The Binding: DV Rebel Filmmaking goes 5k, Post Workflows for RED Raw, and How to Bang Your Head Against a Wall (Literally)

The Binding is a new feature film from writer/director Gus Krieger that was recently released on Blu-ray, and iTunes. It’s a scary and thought-provoking film that also happens to be a great example of DV Rebel feature filmmaking. I helped my buddy Gus out with the Visual Effects and color grading.

From Web Videos to 5k Feature

Gus is an accomplished writer, producer, director, playwright, and probably astronaut (unconfirmed), and has a wonderful group of collaborators with whom he’s made various web videos and short films. I highlighted one of these, a horror short called M is for Marmalade, in a previous post. Gus and company refined their tools and techniques with each video project, and eventually cinematographer Jeff Moriarty traded up his Canon 7D rig for a RED Epic, just in time for The Binding. The result is a film that looks and feels every bit a high-end production, but its roots are firmly in those micro-budget web shorts.

There’s a great lesson here, which is to keep making films with whatever camera you have. Let your filmmaking draw you to a camera upgrade, rather than thinking that any one super-special camera will suddenly uncork all those films you’ve been meaning to make. The skills that Krieger, Moriarty, and the others honed with their Handycams and DSLRs translated perfectly to the RED Epic kit.

Gus Got Tired of Asking Permission

I’ll keep this short and sweet. Gus has been pitching and shopping projects around for years. He’s written produced films and had many paid writing gigs. Despite all this, he, like all of us, was having trouble getting his favorite scripts bought or made. So, in his own words, “I said, ‘Eff it; I’ll just write a screenplay to produce myself.’”

He shopped The Binding around to a few production companies, but rather than ask them to make his movie for him, he informed them that he would be shooting the movie in a few months, and invited them to be involved if they liked. In other words, he was the moving train, rather than the schlub standing on the platform with all his baggage.

No one offered to finance The Binding for Gus. But he did meet up with a like-minded producer who suggested a way they could self-finance principal photography. And that’s how Gus went from ”we love it but it’s not for us” to location scouting, in about a month.

Production Value Do You Speak It

The central tenet of The DV Rebel’s Guide is that production value is not necessarily tied to budget. Yes, The Binding looks slicker than M in part due to the use of a more expensive camera. But what really makes this modestly-budgeted feature feel like a slick Hollywood movie are three things:

• Great production audio
• No attempts to put anything on the screen that the budget wouldn’t comfortably accommodate
• Great performances by accomplished actors

That list is in inverse order of importance, if you ask me. The acting in The Binding is terrific, and it’s a great example of Gus following the DV Rebel guidelines to the letter. Before he wrote a single word of his screenplay, he made — you guessed it...

The Rodriguez List

In The Guide I borrowed this concept from Robert Rodriguez, who famously made a list of every production-value enhancing person, car, location, wardrobe item, and prop he had access to before writing El Mariachi. Gus did the same, and at the top of his list was a small cohort of professional actors. How do you get to be friends with professional actors? Spend the ten years prior to your feature debut making shorts, putting on plays, and even acting yourself.

Also on Gus’s Rodriguez List was that he knew a guy who could do some visual effects.

Visual Effects

The Binding uses visual effects judiciously, but to great effect. I don’t want to show you too much because I hate spoilers, but Gus gave me permission to show this shot in which the character of Bram is seen uncontrollably banging his head against a wall. Gus wanted this moment to be viscerally violent and disturbing, so his crew placed a thick pad on the wall so that actor Josh Heisler could safely hit it with great force.

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Gus shot the effect perfectly, including a clean plate of the wall without the pad. Nevertheless, my task of removing the pad was complicated by the shadows on the wall, and Heisler’s hair. I used the Rotobrush Tool in After Effects, with the Refine Edges brush to extract a soft matte for the hair. This was a case where the 5K (5120 x 2160) RED Epic footage was both a blessing and a curse — the level of detail allowed a very high quality extraction, but the overhead of the computationally expensive Rotobrush tool made for slow work. I wound up pre-composing a crop of the plate to work on as few pixels as possible, and rendering a Comp Proxy of the Rotobrush work after each session.

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Matting Heisler’s head back onto the clean plate left one big problem: his shadow on the wall. Luckily, Gus consulted with me before the shoot, and I asked him to have the actor pantomime his action in slow-motion against the pad-free wall as a third effects plate. I match-retimed this shot to the hero plate with Heisler hitting the pad, and this gave me a near-perfect contact shadow for the patched-in area.

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Finishing touches included a bit of animated Liquefy warp on the wall to show it bowing under the impacts, a bit of blood splatter on the wall (ew), and a super subtle camera shake on each it.

Color Grading Means Color Pipelines

As soon as Gus was ready to hand of the first VFX plates, we had to figure out our complete color correction pipeline. Here’s why:

Moriarty shot to RED Raw using REDcolor3 color gammut and REDgamma3 gamma. This provided a pleasing, contrasty Rec709 viewing image on set, with plenty of exposure headroom in raw. Editor Matthew Herrier cut in Premiere Pro, working directly with the camera original R3D files, using the camera default color settings. So far so good — the film looks great, and the rough cut matches what was seen on set.

But if we had used this as a starting point for the VFX work, we would have severely limited our post and distribution options. We’d have baked-in this low dynamic range video look.

