Ask Mike Most Anything

[M Most]

Which Plasma models would you recommend today? Would you always use with Plasmas a 4:4:4 RGB signal? Any comments on signal converters?

I believe the current Panasonic model is the 20 series, but honestly, anything from the 11 series and newer are pretty good and are used by most of the major facilities. 444 connections are not used very much and for nearly all video work 422 is not only fine, but it's very unlikely that you would be able to see any real difference. The differences between 422 and 444 are primarily manifested when you try to pull the image apart for things like matte extractions, where the lower sampling rate for the color information makes itself known. Visually, there is no real significant difference even on the best of monitors.

If by signal converters you mean things like the HDLink, they all seem to work pretty well. I've usually found Aja's products to be a bit more reliable and robust than Blackmagic's, but that is changing a bit and Blackmagic's redesigned products seem quite stable and reliable.

[Jay A. Kelley]

Mike, I have been a shooter for twenty years.. I work in the midwest so there is more corporate here than anything else. I come from the generation and culture of "learn it all".. And by this I mean, in my area: Production, Directing, Camera, Editing. Now I realize that when many say this people tend to think "Jack of all trades, master of none". To them I would not agrue this point.. There are people better than I, however I do these jobs more out of a love of the medium and a passion to learn, than to be a control freak.. I also find that few people will put in the work and suffering I would on my own stuff, unless I were to pay them correctly for the time, and sadly out here, budgets like this are few and far between. But I degress (I just started using that sentence... Makes me feel smarter!)

I have begun to pay a lot more attention to color work, and have also taken the plunge into working in After Effects. For me, the moment I began to realize what I could do was when I discovered I could hit a button on a clip in Premiere and that would take the clip to AE where I could work with it, and then any changes would be reflected in Premiere. For long form projects this would be a nightmare, but for short form (Like 30 second spots) it allows me to really kick things up a notch (No.. I don't cook)..

I would kill to be able to work on Davinci resolve, and I am trying to get that setup, but it will be a while before that's a reality for me. I am not a MAC fan and have no intention of moving my editing systems to MAC, but I would be interested in editing on PC and then doing my color work on a MAC.. This will take time. I have enjoyed reading about the Monitoring issues you've been speaking of, and this brings up a very interesting question: When you say accurate monitoring, do you mean accurate in the sense of the monitor in question reflecting your FINAL VENUE? In other words.. If TV is my final output, I would imagine a nice Panasonic Plasma is my choice.. But if internet is the goal, when I would guess my LCD computer monitor is the best choice. I am always amazed at how DVDs look so good, and so much like what I see on a movie screen, but this is not accidental is it? can you tell me, how much work goes into converting said movie for DVDs and/or Blu Rays for that matter, vs. the origional file or film print.

What a long way I drove to get to this question.. I suppose I felt the need to give you some background.

Jay

[Richard Bradbury]

Mike,
In the early days of the Red One many DPs used blue filters (generally 80A, B or C) when shooting under tungsten light to balance the light to the camera (much as we use filters to correct filmstock / lighting combinations). This practice has largely disappeared in my experience because of the greatly improved noise floor of the MX sensor. This thread got me thinking about a wider question that I would be very interested in hearing your response to:

What must be done in camera to achieve a certain look, and what can (and perhaps should) be left to the DI environment?

I'm thinking to some extent about lighting, e.g. you can't change the direction of a light in the grade, but can you change it's quality? However I'm mainly thinking about lens choices and filtration - can you make an image captured with a Zeiss lens look like a Cooke and vice versa? Can you create the same diffusion quality as a Classic Soft? Can a Dior on the back element be accurately reproduced? Can lens flares?

Regards

[David Mullen ASC]

My two cents as a cinematographer, not a colorist:

Given unlimited time and money in post, there are probably all sorts of things you can do to an image and its lighting, but who has unlimited time and money in post? Not to mention, often the simpler method looks better, i.e. get it right to begin with rather than fix it in post. If you want something to look softly side-lit with no unusual artifacts, then just softly side-light it!

It's very hard to change the texture (softness and direction) of a light casting shadows on a subject, or create a textured lighting effect from whole cloth in post. Not impossible, but odds are high that even after much effort (again, time and money) the final results might just be barely acceptable at best. It's also hard to radically change the color of one source of light relative to another if both are hitting the subject, like a warm key and a blue fill -- it's pretty hard to take neutral footage and make it look like the key had orange gel on it and the fill had blue gel on it. At best, you can shift the shadow end of the image towards a different color tint, or the highlights the other way, but I'm talking about subtle tints, not full orange meets full blue sort of effects.

