FilmConvert Nitrate is a powerful plugin for Davinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro. In this video we take a look back at Star Wars: Episode I & II compare a scanned film projection print with the standard ‘digital look’ and examine if and how FilmConvert Nitrate can offer us the “look of film” with all the benefits and cost savings of shooting digitally.
00:00 INTRO
01:03 2002, Star Wars Episode II & Digital Cinema
2:01 Analog projection (projection print)
2:53 The "Analog" look
3:20 FilmConvert Nitrate
3:44 Screen cap overview
13:47 Screen cap Corporate grade
19:01 Process
22:20 Problem with modern digital films
23:36 weaknesses
24:57 Conclusion
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Q&A with FilmConvert below.
Special thanks to Henessey Griffiths
How did the creation of FilmConvert come about? Why did you originally create FilmConvert? How was it intended to be used (originally)?
Back in the day, we had a sister company that did film post-production. Customers would roll in, and announce that they wanted to shoot on Film. Of course, when we pointed out that a 10 minute roll of 35mm film was around $1000 NZD per roll and that their budget didn't allow for it, a lot of them had trouble making it work. For many, there was a feeling that you weren't a real film maker unless you were shooting on Film and it was hard to break people away from that feeling.
Meanwhile, we had some Red One's available for rental, but the original Red One didn't have very nice color science (it's a lot better now of course). So trying to convince these people that they should shoot digital and spend their money on what was going in front of the camera was a very hard sell. We decided to try making Red One footage look like film so they could have the best of both worlds.
Our first instinct was to mimic the film process as much as possible and take in digital footage, and give back the look of a Cineon film scan. From there it could be treated like any other film process. We originally wrote this for the Red One specifically. This was also before RedLogFilm, and so we were typically trying to convert sRGB images to Cineon, which quickly went into the too hard basket. Eventually we applied a print film emulation and a viewing LUT on top of our targets, and this defined the original FilmConvert look.
How have customers changing needs and the ways that customers have used FilmConvert impacted the it's evolution? (E.g. from the original plugin to Nitrate?)
The first thing that happened after we released the original FilmConvert was the Canon 5D mkII revolution. Instead of having a few niche and expensive digital cameras available, we now had an affordable option that was full frame and very high quality. Everyone was using this camera and producing fantastic results.
This was where we started profiling individual cameras, as our film stock emulations needed a known starting point so that we could get consistent results. We also found that people were after a quick turn-around grading tool, more so than a film-lab simulation, and so we started to add more controls to create a much more complete tool kit.
And then we kept listening to our customers and keeping tabs on how people were using the software, especially where we found that people were using workarounds to deal with the limitations in FilmConvert. The biggest criticism of the original FilmConvert was probably that our viewing simulation was too crunchy, and it was difficult to rescue afterward. We also saw the trend towards shooting LOG whenever it was available.
Nitrate now keeps everything in Cineon LOG under the hood, so you never lose any information during the grading process. If you are shooting LOG, you maintain all of the latitude you had in your original image. The final looks can be the same still, if that's what you want, but you can dial back the viewing simulation to your personal taste and nothing gets clipped out. We also added a bunch of quality of life improvements along the way, improving the behaviour of the secondary controls and making the grain far more customizable.
Have the ways customers have utilised FilmConvert surprised you? In what way?
We are often surprised, but that's mainly from a workflow point of view.
We designed FilmConvert to be the first thing you put on your original camera footage. It works best this way because the software knows the input space of your camera and knows how to treat it. Whatever you do after FilmConvert is up for grabs, but it relies on having that known input space. Now there are so many different workflows with all sorts of nodes and LUTs that sit in front of FilmConvert. Some people just download heaps of camera packs and use them as "creative LUTs", which is 1000 miles from what we originally intended. Whatever works for people is good as far as we are concerned though. It's the final result that counts.
8 июл 2024
