nofilmschool » gamma

With Film Dead or Dying, Can You Still Get the 80s or 90s Wide Open Low Light Look?

Dave Kendricken — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 22:24:53 +0000

Film is going the way of other elegant, exotic, but evolutionarily condemned creatures such as the Tasmanian Tiger, the Dodo bird, and the Macarena. Somehow chart the decline of film use against the rise of digital and you’ll hear a lot about ‘how to make digital look like film’ in your research. It’s almost an existential crisis for shooters of our transitional generation, and the heart of digital’s identity crisis. If film is the look of cinema, what’s the key ingredient? Resolution? Latitude — or worse, light response curve? Motion transfer? Color reproduction? Or should we just let “the digital look” evolve into its own beast altogether? That’s a lot of heavy questions for a Sunday afternoon read, but ones unavoidably raised by a post from Art Adams of Pro Video Coalition about the wide open lensed and low light look of ’80′s and ’90′s films. (more…)

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How Gamma Issues Can Change the Look of Your DSLR Footage in Different Players

Joe Marine — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:34:57 +0000

Gamma issues are the bane of any filmmaker’s existence. It’s difficult to keep everything consistent when different editors and even different video players decode gamma and affect the brightness/contrast of the video you’re trying to play. We’ve talked a little bit about these issues before, and Apple has been one the biggest offenders in terms of inconsistent gamma, from Quicktime 7, to Quicktime 10, to Final Cut Pro 7. Tony Reale, over at NextWaveDV, takes a look at these issues within the Windows platform. (more…)

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Does 5DtoRGB Yield the Absolute Best Quality DSLR Footage?

Ryan Koo — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:43:38 +0000

Months ago here on NoFilmSchool I tried to call attention to a little-known DSLR plugin in development known as 5DtoRGB. 5DtoRGB is a software plugin from Rarevision similar to Canon E1, MPEG Streamclip, and Magic Bullet Grinder in that it is designed to transcode your DSLR footage into something that’s eminently more editable. 5DtoRGB claims to offer the highest quality output of all of these options, but despite my posting about the plugin repeatedly, I could do no actual tests with it since my lowly laptop was restricted to 32-bit processing (5DtoRGB requires a 64-bit processor). Now that I’ve successfully built a 64-bit hackintosh, however (the how-to article is coming soon!), I was looking forward to putting the plugin to work. But I was beat to the punch by NoFilmSchool regular Robin Schmidt, who has done some great tests of his own, and as a result the word is out; now even 24 DP Rodney Charters is tweeting about 5DtoRGB. So now that we have our hands on the plugin, what’s the verdict? (more…)

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Color correcting DSLR footage on a Mac is a clustercuss

Ryan Koo — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:46:22 +0000

In Zacuto’s most recent DSLR/film comparison, one of the commenters noted that upconverting to ProRes gave much better results (than editing native h.264 footage) in post. While ProRes is definitely a better codec (in terms of color space and compression), the clip showed as a reference seemed to exhibit a perpetually-annoying gamma shift bug that applies to a lot of DSLR shooters — more specifically, anyone editing h.264 video on a Mac. When I shot some stuff on my 5D for Focus Features, I noticed that the clips looked desaturated and flat in Quicktime 7, and supersaturated and contrasty in Quicktime X (Quicktime X ships with Snow Leopard, and Quicktime 7 is an optional install). Jerome Stern at MotionLife corroborates this experience, decrying the lack of consistency when it comes to viewing and editing h.264 footage on a Mac: (more…)

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