Vintage cinema look?

How would you go exactly (with step by step tutorial) getting that visual clarity (that looks like negative film compared to digital, which is like positive film) and color reproduction as on these high budget 1950/60s movies when using LOG or RAW? http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompar ... review.htm (scroll down for the Blu-Ray grabs to see what I mean).

Emulating the "film look" as seen on some later movies (particularly after the 1980s when film tech changed) is rather easy. But these 1950/60s epic movies (and James Bond of that era) have a DIFFERENT look. I know they lit very hard with old school hot tungstens, but even day time shots have that special look that I can't find in any recent movie (neither I have ever seen anyone successfully reproducing).

Yes, I have seen the Technicolor tutorial for Resolve online btw. It doesn't even come close to accurately reproducing the look of these movies! And yes, I know that Technicolor movies used specific colors wardrobe. But even with that it still doesn't account for that different look. I mean, look at the bare skin in one of the screen grabs! Nothing to do with wardrobe!

So I wonder if that "negative film" vintage look could be done today via color grading, or we would need special emulation software that fundamentally changes the pixels, rather than just the colors.

Ask production to shoot it on film.

Feels like so much of the look is studio lighting and body oil.

You'd need to find other examples of Technicolor Vistavision film stocks to get a better sense of how the film stock reacts. From some examples that I've seen, it looks like skin stones skewed slightly orange and highlights went slightly magenta but that was based on a small sample size.

I don't think you need anything particularly special to get the look though. You should be able to get the look in Resolve.

Erm... not really. The clarity of the elements of the scene (while remaining soft as film is) is beyond "contrast" or 'midtone detail". There's some component that we all miss trying to simply grade our footage to look like it. I can't pinpoint it, but it goes beyond using the Color tab. IMHO, it needs an actual plugin to go deeper into emulation rather than simply playing with curves.

Erm... not really. The clarity of the elements of the scene (while remaining soft as film is) is beyond "contrast" or 'midtone detail". There's some component that we all miss trying to simply grade our footage to look like it. I can't pinpoint it, but it goes beyond using the Color tab. IMHO, it needs an actual plugin to go deeper into emulation rather than simply playing with curves.

Anything related to the film stock can be emulated with grading. In terms of "the clarity of the elements of the scene" that would be lighting and production design. If you're talking about softness of skin tones, you could be talking a little bit about mid-tone detail but makeup would have something to do with that as well.

Some classical lenses might help too.
Zeiss Contax C/Y for example has excellent micro-contrast, while still exposing some softness WO. Older Cooke lenses show much of a vintage look too.

Anything related to the film stock can be emulated with grading.

I don't believe that's true. I think there are ephemeral characteristics of film that are extremely hard to duplicate digitally. If it could be emulated that quickly and easily, I think all the big-budget movies still shooting on film would gladly shoot on digital cameras. So far this year, some of the big productions shot on film include The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Wonder Woman 1984, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Pokemon Detective Pikachu, Ad Astra, and a couple of dozen others have all shot on film. I don't think it's done purely for nostalgia.

Noted DP Steve Yedlin has written extensively about the differences between film and digital, and he has some interesting thoughts:

http://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/

In terms of "the clarity of the elements of the scene" that would be lighting and production design. If you're talking about softness of skin tones, you could be talking a little bit about mid-tone detail but makeup would have something to do with that as well.

I agree 100% that what a lot of people think of as a "cinematic look" boils down to great art direction, makeup, lighting, lenses, and all the other work that goes on in front of the camera. It's not something that happens in color-correction. We can always enhance what's there, but it's almost impossible to take poorly-shot material on a crappy set and make it look great.

Some classical lenses might help too. Zeiss Contax C/Y for example has excellent micro-contrast, while still exposing some softness WO. Older Cooke lenses show much of a vintage look too.

I did a Red project a year or so ago, a romantic comedy/drama that took place over a 10-year period, and I told the DP I was floored that it looked so good -- it was the first time I didn't struggle a bit with skintones. She told me that a) she followed all the rules, b) she shot for an ISO of 400 (half the normal camera rating), c) she used a mild 1/8 ProMist for most of the shoot, and d) she used Cooke S5 lenses. I've never seen the Red (especially the Dragon) get so close to an Alexa in terms of color quality.