I had already consulted with Herrier about color workflows after the edit, and we agreed that the best path would be to set each clip to RedLog Film, and export the uncorrected cut in log, for a traditional film-style DI. This would take advantage of the rich Red Raw digital negative and afford them the ability to make a film print if needed, as well as an HD master in Rec709.

Camera Defauts

What was seen on set and in the R3D native cut was this REDcolor3, REDgamma3 image.

For Export

We switched every clip to REDlogFilm to maximize dynamic range, and prep for a film grading pipeline.

Color Grading under a LUT

The grading is in log, and the Kodak 2383 LUT shows us how a film print would look.

This meant that the VFX would also be done in REDlogFilm, which was ideal. I used the Prolost EDC log conversion presets to convert plates to linear-light and back for some compositing operations, and set up two output compositions: one with a color correction curve that matched the Rec709 cut, and another for log. I delivered Rec709 takes until Gus finaled the shot, at which point I handed off the log version, which cut in perfectly over the DI-prepped REDlogFilm edit.

VFX work must be done on RGB pixels. Raw gives you lots of options in post, but you need to decide what flavor of RGB you’re going to standardize on before you do any sensitive VFX work. Do this right and your VFX will cut into your DI perfectly. Do this wrong, and you’ll pay, in time, dollars, and a very different kind of banging your head against the wall.

Coloring 5k At Home

With the film fully prepped for DI, we explored various options for color grading. Prepped as we were with a complete 5k cut in log color, we could have gone anywhere, but in the spirit of DIY, we brought the project to Gregory Nussbaum at Pictures in a Row. Gregory and I have worked together on numerous projects over the years, and I see him as a model for the direction the color industry is going. The number of professional colorists working on locked cuts with assistants to do their conform work for them is, I’m betting, a tiny fraction of the number of people like Nussbaum — editors who also do color, and frequently both at once.

So we kept the project in Premiere, and set out to color correct a 5K feature film on a single trashcan Mac Pro using Magic Bullet Colorista and Looks.

Gregory’s setup is very much like what you might have at home, with the exception of a 50-inch professionally-calibrated Panasonic Plasma display for client viewing. Because I trusted the calibration of this monitor, I was able to build a LUT that allowed us to preview our work as it would appear filmed out to Kodak Vision film stock, using a combination of Red Giant and Adobe tools. The rationale behind creating this LUT is a little complicated, but I’ll explain it in the comments if anyone asks.

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Click to see the whole mess.

We loaded this LUT into Magic Bullet Looks, applied to an Adjustment Layer in Premiere. Gregory also had a separate Adjustment Layer with Magic Bullet Mojo’s Skin Overlay applied, so that we could always be checking skin tones as we worked.

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Then each shot got at least one Colorista III effect, sometimes more. We placed them on Adjustment Layers as well, as is Gregory’s preference, and would sometimes span one layer across many clips for a “look,” while adjusting individual shots with layers placed below that. For a handful of shots, we tracked in masked color corrections using Premiere’s built-in effects masks and tracking.

Masked Corrections

Premiere's excellent Effects Masks working in conjunction with the Colorista keyer to boost exposure in the doorway.

Colorista Keyer

This Lightness-only key keeps the correction inside the doorway. This also shows the REDlogFilm color, pre-LUT.

Even with multiple instances of Colorista and Looks running in 5k, we were able to get consistent real time performance by setting our playback resolution to half or quarter res in Premiere Pro. Quarter res sounds extreme, but one-quarter of 5120 x 2880 is exactly 720p, which looks great on a 1080p plasma.

Being Smart is Cheap

What a strange post this is. It starts with stuff about web shorts and camera upgrades, and ends with LUT making and nerdy color space talk.

What's the takeaway? How do I sum it all up?

Let's go back to that part about Gus and his filmmaking team pooling their resources and self-financing their film. Nothing inspires efficiency like spending your own money.

And that's something I don't think I've ever said in so few words: The DV Rebel ethos is all about efficiency. And that is a major advantage against any Hollywood production.

The best way to save time and money, both on set and in post, is to avoid doing things over again. The modern DV Rebel needs to be both a filmmaker and a film pipeline maker. In an age where the camera and post gear that a microbudget feature uses is exactly the same as a major Hollywood feature, it's this commitment to working smarter that sets the DV Rebel apart.

Raw is Not Magic

When you open a raw image from your digital SLR (or Cinema DNG files from something like the Blackmagic Cinema Camera or Digital Bolex) in something like Adobe's Lightroom, and reduce the exposure to reveal a huge amount of information in the highlights — or radically adjust the white balance to recover a well-balanced image from a murky orange mess, it's easy to feel that the raw files are somehow more than just pixels. It almost feels magic.

This sense of raw images being a true digital negative — deep, rich, forgiving of exposure errors, and massively tunable to your ultimate taste, leads some to feel that raw is always a better choice than the other common way of capturing a high-dynamic range cinema image: log.

“Log” is a broad term to describe images images stored with logarithmic (rather than linear or gamma-encoded) light values. You don’t see this format available often in still cameras (GoPro is a notable exception), but it’s commonplace in higher-end video cameras. The intent of log is similar to the intent of raw: to capture and preserve as much dynamic range as possible. Like raw, log images require post-processing to “look right.”

Are your familiar with shooting flat video? Log is the ultimate flat.

A Typical Scene

Shut up, it's totally typical. And this is roughly how your eye might see it.

