Panalog Pipelines

I mentioned that Panalog images from the Panavision Genesis camera can be used easily in either video or film grading workflows. Here's what I mean by that.

Here's an image in Panalog color space:

You can treat this image as a video source, and many do. I just finished three commercials this way. You can just load in the Panalog source, and color correct it to taste. No fuss, no LUTs. As an example, here's that same Panalog image corrected with Colorista:

You can also load the Panalog footage directly into a film grading pipeline. Here's how that same uncorrected Panalog shot would appear under a standard Kodak Vision preview LUT:

It's a bit dark and crunchy, but no matter—Colorista can take care of that. Here's the image color corrected underneath the Vision preview LUT:

Here are the Colorista settings used on the video version:

And here are the settings for the film version:

In either a film or video post environment, a colorist can take Panalog footage into his or her existing workflow and start working with it immediately, color correcting to taste. That's pretty cool.

The big difference between the two is that the film version has that nice soft highlight rolloff. The white t-shirt reaches almost 600% scene illuminance in this image, and that detail is preserved in Panalog. It gets crushed out in the video correction, but on film that detail is preserved, albeit compacted into the soft, sloping shoulder of the print stock.

Note that the sample image used here was not shot with a Genesis. It was shot with a DSLR and converted to Panalog (accurately) from raw. I don't have any good Genesis sample images that I'm free to use just now.