I don't believe that's true. I think there are ephemeral characteristics of film that are extremely hard to duplicate digitally. If it could be emulated that quickly and easily, I think all the big-budget movies still shooting on film would gladly shoot on digital cameras.

It's not necessarily easy but it can be done. A lot of movies that are shot on film these days are simply by preference, not for the look. For example, JJ Abrams has is known for shooting on film but it's mainly a personal attachment to it. I believe he was even part of a group of film makers who spearheaded efforts to keep film around because it's one of the few formats that you can conceivable load up onto a projector from 100 years ago and play back just fine.

Noted DP Steve Yedlin has written extensively about the differences between film and digital, and he has some interesting thoughts:

http://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/

I'm a big fan of Yedlin's posts and videos about film and video

He talks about the differences but he also has talked about the similarities. He talks a lot about how the processing of film and video is just as much or more of a factor than what comes out of the camera. He looks at cameras as data collectors and believes that any camera that can record the appropriate amount of data can be tailored to look anyway you want.

I did a Red project a year or so ago, a romantic comedy/drama that took place over a 10-year period, and I told the DP I was floored that it looked so good -- it was the first time I didn't struggle a bit with skintones. She told me that a) she followed all the rules, b) she shot for an ISO of 400 (half the normal camera rating), c) she used a mild 1/8 ProMist for most of the shoot, and d) she used Cooke S5 lenses. I've never seen the Red (especially the Dragon) get so close to an Alexa in terms of color quality.

that makes me curious. would you mind share some/the end result of it?

From some examples that I've seen, it looks like skin stones skewed slightly orange and highlights went slightly magenta but that was based on a small sample size.

magenta highlights are usually the result of a bad telecine pass: if you print on a real stock, they go yellow, not magenta.

From some examples that I've seen, it looks like skin stones skewed slightly orange and highlights went slightly magenta but that was based on a small sample size.

magenta highlights are usually the result of a bad telecine pass: if you print on a real stock, they go yellow, not magenta.

happens alot with over-exposed red footage, but its an easy fix.

From some examples that I've seen, it looks like skin stones skewed slightly orange and highlights went slightly magenta but that was based on a small sample size.

magenta highlights are usually the result of a bad telecine pass: if you print on a real stock, they go yellow, not magenta.

happens alot with over-exposed red footage, but its an easy fix.

any camera will do: green channel will clip faster than red and blue. Manufacturer deal with that and "fix it" rebuilding details form other channels instead of let it go magenta (to a certain extent)

that makes me curious. would you mind share some/the end result of it?

It was a small indie film called The Sand Dune, lit by Dawn Suhyun Shim, and I believe it's available on Amazon and iTunes. Absolutely the most beautiful Red film I've ever worked on.

I have another Red project coming out this year, a romantic drama called The World We Make, and that one also has some really beautiful moments.

That represented about 140 hours of work, including 3 days in a DI theater for the theatrical trim pass. I think it ultimately came out very well, but there were a lot of challenges involved. I think there were a few scenes that set a record for tracking power windows for me, somewhere north of 13 or 14. Quite a bit of relighting that went on, requested by the director. I think it helped a lot, particularly in balancing out the difference in skintone between our actors. Also a very upbeat, inspirational story.

So I wonder if that "negative film" vintage look could be done today via color grading, or we would need special emulation software that fundamentally changes the pixels, rather than just the colors.

I am not following at all what you are trying to say here.

I think there is no one vintage look, there are many reasons why something may look vintage.

Of course, there are tons of folks who love to 'help' you with that special LUTs and or secret plugins for a small fee, but after all what is money when you are promised magic?

I think there is no one vintage look, there are many reasons why something may look vintage.