Raw

The same scene as captured by a still camera in raw, and processed at the default settings by photo software. Note that the image has a pleasing contrast, but the sky is blown-out.

Linear

The linear pixel values stored in the raw file. Note that the sky isn't as blown-out as it looked, meaning we can recover it later in software.

Log

The same scene stored in log pixel values. The image appears "flat," but the log pixels have the same overexposure latitude in the sky as the raw ones do.

Cameras that shoot raw are great. But so are cameras that shoot log. A properly-recorded log image can be as powerful and flexible as a raw one, and can even have some advantages over raw.

And raw? It’s not magic — but the reasons it can feel that way are worth exploring.

The Double-Edged Sword of Linear Light

Raw images are typically stored in linear-light values. A reasonable definition of raw is “what the sensor captured,” and the sensor records light in light’s own measure, meaning that +1 stop = twice as much light = 2x the numerical value in a digital file.

Linear Exposure Values

This logical arrangement turns out to be inefficient as heck in any kind of quantized digital file. Half of your available tonal range is dedicated to the single brightest stop of your image, so raw files have to have very high bit-depths to hold detail in the low exposure areas. It’s not unusual for raw files to be 12- or 14-bit. But it’s not useful to directly compare those numbers against the bit depths of log or video encoded files, where the tonal range is distributed non-linearly.

The huge advantage of storing raw files in linear-light is that no conversion has been baked-in to make them “look nice” on a non-linear display. No subjective corrections, such as contrast curves or color adjustments have been applied. This (among many other factors) means that a raw file is not inherently ready to be viewed. It must be interpreted by software and converted to a viewable state. And this interpretation process is inherently subjective — even if you, the shooter, don't get involved.

“Straight Out of the Camera” Raw is a Myth

This is a little pet peeve of mine. You’ll sometimes see photo dorks post shots from a new camera with the intention of showing “what the camera can do,” so they make a point of noting that the image has “no processing” or is “straight out of the camera”. This is only a valid notion for JPEG or other baked-in-processing formats. In the case of raw files, what they really should be saying is that they’re showing you the default processing of whatever raw conversion software they’re using — which is going to be different in Lightroom than it will be in Apple Photos or Capture One. If you don’t touch the controls in your raw software, the image is not “unprocessed.” It’s just processed according to the subjective decisions of a team of software engineers instead of you.

Often those engineers have labored to make their default processing match our expectations, by visually matching the JPEG previews we saw on the camera’s LCD screen. In Lightroom, for example, this is made possible by carefully-crafted camera “profiles,” which are essentially sets of invisible sliders adjusted to pre-process the shot into an expected appearance, while leaving the visible controls at their defaults. In these cases, the hard work of the developers actually perpetuates the myth that there’s something “pure” or untouched about a raw file left at its default processing settings. The truth is, any raw processing is subjective, and plays a major role in the appearance of a photo or motion picture frame.

Log is as Good as Linear, Maybe Better

Where a linear-light image is stored such that the numerical values directly equate with light intensities, log images are arranged so that the same number of pixel values are used for every stop in the image.

An idealized 0.0–1.0 linear image uses values 0.5–1.0 for the brightest stop, 0.25–0.5 for the second-brightest, 0.125–0.5 for the third brightest, 0.0625–0.125 for the fourth brightest, and so on. At the fourth-brightest stop, we're already down to the bottom 6% of the available pixel values. The middle-range of your image, your exposure sweet-spot, is stored entirely in the bottom 3% of the available data range.

Pixel Values per Stop in Linear and Log

Log, on the other hand, uses its pixel values much more efficiently. If a log image holds ten stops, then 0.0–0.1 is used for the darkest stop, 0.1–0.2 is for stop 2, 0.2–0.3 is for stop 3, and so on, up to 0.9–1.0 for stop 10. Each stop gets exactly the same amount of data fidelity.

See what I mean about log being the flattest of the flat picture “styles" or “profiles”? When I created Prolost Flat, I was aiming for something as close to log as I could get.

In both log and linear images, color adjustments can easily be natural and organic, because the number-spaces so easily invite simple math to relate directly to light values.

• In a linear image, adjust exposure with multiplication. To brighten an image by one stop, multiply the values by 2. To darken an image by two stops, multiply the values by 0.25.
• In a log image, exposure is adjusted with addition/subtraction, which is sometimes called offset. To brighten an image by one stop, add one stop’s worth of values to the image. In our 10-stop example, that would be 0.1. So adding 0.1 the the pixel values bumps exposure up one stop. To reduce exposure by two stops, subtract 0.2.

When someone points out that raw images are eminently color-correctable, it’s worth remembering that the same is equally true of log. And since log images better utilize their data range, they don’t require as high a bit-depth to hold a high-fidelity image. A hypothetical 10-bit linear raw image has substantially less color fidelity where it counts than an all-other-factors-being-equal 10-bit log image.

Raw Pixels are Rapidly Reduced to Regular Pixels

One myth of raw processing is that it happens all at once. This is not true. Every raw processing engine has an order of operations. And very early in that order of operations is the debayering step, where the monochrome, color-filtered pixels are cleverly interpolated into unique RGB values per pixel.

After this operation is performed, the result is a set of very nice, high-bit-depth, linear-light RGB pixels. These pixels are no different than any other very nice RGB pixels. In fact, they’re somewhat challenged, since the debayering process isn’t perfect, so the RGB values may have aliasing and other undersampling artifacts.

