Resources for New DITs
In this 5th round up of online resources for DIT’s (Digital Image Technicians) editors and colourists who need to understand more about colour science, workflows and data wrangling apps.
DIT’s are supposed to be able to bridge the gap between production and post, understanding the entire pipeline that a digital image might flow through right from the sensor to the silver screen. Getting to grips with some of the science that affects those images is a crucial skill. Hopefully these resources will aide you in that endeavour.
Understanding ACES
Andrew McKee has a good introduction to the ACES colour space and a simple workflow involving DaVinci Resolve and a piece of ARRIRAW footage that you could test out for yourself.
The main point of ACES is that, as colour space, it contains the entire visible spectrum with plenty of leeway to push brightness and colours back and forth without ever clipping values.
Understanding Display Gamma & Gamma Correction
Wolfcrow has a great summary of the differences between display gamma and gamma correction and although its quite technically detailed its worth getting to grips with. Click through to see some images with different gamma applied to see what this is all about.
When you increase gamma (pull the curve down) you are mapping more values into the dark regions, and the image goes darker. When you reduce gamma (pushing the curve up) you are mapping more values into the lighter regions, and the image looks lighter. Whether or not the image will have anything to display depends on its dynamic range and ‘strength of data’. You can’t go overboard with this.
REDLogFilm & REDGamma
With RED, the gamma setting may also be comprised of other tonal curves. To give images the more pleasing and familiar toe and shoulder characteristics of film tones, REDgamma3 and similar settings are the net result of both a standard log curve and a contrast curve:
The RED learning site has a useful and easy to understand introduction to the differences between REDLogFilm and REDGamma and how to apply them in RED CINE-X Pro.
DIT Tools – BulletProof
Software developer Red Giant’s latest product is a brand new tool aimed at covering ‘the other half’ of your camera, by offering you a seamless way to back up, ingest, transcode and colour your tapeless media. You can currently download the free Mac OS X beta to give it a try for yourself. Stu Maschwitz gave this 20 minute demo of the product at NAB 2013 Supermeet. Red Giant has a huge amount of support for using BulletProof on their site and you can also watch a 30 minute walkthrough with Simon Walker (also below).
DIT Tools – Shotput Pro Tutorials
If you’ve got Shotput Pro 5 to offload your camera footage files to multiple harddrives at the same time you’ll notice that the interface is quite different to V4. Here are some handy short tutorials to make sure you’re getting the most out of your software. You can currently upgrade from v4 to v5 for $29.99.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHalh5IsiyI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6UN_Qeh1_I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61QSkeleM6s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WLygdJP1lg
LightIron – Carts & Software
These videos will get you up to speed on Light Iron Digital’s hardware and software, which if you’re serious about becoming a DIT, you’d be wise to get to know. No Film School has an excellent round up of Light Iron related resources and you can also check out any and every mention of them on my blog, here.
http://vimeo.com/67178911
H.264 vs H.265
Lastly if you’re wondering what the deal is with the new H.265 that will be coming along shortly then Larry Jordan has a great summary of it in this webinar excerpt. Tech Crunch also had this post on it when it was approved by the International Telecom Union in January.
