Inspired Digital Production
Technicolor CineStyle
By now most of you have probably already heard about Canon and Technicolor’s collaboration on a new “Log” curve picture profile for Canon DSLR’s called Cinestyle. I’m a little late to the party with this post because I’ve been so busy in post production on The Specimen that I haven’t had a chance to review it.
Since my site stats tell me the most searches and page views on this site are for “superflat” and my “Changes in latitudes“ post, I figured I owed it to everyone to take some time and check it out. So last night I took a break from editing and downloaded the picture style and loaded it up on my 7D. I was immediately blown away by the additional latitude this picture profile delivers over my previous settings of Neutral, Sharpness 0, Contrast -4, Saturation -2. Others have done much more testing and provided some great visuals with this. So rather than recreating all that, I’m going to stand on the shoulders of others hard work and point you in their direction for more info.
- Vincent Laforet’s Cinestyle Post
- Cinestyle vs. Superflat, Marvels, and Neutral
- Cinestyle is a Must Use
- Planet5D
- Crooked Path Films
I’m going to shoot some tests with people to see how the skin tones come out, but it looks like this could be my new flat shooting profile. I’ll report back when I’ve done those tests and add them to this post.
One note, with the profile you can also download a look up table (LUT). This can be applied in your NLE using a free utility called LUT Buddy. This LUT simply adds an S-curve to the footage which makes it look natural for editing, instead of the flat image. It is NOT a color correction and should be removed before you apply any color correction. I’ve seen a lot of misinformation about this. Color correcting after the LUT is applied effectively takes away the dynamic range you achieved by shooting with this preset in the first place. So please remove the LUT before you color correct. For more info see this post by Jay Friesen.
Happy Shooting.
EDIT: The links on this page have been updated as of 6/18/12 for Jay Friesen’s blog which changed domain names.
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Jane, thanks for posting that link. It was a very interesting article. I’ll admit I have not delved too far into my testing with Cinestyle as I promised above due to lack of time to do the tests. Work and life have gotten in the way. To date, I’ve only shot 1 project with CineStyle, which was the PopTent ad for Clinique Happy. It worked OK, I really pushed it in post, and didn’t have too many issues. One way that works for me in terms of color fidelity, is to color correct in 32-bit in After Effects, and first applying a light de-noiser before doing anything else. This not only cleans up the noise, but at 32-bits it creates new high bit-depth pixels increasing your color fidelity. I think this is why I didn’t see banding or posterization. You may see some in the web version, but that’s after subsequent re-encoding.
All my other projects have been shot with Prolost Flat which is Neutral with sharpening -4, contrast -4 and saturation -2. (I believe it’s what you are using in the mean-time as well) I find I always get good results, and as Stu Mashwitz points out in that post, it’s an in-camera tweak, it’s always available without having to download or load a picture style, which makes it easier to match with your friends or a rental 2nd camera in the field. I really recommend you read that Prolost Flat post as it has a lot of great info.
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#3 written by Jane 12 months ago
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Played some with CineStyle. Not impressed. Lacks color resolution as outlined in this overview of Canon picture styles. I am now trying other options like Crooked path and Marvel cine. For now, Neutral at -4 seems to work best.