All of the subsequent image processing in your raw software is done to these regular, non-magic, RGB pixels.

Some raw adjustments, like sharpening and other detail tweaks, may dig all the way back to the demosaicing stage in the pipeline. But that doesn't change the fact that the first step in the image processing pipeline is to make plain old RGB pixels out of the raw file.

What this means is that the vast majority of the “raw image processing” to which we ascribe so many magical powers, is just good, old fashioned RGB image processing — that could just as easily be done to, say, a TIFF file, or a 10-bit log ProRes frame, as it could to a raw image.

Myth: Raw Images Have No Native White Balance

One of the “magic” properties of a raw image is that it is said to have no inherent white balance. You get to “white balance after the fact.” This is one of the easiest demos of why raw is so great. It’s quite easy, for example, to shoot a daylight-balanced JPEG in tungsten lighting and demonstrate how nearly impossible it is to correct it to a properly white-balanced image. Capture the same shot raw, and the process of correcting the white balance is effortless.

But the reason this works is not that the raw image has no inherent, or native white balance. It does. The RGB color filters let in certain wavelengths of light, and these are chosen carefully by the manufacturer to result in a robust, but specific, colorimetry. There’s one and only one color of light that pings the red, green, and blue-filtered pixels to the same value, and that’s the native color temperature of a bayer-pattern sensor.

The reasons its hard to rescue a poorly-white-balanced 8-bit JPEG are numerous, and they compound on one another. An image shot at the wrong white balance will inevitably be very dark in one of the color channels — for example, our tungsten-lit, daylight-balanced JPEG will be so orange in appearance that the blue channel might be near-black. Fixing the image means brightening up the blue channel so much that we're going to not only experience nasty quantization from bringing up the deep shadows of the 8-bit image, but compression artifacts as well. Compression is perceptual, so when the compression engine sees a really dark blue channel, it assigns it very little of the available data values.

This is made much worse by the subjective tone and color adjustments that are baked into that JPEG. A pleasing contrast curve (or s-curve) makes a well-balanced JPEG look lovely. But part of how it does that is to create a "toe," or an area in the extreme shadows where values gradually taper off to pure black. Values in this range are quite similar, i.e. difficult to distinguish visually, and are therefore likely to be compressed heavily. When you brighten up that blue channel, you're trying to make useful, visible pixels out of this intentionally-mushed-down and mercilessly-compressed portion of the image.

Contrast curves and compression happen very late in the raw processing pipeline, but white balance happens quite early. The problem with trying to correct an improperly white balanced JPEG could be categorized as a colossal error in order of operations. So rescuing a poorly-white-balanced JPEG involves revealing the very worst of an image that was designed to be seen, but not touched.

When you adjust the white balance of a raw image, you're acting on the linear-light RGB pixels that resulted from the debayer phase. White balance is actually a very simple operation — it's nothing more than exposure adjustments in R, G and B. You’re doing this under a bunch of the other processing that goes into making a JPEG look nice, such as the s-curve and color adjustments.

So white balance is just exposure. Remember how easy exposure adjustments are in linear light? Remember also how easy they are in log?

A good log image is just as re-white-balanceable as a raw one.

I Don’t Believe You. It’s Frickin’ Magic

Not magic. But there is some really clever stuff going on in most raw processing software that can make it seem like raw images have magical properties.

Remember that white balance is just exposure adjustments per channel. For example, to warm up an image using white balance controls, you're increasing red exposure a lot, green a little, and decreasing blue.

When decreasing exposure, you can run into issues with highlights. A blown-out highlight, reduced in exposure, is not pretty.

An easy way to show off the power of raw is to use your raw processing software to reduce the exposure of a seemingly blown-out image. Often you'll see highlight detail appear as if by magic. Of course, it's not magic at all — it was there all along, but held in reserve. The reason for this is actually less about giving you room to reduce overall exposure in post, but rather for white balancing.

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Reducing exposure on this raw file in Lightroom reveals a blue sky where the default settings were clipped to white.

Holding some overexposure in reserve means that when you adjust white balance, which entails reducing exposure in at least one of the RGB channels, you can bring in new, valid highlight detail in those channels. You can sense this happening as you adjust white balance in Lightroom — it doesn't feel like color correcting — It feels like something “more.” But it’s just well-designed software with a proper order of operations (the last step of which is a pleasing s-curve), working from a robust digital negative, that allows a simple thing like white balancing to reveal previously-hidden image information.

But this comes at a cost. Remember that the top two stops of your image take up 3/4 of your available pixel values. If your raw image holds three stops of overexposure in reserve, that means that the visible portion of your image is restricted to 1/8 of your pixel values. In a 12-bit image, which can hold 4,096 shades of gray, this means that the visible portion of your image only gets 512 values. That’s only twice as many as in an 8-bit JPEG.

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Reducing the exposure on this Alexa Log C frame in Nuke, viewing under an sRGB preview LUT, reveals the previously blown-out detail in the sky. Screen capture courtesy of Dan Sturm.

Nope. Magic.

Raw processing software will often allow you to do extreme exposure reductions, past the point where the camera data is capable of producing usable highlight imagery on its own. And yet sometimes, seemingly magically, highlight detail appears.

