SO in this fun ongoing topic, I want to shift the conversation a bit to artistry, because all these technical things to me only serve one purpose namely; making/creating interesting images and stories and worlds.
As I have mentioned many times before I believe in rec709 as a future proof format. even though the gamut might be enlarged to me rec2020 with its potential high dynamic range is too far off from my believes it will hurt the eyes and desaturate the heart. I was being raised with art, to start with paintings, from Caravaggio to Diebenkorn, to Rauschenberg to Malevich to Vermeer. One thing they all have in common even though some of these quick examples use mixed media is that their dynamic range of what they exhibit is never more than 6-8 stops (yes Rauschenberg had some installations with incandescent lights, but even these were kind of muted).
Diebenkorn
K Malevich
Bruegel
Rauschenberg
As we all know cinema is highly hijacked by capitalisms, and most innovations, are pushed by the big players (Sony etc), and not really the artists. The term ‘ immersive’ is often used by these players. in their opinion we need 3d, huge screens -where you cannot oversee the whole screen and instead have to move your head-, 5d (also wind ,water and odor). To them cinema should imitate life and not transpose life (transposing means we can see and feel and understand the world with different observations/angles)
Yes , what if these painters had richer blacks and whiter whites? Would they have used it? Yes probably, but not for good.
The issue with paint is that the only way to increase contrast is to decrease reflections in blacks, so that black appears deeper and thus white in relation more bright. Yet if we do a deep study to painters their needs were never to have more contrast but instead have more color variaty and textures, if we look at the development of paint, we see that the biggest innovations and talk abouts where the invention of more colors(pigments) and eventually the paint in tubes in 1841. The invention of paint in tubes could be compared with the invention of the portable camera. The idea that you could go into the field and bring your favorite colors and could just paint without having to bring an enormous amount of stuff to mix paint etc, was a huge revolution, it’s kind of what we saw with the canon 5d for aspiring filmmakers. All of a sudden the amount of poetic realism, documentary painters sky rocketed, leading to whole new styles of painting and eventually impressionism.
That said, innovations are always part of what drives artistry, but also limitations help artistry. Look at medieval paintings, they have in common that they only had access to a few different pigments to paint with (like red ochre), it’s very distinctive and some painters could really come up with superb compositions and color arrangements.
Raphael - the cardinal
So if we look at the history of painting, colors, textures were the main innovations and also the things the artists craved about the most.
If we look for instance at documentation about Rembrandt who made immersive paintings which seem to have very high contrast but just by depicting scenes with high contrast. Art is about seeming not being, by depicting the sun we can feel and see it’s strength just because we can imagine the sun.
Science wise a lot of research has been done after how we perceive colors and contrast, and it seems our brain doesnt like more than 8-9 stops of dynamic range. Once it exceeds our brain has to work hard, we have to capture the very bright parts of a scene by closing down, and capture the shadows by opening up to them and combine them in our brain into a reasonable image. But that takes effort.
To make a quick statement here are three images, sadly not very artistic but to proof a point. Spot metered we see that the sky is the brightest point at around 12.8 stops. and the darkest part in her hair at about stop 1. We can capture this full range with the mavo edge, ofc the shadows will suffer a bit from grainyness, and thus less resolution, but due to 8k capturing this is very fine and can easily be taken care of by advanced nr (which i didnt used in this quick example). If we start color grading and want the outside to be a normal exposure we will have to underexpose the inside. The other way around is ofc the same issue.
What we can do is start decreasing the contrast but since this math is applying to the full image it will start to look weak and the blacks will be lifted by a ugly amount washing out the image, same goes for the whites. A good image in general needs a white or black point to level up the rest of the image to.
In this example below we graded for the outside
in this example below we graded for the inside
Now even if we used the mythical roll off (currently the most used word in populist camera forums) , we still would not really benefit from our high dr camera. SO if you lack the ability to color grade (repaint), you wont need a high dr camera, because you are pushing this grade into a rec709 space, and to make it a bit good looking we have to either underexpose the foreground or overexpose the background. So even though our camera can capture it we will throw it away in post.
Filmmakers who have took lots of advantage over HIgh dynamic range with cameras like the alexa 65 are Emanuel lubezki and alejandro innaritu in the film The revenant, even though the film proofs to be mediocre from a artistic point of view (mine pov and maybe not yours), its still a tremendous achievement technically and from an image make point of view (if filmmaking was only about image making this film would be great) there are some truly beautiful frames. But what most viewers dont know is that these images arent shot in-camera.. they had to move fast, and couldnt use light sources, so at a very high level they did relighting in Autodesk Lustre, masking about every person out and changing the balance and colors. This post- production process took ages, but because of that they were able to use a more documentary kind of way of shooting which fitted that project. Ofc still a big crew, but due to the extreme weather and doing reshoots in other seasons light changed so much that there was no other way of doing so. So even though most images could have been shot maybe on a lower dr cam some scenes had simply too much dr, looking ugly to the eye, and had to be rebalanced. High dr cameras are great for if you are a painter and want to repaint your images in post. But there’s only one way and that is starting to use animated powermasks…
If your arent someone handy in the field of post production you probably dont need more than 10-11 stops of dr at max. As long as you set your camera at the right settings (lens, iso, shutterspeed, nd) it will do.
Grading the revenant
Now back to our simple thesis the shot we all know, person sitting inside and inside its much darker than outside, and we somehow want to retain the background (the world outside the window). By trying to add a light by means of a powermask with individual parameters we can start to make it happen, but our eyes are not so easy to be fooled sadly. Still this light coming from the outside is the keylight for the inside, so we have to understand when working in a grade we want to work in 3d space yet our images are in2d. This is where painting knowledge is needed, painting does the same, it seems to be a 3d world yet its established ona 2d flat canvas. So we have to study light and by doing so during a grade we will also start to learn about our own compositions, how we could have done better how we could have added fill light etc, and thats the reason I think every so called dop should learn the craft of color grading, to my believe you should be a bit reserved calling yourself a cinematographer if you just point and shoot, cinematography is image making, you dont need to necessarily manipulate your images in post, but you need to establish yourself as an artist and start discovering. I myself am not a cinematographer, I am only active as filmmaker and Ive learned from a few great dops ( for instance from the previous mentioned Emanuel lubezki during a shoot in 2009 which took two months and gave me the opportunity to learn a lot from his visions), but I believe in myself as a filmmaker/cineast in which i try to be both the cameraman and director and editor. So i know I will never be as good as those people or else I have to compromise on my other interests, so I have to be humble, and keep developing myself in a broad way. This forum helps me to write down these ideas and revisit them by sharing them with you.
I quickly made a few powermasks to balance the outside to the inside. On top I added (not included in the image down below) a powermask to highlight the person sitting on the couch. i did this with two power masks and follow the already existing keylight which lifted to a smaller degree than the fill light
Here is a small video showing you this issue and how we could possible resolve it.. shot with the MAVO Edge, and spot metered a 12.8 dynamic range.
These are just plain and boring examples, but sometimes these work the best. Our goal is to take you on our journey, and this topic will be crowded with a lot more interesting examples and actual projects we will be working on. Join the conversation!