As a general rule, it's always easier to take away information in post than add it. So softening an image is fairly easy in post, though the unique optical characteristics of net diffusion and flares take some more advanced software. The only problem I find with softening the occasional shot in post when you've shot the movie on film stock is that a lot of basic diffusion tricks tend to blur the grain, so the post-diffused shots may look too clean compared to the clean shots... but there are tricks in post to bring back some grain.

Washing out the blacks a little is very easy compared to recovering clipped highlight information (impossible) or adding more shadow detail without increasing noise, so to some extent, minor differences between a zoom and a prime in contrast and color tint can be corrected to match, same goes for a Zeiss versus a Cooke. But if one lens inherently has more sharpness than another lens, it's very hard to make the soft lens look like the sharp lens (I mean, there's edge sharpening of course, but again, it comes back to the basic problem of not being able to add information that was never recorded.)

Diffusion filters that create unique optical artifacts usually need some sort of software designed to mimic those effects. Artificial lens flares also require some sort of software effect other than a simple round ghost or something easy to fake with some windows.

Over the years, I've found that when shooting narrative, with its large amounts of footage generated over weeks and months, the volume of material makes it hard to add post effects like digital diffusion to the image except at the end when doing the final color-correction to the edited footage. So likely by that point, the director, producer, and editor have been staring at dailies where the effect was missing, making it harder to convince them to now add it at the very end. But even then, adding a lot of effects to the image during the D.I., like diffusion controlled on a shot-by-shot basis, can take time... and time is tightly budgeted for most people on a D.I., which again, makes it prudent to have gotten the live-action photography close to the final look in a practical and cost-effective manner. Which is a judgement call, sometimes on the set you make a decision that it will be better to save something for post (though I'd guess that 80% of the time when a producer says "don't worry, we'll fix it in post" he finds that he ends up spending more money than if he had fixed it on the set to begin with...)

[M Most]

When you say accurate monitoring, do you mean accurate in the sense of the monitor in question reflecting your FINAL VENUE? In other words.. If TV is my final output, I would imagine a nice Panasonic Plasma is my choice.. But if internet is the goal, when I would guess my LCD computer monitor is the best choice. I am always amazed at how DVDs look so good, and so much like what I see on a movie screen, but this is not accidental is it? can you tell me, how much work goes into converting said movie for DVDs and/or Blu Rays for that matter, vs. the origional file or film print.

In a DI process, there is usually one primary target and multiple deliverable targets. The grading is done to the primary target. If that target is film, that is the format that is emulated during the DI sessions. If it is digital cinema, that is the projected target during the DI. The idea is that the creative decisions are made in one environment that is generally accepted as the most capable, with the widest range, and probably the largest initial audience (note I said "initial..."). To this point that has generally been the film print, and so that has been the primary delivery target and still is to a great extent, and certainly when film is the origination medium - as it still is in most studio features that are not specifically 3D. Lookup tables are used that emulate the film processes during the DI sessions. When the DI is complete, a finished Cineon log format image is produced that is used as the source for all deliverables. It is sent for film recording and used directly on the film recorder to produce a new negative for the film deliverables. It is transformed using various LUTs and often color trim passes to create the digital cinema master and an HD video master. All of these LUTs retain the same film target as the DI. The HD video master is the source for all video deliverables, regardless of format (SD, HD, PAL, whatever). That is why just about any version of a modern film that is the product of a DI process looks essentially the same today, they are all basically created from the same digital source master (the Cineon image from the DI).

As for hard goods like DVD and BluRay, they look as good as they do for a number of reasons, but one of the primary ones is that studio level discs go through a scene by scene compression process, with the compression optimized based on the material and the physical space allotted on the disc. Scenes with more detail are given lower levels of compression, and static scenes with less detail are assigned more compression. It's all a balancing act, but when it's done well - as it usually is these days - the result is significantly better than, say, over the air HD broadcast, which is essentially undergoing "live" compression that is not tuned to the material. That's why you often see artifacts, especially on things like fast pans, bright lights passing by, or fast moving material like sports events, that you likely never see on a BluRay disc. Real time needs demand real time solutions and compromises, while non-real time processes allow for deeper analysis and better solutions, even given similar technology.

[M Most]

What must be done in camera to achieve a certain look, and what can (and perhaps should) be left to the DI environment?

As is almost always the case - no surprise to me - David's answer and mine are virtually identical.

