RED Log

It's Friday, the traditional time where we at ProLost sit back with a glass of tawny port and reverse-engineer camera transfer functions. Join us, won't you? Today's subject, RED Log.

RED Log is one of the options available in RED Alert (or the at-your-own-risk RED Cine). It's a logarithmic transfer function that appears to be designed to map the camera's linear-light image to a DI-friendly tonal range.

Like Panalog, the RED Log transfer function can be matched using the Cineon log/lin tools available in common compositing applications.

Here are the correct settings in After Effects (set to display pixel values in decimal):

In Shake:

And in Nuke:

Panalog

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

Download the Shake Macros

Nuke version coming eventually maybe possibly!

Update: Download the undocumented, untested Nuke gizmos!

ProLost Holiday Gift Ideas

Got a DV Rebel on your Christmas list? Or maybe you're a DV Rebel looking to help your homies make your Hanukkah hot? Here are some ideas for you and yours.

The DV Rebel's Guide

Well, duh. So many of you have written to tell me how, after you read it yourself, you turned around and bought The Guide for all your filmmaking friends. Well that makes you awesome. Be awesome.

Drobo

I bought a Drobo not long ago, and it has added years to my life. It's a mass storage device that's smarter and more handsome that a traditional RAID. You can cram any configuration of drives into it and it will keep your data redundantly safe. Don't worry about mixing and matching drives, just throw in what's cheap and plentiful. As drives get cheaper, toss bigger ones in there. When a drive goes bad, Drobo will let you know to swap it out. My half a terrabyte of digital photos has never felt safer!

Use the "drobulator" to figure out how much storage you'll get with various drive configurations. Better to start with small cheap drives and upgrade as you need more storage. I had initially considered getting two 750GB drives, but the drobulator showed me that three 500GB drives would give me more storage for less dough.

It's not the cheapest storage solution out there, but the peace of mind and flexibility are more than worth it.

Canon HV20

Feeling generous? This little camcorder that could is still the cheapest best DV Rebel cam. Giving someone this camera strapped to a copy of The Guide with a ribbon of primacord is a great way of saying "shut up already and make a movie."

Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional Studio Techniques

Stay tuned for a longer post about this must-have book, but for now suffice it to say that Mark's venerable book is the best companion to The Guide you can find, and still the one and only book that approaches real visual effects compositing from the generalist standpoint afforded only by high-end systems like Discrete flame and, ironically, the affordable and ubiquitous Adobe After Effects. Get this massively-revised edition now, despite the sad fact that a few perfectly good pages near the front somehow mistakenly got covered with words written by some guy named "Stu."

The War of Art

In 1999 I made the most difficult decision of my life: Quiting my dream job at Industrial Light & Magic to help two friends start a little company called The Orphanage. At the core of the DV Rebel code is the impetus to do what you love, against all odds. Whenever I need a kick in the Rebel pants, I read a bit of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. A better book on the creative process you will not find. Warning: ProLost is not responsible if you quit your job after reading this book! Well, maybe a little.

Bambi vs. Gozdilla

Another spiritual ompanion to The Guide, this is David Mamet's insightful, scathing, delightful and perspicacious perspective "on the nature, purpose, and practice of the movie business." Featuring chapters such as "How Scripts Got So Bad" and "Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight; or, A Short Tour of the Concept of Suspension of Disbelief," this book will either teach you how to understand and navigate the strange world of Hollywood film production, or inspire you to avoid them altogether.

Baratza Maestro Conical Burr Coffee Grinder

Readers of The Guide know that I love coffee, and that the process of coffee discovery begins with a burr grinder. The Maestro is affordable and awesome. Find more coffee gift ideas in this Rebel Café thread.

Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM Lens
or
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens
or
Nikon 50mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor Lens
or
Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor Lens

Chances are you or someone you know have a digital SLR. Chances are it sports the all-purpose zoom lens that it shipped with. And chances are the photos it makes are good, but maybe a little less that what you'd hoped from this step up in photographic equipment.

By far the best treat for a digital photographer learning the wily ways of her new DSLR is a fast 50mm lens. Fast meaning a maximum aperture f/1.8 or better. Larger apertures mean more light, which means you can shoot in less light with slower ISO settings and faster shutter speeds. But most importantly, larger apertures mean shallow depth of field, which adds an extra dimension of control and velvety bitchin'-ness to your compositions.

There's a popular idea that the 50mm focal length "best approximates human vision" or whatever. That's a highly subjective idea that is best ignored, especially since it has its roots in the 35mm negative size, for which the 50mm is considered "normal," i.e. neither wide-angle nor telephoto. Unless you have a DSLR with a full-frame chip (such as my beloved Canon 5D or the badass new Nikon D3) this measure doesn't apply. On a smaller-chipped DSLR, a 50mm lens is a telephoto lens, falling into the "portrait" range—which is perfectly awesome and worth having, irrespective of all that worthless pontification about matching human eyeballs.

Both Canon and Nikon have f/1.8 offerings that are insanely affordable, and f/1.4 50's that are the best lens deals going (in terms of quality for the price). If you want to go big, Canon's EF 50mm f/1.2 L is a pimp-daddy 50 that pro photogs will respect and possibly mug you for, as is Nikon's 50mm f/1.2 Nikkor AI-S Manual Focus Lens.

Whichever of these lenses you get, learn how to put your DSLR into aperture-priority mode and spend a day "shooting wide open." You'll be embarrassed at how much better a photographer you just became!

Magic Bullet Looks

Lastly, maybe you know a filmmaker who hasn't yet treated himself to Magic Bullet Looks. How much will he love you for the gift of cinematic sexiness that is Magic Bullet?

Happy holidays all. I'm almost done with my tour of duty in Albuquerque, so look foreword to more posts and more interesting developments as we roll into the new year!

Is RED One Really a 4K Camera?

Anyone interested in the RED One camera should read this comparative review/diary of the Sigma SD14 and the Canon 5D (the latter of which I am a delighted owner).

Both are SLRs, both are a few years old. But the 5D has a 12.7 megapixel, full-frame chip, where the Sigma produces a mere 4.6 megapixels. Why bother even comparing them?

The reason is that the Sigma has a Foveon sensor rather than a CCD or CMOS. This sensor can capture distinct R, G and B light information at every pixel. The 5D's CMOS chip can record luminance at every pixel, and uses the common Bayer pattern of color filters at the photosites to capture RGB color, intermingling color fidelity and spatial resolution in a way that must be decoded by software using some math, some compromises, and some guesswork.

One way of looking at this is that the 5D spends three of its 12.7 million pixels to accomplish what the Sigma achieves in only one. If the 5D records 12.7 million tiny little light records per image, then the Sigma records 13.8 million (4.6 x the unique R, G and B records per pixel).

But that's not entirely fair. Our eyes tend to perceive detail more in luminance than in color, and the 5D is recording much more luminance information that the Sigma. For black and white photography, the 5D truly is a 12.7 megapixel camera and the SD14 truly is a 4.6 megapixel shooter.

So the truth lies somewhere in between—the SD14 is neither the 5D's equal in resolution nor is it possessed of one third the pixel count.

In one very real way the RED One is a 4K camera. It creates 4K images that look damn good.

And in another equally real way, the RED One is not a "true" 4K camera, as each of the 4K's worth of pixels it creates for each frame is interpolated (from compressed Bayer data at that).

And that's probably just fine—a topic for another day.