The histogram for this footage in 32bpc is compressed on both sides and very clipped in the middle
a) I am concerned the editor didn't do the transcodes properly. I'm not even sure whether they were converted to 8 bit 4:2:2 or 10bit 4:4:4. I am, unfortunately, one of the more tech savvy people on production. Is there any way to figure this out?
B) how should I handle final outputs? Should I use color space conversion back to log c on export so it's consistent in fcp? Does fcp do this conversion automatically? Thanks!
--
Animator & Editor
www.teddygage.com
Brooklyn
--
Animator & Editor
www.teddygage.com
Brooklyn
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