We could agree that there is a particular look to 50's and 60's Technicolor films. Not easy to replicate, certainly not with a LUT or such. Something about the way the negative reacted and the lab processing definitely created a rather unique look.

b) she shot for an ISO of 400 (half the normal camera rating),

I was involved with a pre-viz test 10 years ago for a feature, spending a day with three cinematographers and one of the early RED cameras. They were trying to figure out what the "native" exposure rating should be outside of all the speed finagling that was going on in metadata. They actually settled on about 200 or so, very similar to the Vision 250D stock that was in vogue at the time. They couldn't get a fluorescent "green" out of it. I was there, They TRIED. And that's when they decided the hidden Planckian equivalent of the sensor was probably around 4000 or so. More toward tungsten than true fluoro, because they kept coming up with something cyan. I never, ever understood where the "800" came from, except for probably a RED sales brochure.

So when you look at exactly the same negative stock over and over again... almost matching batch numbers, but different projects, different lighting, different lenses, different art direction... you start coming to the conclusion it isn't the stock that is responsible for the entire look. I've been asked innumerable times to emulate finishes, specific stocks, damaged, flashed or aged film, skip bleach, reversal, cross-process. You name it. I've been asked to tap-dance it, over and over again, on the spot like improv comedy, while the clock is ticking. And the cash register is going *ka-ching*.

The best one was a junior first-timer who wanted to turn a 16mm day shoot into "Rear Window". Sure.

Biggest single factor though is lens, lens, lens.

jPo, CSI

It was a small indie film called The Sand Dune, lit by Dawn Suhyun Shim, and I believe it's available on Amazon and iTunes. Absolutely the most beautiful Red film I've ever worked on.

I have another Red project coming out this year, a romantic drama called The World We Make, and that one also has some really beautiful moments.


That represented about 140 hours of work, including 3 days in a DI theater for the theatrical trim pass. I think it ultimately came out very well, but there were a lot of challenges involved. I think there were a few scenes that set a record for tracking power windows for me, somewhere north of 13 or 14. Quite a bit of relighting that went on, requested by the director. I think it helped a lot, particularly in balancing out the difference in skintone between our actors. Also a very upbeat, inspirational story.

Very inspiring, thanks.. it looks stunning.

Yes I agree, that 1960s/70s Technicolor and Panavision look is what I expect movies to look like (probably because I grew up with it), and i have not yet seen it matched by digital cameras and grading yet. I'm not saying it's better than what can be achieved now, it's just a look that seems right.

Steve

Yes I agree, that 1960s/70s Technicolor and Panavision look is what I expect movies to look like (probably because I grew up with it), and i have not yet seen it matched by digital cameras and grading yet. I'm not saying it's better than what can be achieved now, it's just a look that seems right.

Steve, exactly! That's what I've been trying to say here. There's a whole streak of films from the late '50s to the late '60s, that includes the "epic" films of the era, Bond and a lot of others, and they have a very specific look. While the picture is not sharp in the modern definition of the word, there is detail and lots of DR, but most importantly, they have a very specific type of midtone detail. The objects are well defined and separated from each other. There's no light leaking from one object to the other.

In the '70s, a new type of film/chemistry was developed, and that changed both cinema and photography. Basically, Kodak took over with a new process that is more accurate, but less cinematic in the sense that Steve and I are talking about. I mean look at this, wow: https://film.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/ ... glowne.jpg

When I'm speaking of the film look, I only refer to these kinds of films mentioned above. The ones with the very distinct look found mostly in the epic films. I'm not interested in the look of the later films, like the Godfather, or Indiana Jones. These are the films that the Alexa can mimic ok-enough (not perfect, but close). But the epic films of the 60s, I have seen NOTHING of in our modern times. I'm not sure they're replicateable, no matter how you light or decorate the scene. There's a quality to them that is not replicateable, because digital sensors are trying to be accurate, and that film and process was anything but. And that was its strong point.

At the end of course, it's personal preferences. My husband for example, he hates both 24p, and that technicolor look. He likes 60p (even for movies!), and the look of modern digital sensors. He's even able to tell how the light bounces from one object to the other and that puts him at a mental ease, because he feels that the footage show things as they're supposed to be. Me on the other hand, I can't tell that (the light bounces), so a modern digital image looks like a TOTAL mess to me. My brain gets jumbled with modern digital images (e.g. 99.9% of what you find on youtube, or some modern films). While the "clean" look of the epic films of the 60s is what feels "orderly" to my brain. And I love 24p.

