Panalog
Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 6:20PM 
The Panavision Genesis camera shoots uncompressed 10-bit HD encoded in a logarithmic color space known as Panalog. Visual effects artists working with these images may want to convert the panalog images to linear floating point and back as a part of their workflow.
At The Orphanage, we’ve always used hard-coded panalog LUTs (based on those supplied by Panavision) for these conversions. But it occurred to me that the format is similar enough to Cineon log that one might be able to find settings in a standard log/lin tool that match the Panavision transform.
Sure enough, a little playing resulted in about 99% success. I got my Cineon log/lin conversions close enough to be within a 10-bit code value of a match to Panavision’s own LUTs.
The After Effects settings are:
10 Bit Black Point: 0
Internal Black Point: 0.0
10 Bit White Point: 681
Internal White Point: 1.0
Gamma 1.480
Highlight Rolloff: 0
The Shake settings are the same, but Shake has a more ‘nuther gamma setting called rNGamma which you should leave at the default of 0.60, and multiplies the rDGamma value internally by 1/1.7, so you should use a value of 1.70/1.480 or 1.14865.
Download the After Effects (CS3+) Animation Presets
Nuke version coming eventually maybe possibly!
Reader Comments (7)
Whoa.. about 90% of that post went right over my head. I guess i have some research to do.
Nice. This (actually its inverse) will also be quite useful for going the other direction if you want to match linear footage to Panalog footage (say when outputting Phantom files).
Very interesting post.
In Shake for some reason the numbers you provide do not seem to match other PanaLog to Linear conversions like the ones provided by PanaLog here:
http://www.panavision.com.au/PDFs/Info-PV/Panalog_to_Linear.pdf
The following settings seem to match better in Shake:
Black 64
White 680
NGamma 0.6
DGamma 1.14865
SoftClip 0
Michele, you are correct—those values are a closer match to the actual Panavision LUTs. But for VFX purposes, I don't find it useful to map any of the 10-bit values to negative floating point numbers, so I set black to 0 and essentially lifted the whole curve from there.
Hello Stu,
thanks for this. I really would like something similar for the GV/Thomson VIPER. But I guess that is not as easy. I'm still looking forward to your Fusion approach to linearizing VIPER-Footage. All the Best. __ Mirko
Hey Stu,
Think you may find this interesting as a comparison... the macro's we used on Superman Returns:
http://www.doubleultra.com/?page_id=33
This post couldn't have come at a better time. As I am opening the Pandora's box that is my first film-out project (shot on the Genesis), I am struggling to find workflow information for After Effects CS3 (currently reading through the Rebel Guide and Studio Techniques). So let me see if I have this right; I interpret the footage in the Cineon settings with the Panalog settings you describe, then use a working space set to Linear sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (D65), and select the simulate output to be Kodak 5218 to Kodak 2383. Does this sound reasonable? It seems if I use levels on the footage and pull up the black input, I get red "speckles" in the darkest areas, but it doesn't happen when i do the same thing with curves.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.