Marvels Film approves my Picture Style 3.4 also test footage

A bit more about the new cine style picture profile v3.4 for Canon HDSLR cameras.

Martin Beek, who works as DP for Marvels Film, has approved my new picture style that i’ve devised for them. They requested this new version (as you can read in a previous article) because they did not like using the Standard profile as a base for the v.3.3 style. I’ve changed this to using the Neutral style as a base for the new 3.4, but that meant that i had to change A LOT about the curve and redo all measurements and tests. This Marvels Cine Picture Style 3.4 (a.k.a. Advanced Flat) will be used to shoot a indie feature length movie. This movie is a Dutch/Italian co-production and a lot of footage will be shot in Italy at the end of this summer. Looks and moods have been taken into consideration with this style, combined with all the pros of the default Marvels 3.3 style regarding “flatness” and skin-tone reproduction.

I have shot and posted a short test movie for both Marvels Film and you all, to see how it behaves regarding skin tones. Remark: skin looks a bit near blown-out on the right of the face in the graded version, but this is due to a gamma lift or broadcast-safe mechanism caused by the Youtube upload. My original seems a tad darker and less amplified than the Youtube result.

Use this link to view in HD: http://youtu.be/XwJl5oYzdH4?hd=1

Martin Beek has translated and edited my German instructions and explanations to him as follows.

(About the test movie on Youtube) Right image is unaltered image from camera (5Dmk2) using the Marvels Cine 3.4 style. Left image is after some simple contrast adjustment, no color grading. The last “bonus” part is a run through Magic Bullet Mojo.

 
The original image was white-balanced manually on a reference white card, but my camera has a slight shift to orange, that i have to correct in-camera one of these days, for the rest you can see that this new picture style offers the best skin tone rendition of all flat styles we’ve came across including our own previous styles. No “plastic skin” or other artifacts.

 
The style differs from the standard Marvels Cine 3.3 in two ways. This style is using the neutral style as a basis instead of the standard style. This is a setting that can easily be changed in-camera to personal taste. Further and most important, Jorgen Escher has delicately changed the curvature of the S-curve in such a way that the 65-75% luminance range, where among others skin tones live, remains linear and not curved. Some of you will notice that this was already a feature of the current 3.3 style, but since this profile is using neutral as a base, we had to adjust the curve.

 
This is NOT a replacement for the standard Marvels Cine 3.3 style, that can be downloaded here:   http://mediatube.marvelsfilm.com/marvels_cine_v33.zip
This new v3.4 is an addition or alternative to v3.3 for those that don’t like the looks of the v3.3 in regard to orange/yellow skin tones.

 
IMPORTANT: Canon L glass AND the Canon DSLR cameras all tend to lean to orange/yellow. This is not a flaw of the Marvels Picture Styles – pick a raw image for inspection and see for yourself. We can only try to prevent further amplification of this hue in our styles by keeping the skin-tone luminance range linear and untouched.
The new Marvels Cine Picture Style v.3.4 (a.k.a. Advance Flat 3.4) can be downloaded here: http://mediatube.marvelsfilm.com/marvels_cine_v34beta.zip

New Flat picture profile for Canon video DSLR cameras

Update: quick link to PP: here (zip file).

I have developed a new type of flat picture profile for the Canon “d” series video DSLR cameras. This profile has been devised and tested using the Canon 5DmkII, a MacBeth colour card, two different calibrated light sources (3200k & 5600k soft floods), Adobe Color, Adobe Photoshop  and a few software tools i have developed myself. This picture profile uses 10 S-curve node points and mathematically wraps correctly around the existing build-in Standard Profile S-Curve.

Goals were striving for correct colorimetric reproduction (no weird chroma artifacts), no gaps or bumps in the resulting curve, linear behaviour in the skin-color-exposure range and a few more points that are described in more detail by Martin Beek on his weblog http://marvelsfilm.wordpress.com. There you can download the picture profile and read about it’s uses for video shooters (i’m a colorist and mathematician, not a film maker…).

Go have a look and use it for free in your camera –  happy shooting!

Jorg.

Developing a new Picture Profile Editor for #Canon vDSLR cameras

We all know the Canon Picture Style Editor, which is a clumsy tool that lets you draw b-spline-assisted curves on a tiny grid (10 points max), and gives you some limited control over color representation; too limited to call it a professional means of color correction. Many people flood the web with home-brew picture profiles that should give professional (better?) results when shooting video with your Canon DSLR camera. Some profiles are targeted towards shooting “flat” and try to create more latitude by lowering the contrast, others aim for cinema looks by also making the picture more flat and adding color correction to mimic specific film stocks.

All very nice and noble, but done while lacking a reliable tool to do so – and that apart from people lacking total talent, insight and knowledge (sorry guys…) – also lacking the proper means of measurement…

I have been contracted by Martin Beek of Marvels Film to develop a stand-alone Picture Profile creator that can output s-curves (and any other mathematical curve) based on 16 8-bit nodes with interpolation.
This application that i will develop, using Adobe Flex (compiling an Adobe Air application for both mac and pc), will not be all that sexy in the first version, but will calculate and draw mathematical correct curves instead of accepting mouse input. Functions for drawing typical filmstock s-cruves (and others) in respect to the existing camera’s curve and profile will be provided and can be selected from a list, as well as entered as a mathematical function.

The resulting picture profile can than be loaded either into the camera or into the Canon Picture Profile Editor (don’t touch the curve!) to allow for further “color correction”.

I did not have time yet to dig into the canon DSLR SDK to see if we can maybe blow the profile to the camera directly via USB , but i think that’s a real possibility.

The first test version is planned for the first week of february and that will be (and maybe remain) an in-house application – so NOT (yet?) for distribution. I am working on it as we speak and will continue to work on it next week. I have a meeting with Martin Beek in Venlo (which is halfway between his office in the Netherlands and my home in Germany) to finalize the functional specs.