[Barbara Mills]

Thank you both for comments. I will look for RED Rocket. There is a chance we won’t be force to use Red this time. I definitely should look closer to it before next shooting.

cheers!

[Barbara Mills]

Great post! I agree in 100% (in log) and found some nice bit of highlights to remember ;)!

cheers,
sy.

[Barbara Mills]

You’re more likely to have problems through giving the operator something they don’t expect than from 10-bit mach banding or whatever…

My point was, at the beginning, that log conversion is not so important for printers as people usually think. I live far, far away from Hollywood but two facilities I work with for years always have given me an option to work in Lin. As I work inside shake in Lin, I don’t bother with conversion to log at the end. The only thing I need to know is their top-secret experienced proven LUT 😉

I think we have an agreement ;).

cheers!
sy.

[Barbara Mills]

Still disagree here, sorry. I still see misunderstanding here. Kodak designed cineon for compression reason not because of film curve response. If you can represent 16bit pallete of information in 10bit this a serious reason to spend money for development specially 15 years ago. In my opinion you mix up two issues here: 10bit log compression and color mapping curves. Yes, of course, colors in different media shouldn’t be linearly converted and they are not (just take gamma for an example). That’s why responsiveness of different media is taken into account. This has nothing to do with a logarithmic cineon representation which is static! It’s equal whatever film stock you use! Some facilities change it to accumulate in one color correction both LUT (your correction in respect to media) and standard LOG (cineon data compression). But still these are two issues. And printers work in linear (although still mapped accordingly to scanner that sourced these images) . They convert 10bits to 16bits and finish with a pure data without cineon remapping. That why you don’t have to convert to log for printing. They will have to convert it to lin (unroll cineon compression) although still leaving color remapping which is your concern.

[Barbara Mills]

I’ll love to know yours/theirs complete opinion on this subject. As to my knowledge there are two issues here: one is LUT used by facility (both scaners and printers) which allows to pack more color space in 16 bit images by exaggerating the importance of some areas (what is performed by LUT color correction). The second issue here is a log color space introduced by DPX which is simply pseudo data compression process and as we know implies data loss (even in FLOAT!). LUT used by facilities should be provided to post-production house as it makes possible to touch any file. Lin2log conversion will allow you save 12bit files – nothing more. Log has nothing to do with printers – why printers would have to be aware of logarithmic images? They expect that input colors are non-linear mapped to increase color spaced saved in files. This non-linear mapping (as defined in proper LUT) is not the same thing as logarithmic color space in cineon or DPX files.

cheers,
sy.

[Barbara Mills]

It’s probably too late but let me notice that LinLog conversion is not required nor recommended during export_to_film process. You actually should give them linear images. Film printing is performed in linear space. Both lin2log and log2lin conversions introduces data loss and should be avoided whenever possible.

cheers,
sy.

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