Everybody clips, including cameras that shoot raw. And since cameras have native white balances, inevitably one channel is going to blow out before the other two. Many raw processing tools include clever algorithms for recovering highlights that are blown out in one or two channels. They rebuild highlight detail missing from one channel by borrowing from the other two. Sometimes this results in apparent miracles. Other times, the recovered highlights appear ashen and monochromatic. This is one aspect of the raw processing that Adobe has improved massively over time. Recovered highlights that appeared gray in Adobe Camera Raw “Processing Version 2010” (used in Lightroom prior to version 4) can have natural-looking color in PV2012 (Lightroom 4.0 and up).

So no, not magic. But maybe close enough.

Advantages of Raw over Log

• Demosaicing is done in software, and can be tuned per-image in post (although almost no one bothers).
• Raw software often has sophisticated highlight recovery techniques built-in.
• Raw software is usually metadata-aware, and can therefore tune its processing to the specifics of the camera.
• Raw files are no bigger than they need to be
• Since you never see the whole dynamic range flattened into a single RGB image, you’re not likley to help popularize a terrible “flat look” trend.

Advantages of Log over Raw

• Better color fidelity at lower bit-depths — you don’t need a crazy-high bit-depth to preserve detail in shadows
• No special software required to view/edit
• Provides a common reference RGB for all of post production (on-set LUT preview, editorial, VFX)
• Does not encourage magical thinking
• Unlike raw files, log files generally do not provide enough rope with which to hang oneself

So When Should I Shoot Raw?

Raw may not be “magic,” but it is often a very smart choice.

I shoot raw for all my still photos, because my photo-processing software is optimized for it. Even if Lightroom could correctly interpret and process log, there’d be no advantage in shooting log stills, because they’d by necessity be a processed subset of the camera’s capture. A nice thing about raw is that it is essentially what the sensor captured. And raw files are no bigger than they have to be, since they are usually monochromatic. An 14-bit uncompressed raw still from my a7SII is about 24 MB. The same image, at the same quality, would be about 48 MB as a 10-bit log DPX file.

While you can build a pipeline that enables color adjustments as powerful and organic as Lightroom’s for your log imagery, few people actually do this (the log grading presets in Magic Bullet Looks 3 are a great place to start if you’re interested). But Lightroom-style processing for raw is as simple as, well, using Lightroom — or any of the many other raw processing tools available.

Raw files are storage efficient and allow you to defer processing decisions until after the shoot. For stills, they’re a no brainer. And for folks comfortable with the technical considerations, digital cinema raw, such as RED’s R3D format, can enable some powefull workflows. Since RED’s raw files are compressed, their data rate is low enough that you can edit them un-transcoded in many NLEs, and get realtime playback even with 5K and up material.

Not magic — but maybe close enough.

However, that luxury comes at the cost of deferred processing. Someone has to make the pixels someday. After all that real-time 5K editing, you have to render — a process that can make you think of the term “progress bar” as a cruel joke.

Not all raw files are so bandwidth friendly though. Cameras like Blackmagic Design’s various offerings and the Digital Bolex, among many others, shoot to losslessly-compressed DNG, an open raw standard crated by Adobe. DNG sequences may or may not be supported by your NLE, and if they are, you’ll need some major throughput to work with them in real time.

Log Looks Great and Is Often Prudent

With log files, you can often be bringing back just as much exposure information as raw, but in a format that’s far less likely to cause headaches.

There are caveats, of course. As with raw, not all log is created equal. There’s a big difference between compressed 8-bit s-log3 from my a7S II and 10-bit logC from an Arri Alexa.

One tremendous advantage of capturing log is that you are bringing RGB pixels to an RGB pixel party. No transcoding is required to work with your footage anywhere and everywhere. You can apply LUTs on set and expect those LUTs to do exactly the same thing in post. You can provide camera originals to your VFX team and expect them to hand back matching files that will cut right into your DI without any fuss.

With log, you’re far less likely to make a crucial mistake with setting up your camera that results in a catastrophic exposure error. These days are mostly over, but it was only a few years ago that I shot a commercial for an agency that had a no-RED policy after a day’s worth of footage was ruined by underexposure. What they’d seen through the viewfinder and tap had looked fine, because the camera’s ISO was cranked up. In RED raw, ISO is just metadata, so their footage was actually horribly underexposed.

Log, in its many flavors, is a smart, flexible, and powerful way of storing high dynamic range digital cinema imagery. It’s closer to raw than you might think, and often much easier to work with, for results of the same or better quality.

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Acknowledgements

I started writing this post in July of 2013, but laziness got the best of me. Since then Squarespace added these cool live charts, so it got a lot easier to bore you with numbers visually. Thanks to Paul Schneider for the tweet that got me to dust this one off and post it, to world-famous colorist and gentleman Dave Hussey for corroborating it, to Dan Sturm for the Nuke screen capture, and to all the folks on Twitter who expressed interest in reading more nerdy stuff about pixel values.

NAB 2015 Impressions

This year I combined my love of Las Vegas and crowds, and attended the NAB Show. I tweeted up a storm during the show, and collected all that noise on Storify — but I also wanted to summarize my impressions here.

Blackmagic Design URSA Mini

The URSA Mini is not “mini,” it’s the right size. The new EVF seems very nice. pic.twitter.com/gxEs4732SN

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 13, 2015

When Blackmagic Design announced the URSA at last year’s NAB Show, I joked that they had finally created a “camera-shaped camera” — but that was before I saw one in person. The URSA is a 16+ pound behemoth covered in LCD displays everywhere but where you most need them, unless you’re doing the only thing I’ve ever seen anyone do with one, which is drop it on sticks and shoot at eye level.