Anything you can get in camera you should get in camera. And by that I don't think either David or I are talking about tweaking the camera itself, other than by exposure choice, lens choice, and filtration. What I'm talking about is lighting and production design. This may sound a bit off the wall, but I never understood - and still don't - the need for "look files" in a digital cinema camera. If you're not shooting what you actually want to shoot, you're better off changing the shooting conditions than you are shooting "anything" and expecting to turn it into a masterpiece in post. And if you're using the set monitors as any kind of lighting guide, it seems to me that it's a bit confusing and potentially self defeating to be looking through a LUT while you do that. The best photography almost always yields the best results, and that doesn't change regardless of what camera you're shooting or who the colorist is. In fact, Stefan Sonnenfeld - who arguably "invented" the notion of modern "look creation" techniques - would be the first to tell you that the best way to achieve, for instance, the now familiar "teal and orange" color palette is to have locations that are either designed or lit to have those colors. And while that look is often done in post, it is far less controllable and ultimately more artificial. Not only that, it takes a lot of time to do well, as it usually requires separation of flesh tones and other items that require customizing the keyed areas on a shot by shot basis to avoid artifacts.

Now, there are always going to be scenes that call for color and other effects that cannot really be photographed. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking more about things like contrast, brightness, darkness, color palette, color saturation, and framing that can and should all be achieved in camera as much as possible if you want the cleanest and best results. That's not to say that nothing should be done in post, of course that's not the case. But for me, the shows that I've worked on that I felt represented the best results were the ones in which the original photography captured the essence of what was desired, and my job was to maintain and enhance that, not necessarily to make it something that it wasn't. And there's a lot that can be done by a colorist, to both direct the viewer's attention through judicious use of windowing techniques, to enhancing mood in scenes where the production conditions didn't permit that to the degree that was desired, to adding "negative fill" where the cinematographer wants more dramatic contrast, to beauty fixes, and the list goes on. But the "look" of a production, if the best results are to be obtained, is always better set in front of and in the camera. And that would include even some of the extreme color treatments that seem to be relegated to post on a regular basis. If you can shoot what you want, shoot it. That's the bottom line.

[Elsie N]

Mike, I once worked on a movie set as an extra. We were instructed to not wear anything white (which I understand for blown highlights worry) or red. 1. Can you think of a (post) reason for not wearing red, and 2. Is there a color or combination thereof that are particularly difficult to work with?

[M Most]

Mike, I once worked on a movie set as an extra. We were instructed to not wear anything white (which I understand for blown highlights worry) or red. 1. Can you think of a (post) reason for not wearing red, and 2. Is there a color or combination thereof that are particularly difficult to work with?

The primary reason I can think of for not wearing red would be because the production designer didn't want red in the scene other than where he designed it. A technical reason might be because they were shooting with a digital camera that is particularly red sensitive and tends to oversaturate reds more than other colors (Sony cameras have had a reputation for that). It is also true that there is more red than anything else in flesh tones, so they might have wanted the faces to stand out a bit more. And finally, one other possibility is that they were planning on a "teal/orange" kind of treatment in the final image, and red wardrobe would be counter to that.

[David Mullen ASC]

Usually the most common reason is that red is too dominant in the frame and thus distracting -- that isn't a digital vs. film issue. In the old analog video days, there was also an issue with reds tearing and bleeding with some bad NTSC dubs, so red was generally avoided. Red is always a problematic color, both creatively and technically. For example, things shot under red lighting tend to look slightly out of focus, particularly on film. It is oversaturates quite easily, particularly in post when you are trying to color-correct fleshtones, which have a lot of red in them.

[Scott Crawley]

Over the years, I've found that when shooting narrative, with its large amounts of footage generated over weeks and months, the volume of material makes it hard to add post effects like digital diffusion to the image except at the end when doing the final color-correction to the edited footage. So likely by that point, the director, producer, and editor have been staring at dailies where the effect was missing, making it harder to convince them to now add it at the very end. But even then, adding a lot of effects to the image during the D.I., like diffusion controlled on a shot-by-shot basis, can take time... and time is tightly budgeted for most people on a D.I., which again, makes it prudent to have gotten the live-action photography close to the final look in a practical and cost-effective manner. Which is a judgement call, sometimes on the set you make a decision that it will be better to save something for post (though I'd guess that 80% of the time when a producer says "don't worry, we'll fix it in post" he finds that he ends up spending more money than if he had fixed it on the set to begin with...)

There's a very plausible reason, well articulated, that would be very easy to overlook. Thanks for the insight David.