Matching Red footage to telecined 16mm film

[Kaku Ito]

Can anyone share the experiences and suggest treatment for R3D file to match with telecined 16mm film footage?

The director was concerned about obvious differences in clarity, so at this point, I suggested something below:

1. lower detailed setting like leading lady
2. OLPF set to low or none
3. higher ISO setting to add grain

Would these treatment do justice to match the film footage? The final would be presented as HD 422 file played on DLP.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts in advance.

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hi Kaku,

I shot tons of 16mm and had once a project where I had to match 16mm with R3Ds. The two biggest differences are a) resolution and b) texture (grain). The in your post suggested settings are much to subtle, IMHO. Between 16mm and 4K Red files are light years.

While 16mm rarely resolve 1080p and is much closer to 720p, 4K R3Ds are obviously beyond 1080p. The first thing would be to match resolution. Scaling down to 720p or a bit higher, say 800p and then uspscale to 1080p using a tool like Shake is a good beginning. Then we have to match texture. This is much more complicated since film grain is not noise. For satisfying results we need a tool that samples the grain of the source. The Foundry's Furnace tool set has a great grain sample tool. You take a sample of the 16mm footage and use this as a reference for the R3D file, very convenient.

Any footage that should match needs appropriate colour correction. I would do this prior to the grain management process.

Hans

[Kaku Ito]

Hans,

Thank you very much for sharing your information.

I will take your advise and create some samples for them. I don't have Furnace, but I'll test what I have, like "Looks" and other things (I should buy Graeme's filters maybe to show appreciation for his work here).

I just tried making 720p files using ROCKETcine-X and 7 minute worth of footage was converted to ProRes422Proxy took 7 minutes. Realtime, beautiful. So it takes no effort for me to make various samples for them.

Thank again and let you know

[mtseng]

Magic bullet have a great quality of grain plugin.
can help.

[Charles Angus]

I would shoot the RED footage clean. Don't bump the ISO - noise looks VERY different from gain.

For one thing, noise is most prevalent in the shadows, whereas grain occurs throughout the image. The most realistic way to match grain is to shoot grain plates on the stock you're matching to - roll an out-of-focus grey card filling the frame for a minute or so, and comp that grain over all the RED stuff.

Downscaling and then upscaling can introduce ringing artifacts if you use the wrong filters; I would suggest simply blurring the 4k and then re-sizing it to 1080 (or whatever you're finishing at) in order to lower the res.

[Kaku Ito]

Thanks all, I will test all of these various ways tomorrow and show it to the director.

[Noah Kadner]

Definitely shoot clean and normal- much simpler to match up in post than to do it in production and be stuck with a look that can't be undone.

Noah

[Kaku Ito]

shooting is already done, so I'd have to do it in post. I will first try the Red Giant Looks.

[Shawn Bannon]

Did you shoot super 16mm? and what iso film stock? I've shot two films with red footage and super 16mm. And what type of telecine are you doing? There is a lot you can do in this stage. Get the lowest noise telecine possible and it will make your life a whole lot easier. Or go for the Datatcine when ready.

[Rob Gardner]

We recently intercut R3D files with super-16mm footage shot about 9 years ago, re-transfered at 1080p. We removed the grain from the film footage (using noise-reducing software as I recall) and it matched quite well.