This year, Blackmagic showed that three years of making cameras has taught them a few things. The URSA Mini they showed off at this year’s show is truly a mature, smart camera design. I totally want one.

There are more thorough overviews of the camera out there, but here are a few tidbits I picked up at the show:

• The URSA Mini is available with either a 4K sensor or a new 4.6K sensor. The 4K sensor is apparently the same one Blackmagic has used previously, which was criticized. The new sensor promises 15 stops of dynamic range and a global shutter. My opinion is that Blackmagic would have done well to make this the only option.
• The Mini lacks internal ND filers, which is about the only criticism I’ve seen making the rounds, albeit very loudly. When I asked a Blackmagic rep about this, he was very candid with me — he said they simply don’t have the optical expertise to do it well — yet.
• The Mini works with the new Blackmagic EVF that also fits the “maxi” URSA. This EVF is really lovely in person, and I wouldn’t consider buying any URSA without one.
• If you held the Mini at the show, you should know that the production models will be made of magnesium, and therefore lighter than the aluminum show models.
• If I was going to pre-order an URSA Mini today, I’d get the 4.6K model with EF mount, the EVF, the shoulder kit, and the battery plate. All told, that’s about $7K — which is pretty darn reasonable.
• Oh, and don’t forget CFast2 cards.

Canon C300 Mark II

The man @vincentlaforet rocking the Canon booth. pic.twitter.com/eK1Gwgm2J5

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 13, 2015

Canon may not be disrupting anything with this $16,000 4K sequel, but I’m sure it’s a solid camera. And hey, it has built-in NDs!

Resolve 12 and Adobe Premiere CC 2015

With the latest release of Premiere and the new Magic Bullet Suite 12, I am finally dropping my long-held stance that the best way to master a film project is to move it from your NLE into a finishing environment such as Adobe After Effects. This means I’m a fan of color grading in the NLE, as you can tell from my latest spate of tutorials.

Both Adobe and Blackmagic Design are supporting this idea by converging their flagship filmmaking products. Adobe added a bunch of color correction tools to their NLE, and Blackmagic is pushing very hard to make an NLE out of their color correction software.

I’m excited about both of these developments. Adobe has essentially done exactly what I recommended back in 2011 when they acquired IRIDAS SpeedGrade. Basic color control should be as intrinsic a part of a video clip as volume control is to an audio clip. Now that Adobe has done that, I’d love to see more support for real color grading workflows in Premiere — things like stillstores, tools for comparing/matching several shots in a sequence, and more advanced masking options, such as the ability to cut one mask with another, as we can in After Effects.

Am I concerned about Premiere shipping with color effects that do some of what Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, and Film do? Quite simply: no. Red Giant’s tools provide a power and ease-of-use that’s tough to beat, and I relish the opportunity to complement Adobe’s color tools, and even to compete with them in a friendly way. Remember my tips for How to Kick the Tires on a Color Corrector? Keep holding both Red Giant and Adobe to those standards, and we filmmakers will always come out on top.

As for Resolve, my biggest complaint has always been that few working editors I know have luxurious enough schedule or client relationships to lock a cut and move their projects to a dedicated color tool. But if you could start your cut and finish it in Resolve? Now that’s interesting.

Gimbals

That's @ClintTorres rocking the @chdntech Nebula 4000 gimbal and his @SluglineApp shirt. pic.twitter.com/VjG2sGNo1m

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 14, 2015

There were two disruptively-priced gimbal rigs that caught my eye. The DJI Ronin-M is available now for preorder for only $1,399, and then there’s the Nebula 4000lite, which is tiny, affordable at $769 with a battery, and fun to use — as long as you’re not the one that has to balance it. Its compact design blocks your view of the camera LCD though, so I was very happy to be able to try one out before buying. You might find yourself needing enough additional support gear to push the price into the Ronin territory.

LCD Monitors and Recorders

Blackmagic Video Asist. 10-bit 4:2:2 ProRes and DNxHD recording to SD cards for $495. Uses two Canon batteries. pic.twitter.com/HnYU0XNLfb

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 14, 2015

One of the more confusing things at the show was comparing the various monitoring and recording options. Blackmagic announced the Video Assist 5“ HD LCD that will record 1080p ProRes, for just $495. SmallHD showed their 502 with optional Sidefinder attachment, which costs over twice that and doesn’t record — but supports 3D LUTs, which Blackmagic told me the Video Assist will not. I went to the Atomos booth a few times to try our their monitor/recorder options, but got distracted by their naked ninja lady every time, so I’m of little use to you there, sorry.

The @SmallHD 502 with Sidefinder. Cool setup. Very nice UI on this 5" 1080p LCD. pic.twitter.com/eoarO6P8ea

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 14, 2015

Frame.io

Since I first posted about it, I’ve had occasion to use frame.io on a real project, and I already can’t live without it.

Redrock Micro HĀLO

So far the @redrockmicro Hālo system is the star of the show for me. It really works, and it will be affordable. pic.twitter.com/mbHXicdTjo

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 14, 2015

Holy crap.

Thank goodness Brian Valente of Redrock Micro never learned to pull focus. He seems to have a personal vendetta against out of focus video. And he was very humble about showing off his latest effort in this holy war, perhaps because some of his previous solutions were slow to materialize. The result of his quiet humility was the best experience of the show for me — the slow, dawning realization that I was seeing something truly transformative.

