Recently, DP Michiel van Son and I (as director) had our short film graded at a post-production house working with Baselight. In the end, we were not fully satisfied with the look, so we’re going back in September to refine or redo the grade. Our disappointment came at least in part from creative choices, but there may have been technical issues at play as well, since the studio had never worked with Kinefinity footage before. My hope is that when we go back, nothing technical is in our way.

A recap:

Michiel and I tested multiple lens sets, and fell in love with how the TLS rehoused Leica R Cinescope lenses combined with his Mavo LF and the Gafpa LUT. The skin-tones looked rich, the details were sharp, and they had a real old-fashioned, soft, film-like, cinematic feel. Once we were on location—the film takes place mainly in forests—we discovered the greens were rendered beautifully as well.

Going into the grading, we assumed we could use the Gafpa LUT as a starting point and refine. However, according to the post-house we would be stuck with whatever information the LUT takes away, making it impossible to recover the full dynamic range, details in the highlights, etc. They preferred working with Baselight’s usual workflow, using DRT profiles that add a look but leave the freedom to recover all original information.

Problem is, there is no DRT (that we could find) for Kinefinity. So we used an Arri Alexa DRT.

What we found was that there were real overtones of greens and magentas. I think in battling these we went too orange, which is one of the issues we ended up having with the final result, the other being a less definable loss of richness in the colors. Where the green and magentas come from we don’t know. Is it the Mavo LF, is it the lenses, is it the LUT? There’s definitely a presence of them in our LUT dailies, and maybe by adjusting the contrast for cinema projection these got more pronounced. Or maybe the Arri DRT made them more pronounced. Hard to say, as neither Michiel or I have any prior experience with Baselight or grading for cinema in general.

Any thoughts or information would be really appreciated at this point:
- Has anybody worked in Baselight with Kinefinity footage before? Is there an established workflow? Perhaps there is a Kinefinity DRT after all?
- Any thoughts about alternative workflows… Eg. I read that KineLOG is based on Cineon. Googling for Cineon and Baselight I encountered this thread, which seems to suggest we could try using ADX color space and the Truelight Film 1 DRT, though frankly most what I read there is Latin to me. https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/pdf/datasheets/FL-BL-DS-0918-Baselight53.pdf
- Any background info on KineLOG or the Gafpa LUT that could help us get close to recreating its look within Baselight. Or could a LUT be converted into a DRT somehow? Probably not that simple.
- Any thoughts about the greens and magentas, and if they may be related to the LUT.

Thanks! 🙏