Panalog Pipelines
Monday, November 10, 2008 at 1:59PM I mentioned that Panalog images from the Panavision Genesis camera can be used easily in either video or film grading workflows. Here's what I mean by that.
Here's an image in Panalog color space:
You can treat this image as a video source, and many do. I just finished three commercials this way. You can just load in the Panalog source, and color correct it to taste. No fuss, no LUTs. As an example, here's that same Panalog image corrected with Colorista:
You can also load the Panalog footage directly into a film grading pipeline. Here's how that same uncorrected Panalog shot would appear under a standard Kodak Vision preview LUT:
It's a bit dark and crunchy, but no matter—Colorista can take care of that. Here's the image color corrected underneath the Vision preview LUT:
Here are the Colorista settings used on the video version:
And here are the settings for the film version:
In either a film or video post environment, a colorist can take Panalog footage into his or her existing workflow and start working with it immediately, color correcting to taste. That's pretty cool.
The big difference between the two is that the film version has that nice soft highlight rolloff. The white t-shirt reaches almost 600% scene illuminance in this image, and that detail is preserved in Panalog. It gets crushed out in the video correction, but on film that detail is preserved, albeit compacted into the soft, sloping shoulder of the print stock.
Note that the sample image used here was not shot with a Genesis. It was shot with a DSLR and converted to Panalog (accurately) from raw. I don't have any good Genesis sample images that I'm free to use just now.
Reader Comments (9)
Stu,
Great post, thanks for the examples!
You said the sample image was from a DSLR converted to Panalog. Just wondering, could you take a linear Red(R3D) file and convert it to Panalog?
Indeed you could, there is nothing magic about Panalog. It is very similar to RED Log and the PD Log modes in RED Alert.
Love it. Keep it up.
STU,
I am currently color correcting a short. I have been doing the color on a 800:1 contrast monitor, but when I bring it back into final cut and see it on my 2000:1 contrast monitor, it looks drastically different. Is there a rule of thumb for contrast ratio AND the way to connect to a separate monitor?
Stu,
"No fuss, no LUTs." I'm totally stealing that. Enjoyed this post and have pointed several pals to the previous one. BTW, I heard the fxguide team is releasing a Red Centre podcast this week interviewing that Jim guy about the new Scarlet and Epic.
By film grading pipeline do you mean you pretend it's cineon?
The biggest problem I had with panalog was the multiple facilities working on a project not agreeing on what it was.
Stu,
Great post but can you elaborate how are you converting a raw image from a DSLR to Panalog?
masont, I zeroed out the image in Lightroom, the converted it to linear floating point and then to Panalog in After Effects.
Ciaran, yes, that's correct. The third image is me dropping the Panalog image into a grading system that expects Cineon.
It is funny how many facilities struggled with Panalog when it first came out, given how clearly documented it was. We are an industry that loves our standards, and this new thing threw people, despite being quite simple. No wonder there's so much confusion about RED, with its infinitely variable flavors of shooting and transfer!