The HĀLO system is a LIDAR scanner combined with a powered remote lens control system and a wireless focus controller with an LCD touch screen. The LIDAR scanner — the same kind self-driving cars use — recognizes the contours of people, and tracks them, displaying them in a way that will have you reciting your favorite quotes from Aliens.

“They’re in the room man!” Hālo LIDAR focus tracking system from @redrockmicro is insanely cool. pic.twitter.com/OpHAzIYdwf

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 13, 2015

You can use the tracking dots to assist manual focus pulling. Or you can tap one of the people-dots, and HĀLO will automatically track it. Tap a different person’s dot to instantly rack focus to them — even if they’re out of frame, as the LIDAR scans a very wide field.

HĀLO can be aware of your aperture (possibly even driving it), so it can show your true DOF as a soft glow around the focus radius. And you can also manually focus by dragging that focus radius with your finger. Release, and focus snaps back to the person you were last tracking.

The system requires nothing in front of the camera, and is very compact. It’s as useful as an aide to a professional focus puller as it is to a single shooter who would rather not stress out about keeping sharps on a slow push-in on a moving subject.

The most amazing things about all this is? It actually works. And Redrock Micro intends to make it preposterously affordable.

Don't take my word for it. Hālo by @redrockmicro in action. pic.twitter.com/0DsD2vMRCu

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 13, 2015

Avengers Assemble

I was quoted in print at a broadcaster’s convention from a panel that was streamed live from a telephone. pic.twitter.com/ATW2DCpnMA

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 16, 2015

Red Giant hosted several press events, including a really fun panel with myself, Seth Worley of Red Giant Films, Ryan Connolly of Film Riot, Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski of Corridor Digital, and the singular Freddie Wong. We had a blast talking about how much Freddie hates slates. Seriously.

And The Rest

This was a really solid NAB Show. Not a lot of frivolous products or trends, and some nice maturations of kit we’ve seen through its awkward toddler stages. I was happy to catch up with friends at the RED booth and wrap my head about their powerful but confusing Weapon upgrade path, and to hold an ALEXA Mini, a camera I expect to see everywhere I go for many years to come.

Do check out my long string of postings from the show floor for many more things I didn’t mention here, including cameras from Kinefinity and Apertus, and a look at my SMPTE socks. And if you want real, solid impressions of the show from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, you won’t do better than the most recent episode of the RC podcast, featuring Jason Wingrove breifing Mike Seymour on many of the items mentioned here.

Vegas: Same rule as Taco Bell. Always leave before you've had enough. See y'all next time! #NAB2015 pic.twitter.com/wf9NR5ANh3

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 15, 2015

Space Monkeys, Raw Video, and Giving Us All You've Got

The team at Magic Lantern have managed to hack the Canon 5D Mark III to record 14-bit raw 1080p video at 24 frames per second. The results are stunning—the highest-quality video we’ve seen from a DSLR yet, comparing favorably to images from cameras costing much more.

This is a big deal. But maybe not as big a deal as some have made it out to be. Like Ham, the chimpanzee that was launched into space on a Mercury rocket, the Magic Lantern raw hack is less notable for its discrete accomplishment than for what it portends.

How it Works

I was skeptical about the announcement of raw video at 1080p. This wasn’t a sensor crop, this was a full-frame image, somehow downsampled to 1920x1080—yet still being touted as “raw.”

How is this Magic Lantern thing “raw” if it’s scaled down from sensor res to 1080p? Scaling requires debayering. Debayered is not raw.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) May 13, 2013

The answer came back from Magic Lantern themselves:

@5tu it's not debayered, it's 14-bit RGGB.

— Magic Lantern (@autoexec_bin) May 13, 2013

@5tu no idea, only Canon knows how the downsampling works. On 5D3 there's no moire, on 5D2 there is.

— Magic Lantern (@autoexec_bin) May 13, 2013

Put this way, it makes sense—and matches what Magic Lantern said in their original post:

Key ingredients:

• canon has an internal buffer that contains the RAW data

Of course. Canon sparsely samples the sensor (the popular theory is that they skip lines and bin rows) to create their own 1080p bayer image, which they rapidly debayer to create 1080p video frames. It looks like Magic Lantern have found a way to grab this raw buffer and save it directly to the CF card.

Whatever magic Canon worked to eliminate the moiré in the 5D Mark III’s video now benefits Magic Lantern users as well. And whatever downsides there are to this sparse sampling will also affect the raw hack.

What it Takes

Right now, the hack requires quite a bit of work to get up and running, and even more work to derive useable results.

But those usable results are compelling. There are tremendous opportunities afforded by the raw video hack over the compressed H.264 recordings the camera natively makes.

• Post-processing debayering can be much better than the hasty in-camera processing. The much-lamented softness of 5D Mark III video is improved noticeably by handling the debayering (including noise reduction) after the fact. Although I can’t help but wonder if we’d get even better results from a demosaicing algorithm tuned to the specifics of the 5D’s subsampling pattern.
• The 14-bit raw frames contain a great deal of dynamic range that 8-bit, heavily compressed video does not.
• No compression.

But there’s a price to pay for recording 14-bit uncompressed raw. It requires crazy-fast CF cards, and you’ll only get 15 minutes of video on that 128 GB card, according to Cinema 5D, who graciously posted their workflow and samples, “after struggling for a day” to get it all working.

What it Means

Even once the setup process is streamlined, and the raw-to-DNG conversion process is streamlined (or eliminated), uncompressed raw video is probably not the best option for most DSLR shooters. Better would be something like ProRes or DNxHD—but that would require high-quality debayering in the camera, which would seem to require more processing power than the 5D Mark III has to offer. More processing means more heat, which means a very different camera design than an SLR. It’s easy to see why digital cinema cameras start to get expensive.

The 5D Mark III raw hack is cool. It’s important. It’s something we’ll use, and like, and get good results from. But as exciting as it is today, it’s even more significant for what it means for the future of low-cost digital cinema cameras.

Mr. Ham risked his furry life to prove that a primate could flip switches in space. Three months later, a human being took the same trip. By proving that raw video is possible from the 5D Mark III, Magic Lantern have joined the forces pushing the industry in an important new direction.

Five years ago I wrote that large-sensor video had shown “that it’s no longer OK for manufacturers to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally.” Since the industry did such a good job of heeding that advice, my new mandate for the future is this:

It’s no longer OK for cameras not to give us everything they’ve got.

What I love about the new generation of cameras, such as those from Blackmagic, Red, and even GoPro, is that they all give you everything they’ve got. They’ll give you the highest image quality they can, in the smallest package possible. They’ll compress images as much or as little as you want. They’ll max out their resolution at the expense of frame rate, or vise versa—whichever you like. And they’ll pack their best dynamic range into any format they can record.

Compared to this, Canon and Sony’s digital cinema product lines seem cruelly restricted at every tier. The result was palpable at NAB. As I said on stage at the SuperMeet, the show seemed to belong to camera upstarts. To cameras from small booths. From the Phantom Flex4K with its Super35 4K at 1,000 fps, to the Digital Bolex, the exciting cameras at every price point were the ones not charging by the button, feature, or codec, but simply giving you all they could do.

What Magic Lantern have done is show camera makers that if they won’t give us all they’ve got, we’ll just take it anyway. The smart manufacturers will try to beat us there out of the box.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera

The NAB 2012 announcement of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera (which folks are thankfully calling simply “the BMC”) from Blackmagic Design, the company that makes delightful video doohickies and acquired industry giants Da Vinci and Teranex, revealed a few interesting things:

• We are living in the “Chinese curse” age of cameras.
• In other words, disruption is the new norm. I’m not sure if there’s a static “game” to “change” anymore. So maybe we could all agree to stop saying that?
• Prolost is not a “camera blog.”

The so-called Chinese Curse goes “May you live in interesting times,” which certainly describes the landscape of digital cinema offerings available today. Apparently, we self-sufficient film folk now constitute a market worth serving directly. Where once we bent ill-suited cameras to our cinematic purposes (first all-in-one camcorders with tiny sensors and abusive automation, then DSLRs with near-accidental video functionality), now we can’t go a month without another “revolutionary” filmmaking camera competing to offer us something amazing at a previously unimaginably low price.

The question is, will these purpose-built offerings, such as the Kickstarter success Digital Bolex, the Sony FS–700, the 4K-ish Canon 1D C, and the KineRAW-S35 cure the DV Rebel of the urge to repurpose consumer cameras for their filmmaking efforts?

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Blackmagic has seemingly (nearly) hit the “3k for 3k” target that many hoped Red would deliver, at a Micro–4/3-ish sensor size wandering between the 2/3” sensor many associated with the notion of a 3K raw camera and the increasingly ubiquitous and affordable Super 35mm size. If that seems like a decent deal, it’s worth noting that every BMC ships with full licenses of Resolve and UltraScope.

I was pretty busy when this camera was announced, but that’s not the only reason I refrained from comment at the time. I’ve gotten a bit weary of writing about unreleased cameras. Red has taught me to comb my writing for phrases like “the camera will have” and replace them with “the camera is said to feature,” and pretty soon I feel like I’m writing about nothing. But late last night, cinematographer John Brawley posted five test shots from a “production model” of the BMC to a brand-new Blackmagic forum. Brawley encouraged us to download the Cinema DNG sequences ourselves and have a play—so I did.

I love big-sensor digital cinema. I love shallow depth-of field. I’m fond of pointing out that sex appeal trumps tech specs every time. The interesting thing about the footage from this not-quite-cinema-sized sensor is that it is sexy. Not because of fetishistically shallow depth-of-field (although Brawley handily demonstrated that focus control is eminently possible with the BMC and some nice glass), but because it’s raw. I graded these shots in Lightroom 4. They came in looking a touch overexposed. I easily recovered the highlights and pushed these shots all over the place, but they never broke. After years of shooting with Canon HDSLRs to massively-compressed codecs, the rich neg offered by this little camera was beyond refreshing.

It’s easy to imagine that Blackmagic chose the smaller sensor to keep the price of the BMC down. It’s easy to get caught up thinking that maybe next, they’ll release a true Super 35 version of this rig. Or that the KineRAW at $6K might be worth the extra cost over the BMC.

But the challenge that befalls camera manufacturers is not to build the “perfect” digital cinema camera. It’s to capture the hearts and minds—and wallets—of filmmakers as much, or even more, as the wrong camera for the job keeps doing.

I think the Blackmagic Cinema Camera might just do that.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is available for pre-order now from B&H.