The chemistry of film changes with age. I have to wonder how much of the "vintage look" is a result of the films being old? Not just old in terms of technique or choices, but actually physically old, such that the film itself changed with age and we see the effects of that when watching them now?

Dears: when it was last time that you saw EXACTLY a print form the '60 projected with the old (carbon arc) projectors in a theaters? Don't tell me form the '60 and pretend to remember exactly what it looks like.

what you see are different way to telecine/scan those old elements and re-color it in post. Period.

The close you can get is when a print is struck form the original negative/inter-positive and projected (xenon lamps): like what Fotokem and Nolan did with 2001 space Odyssey. There was a print done by contact from the original elements.

That's is your reference...

Yes, there are different ways to process, scan, project, or age a film. But it doesn't matter to me "how" the look got to the look it got. What I want to see is the look itself, as I see it today. Having said that, watching these movies on TV in the '80s, surely they were crappy resolution and all, but they still "felt" the same, with the same perceivable clarity and color compared to newer films at the time. The "essence" of the look was always there.

In my effort to reverse engineer that look, it's my opinion that all the "phosphorescent" colors are non existent in these old movies, there are mostly darker shades in the color palette, and are grouped together (so a red dress had almost the same red color throughout, instead of shades of it as it would more correctly seen by a digital sensor), and light doesn't bounce around. Each object was its own object, very well defined, possibly because of that grouping of colors. Midtone detail was different too. It was like the scene was gathered around the midtone part where skin color lives, so actors were popping out in the screen a lot more (rather than looking like props).

I don't think that a LUT can do all that, or using curves or wheels. We probably need a C/C++ plugin, that groups and changes/saturates colors around in a very specific way, while through AI removes light bouncing and "neutralizes" the scene in some way that normal lighting can't do.

Hi, I read the forums a lot and have never posted here before, but feel I can add something to this conversarion.

My wife and I worked on a years long project to bring the look of the three-strip Technicolor camera back into the modern filmmaking toolkit. We were unsatisfied with any of the digital solutions and found that the problem that digital was unable to work around had to do with camera hardware itself, as well as lighting tech (in addition to things like art design and lighting style).

Our goal was the look of the original camera which was in use from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties, a little bit earlier than the films you referenced, but many of the same lights, art design choices and on set workflows were likely the same during that late 50's to mid-60's era

Our solution involves modifying cameras analog stages along with using custom made lights that meet the specs of what was used in that era. Along the way we found that a lot of "common knowledge" about that era was not accurate through studying old patents and internal documents from Technicolor.

Years of research went into it before we developed any of our tools. We did it for our own films, but after putting all the work into it we decided to get patents to protect ourselves and we've now formed a company around what we developed.

You can see what we do at opticalradiance.com. I hate to sound like a commercial, so if you look and are interested in what we do I'm happy to talk further, but otherwise I'll stop here.

Thanks Andy, I'm aware of your company. I've seen your videos last year, when I was checking out technicolor. However, your solution is shrouded in mystery, and that's not a great thing for trust. You don't have to give us all the information of how exactly it's done, but a basic idea of how you change the analog stage of "any" camera, would be helpful. I mean, would that mean that I'd have to send you my camera for you to modify? Do you change the camera electronics, or is it a filter in front of the lens?

Finally, from your samples, your solution seems to create a lot of blooming, making the image softer than it has to be. Or is that just your lens?

Other than that, thank you for your efforts. Your solution does come closer to software solutions.

Hi Eugenia, the "blooming" can be dialed back. Some of our more recent examples have less than examples we released initially. I have a tendency to shoot into light because I think it looks beautiful.

We operate as a service, so our tools aren't something you would buy and get to keep, we're cinematography consultants with a special tool set. The mods we make are reversed after shooting is complete and cameras are reset to normal.

As to what you're seeing in your initial post - the films you site wouldn't have used the three-strip camera, on anything from 1955 to 1978 Technicolor usually means dye transfer printing, and if you're using DVD/Bluray as an example you're probably seeing a transfer of a negative, not a dye print.

Even though they're not three-strip, from our research it seems like the variety and dimensionality of color has gone down as film speeds have gone up over the years. Colorists can match an Alexa to modern film stock pretty well, but the farther you go back the harder it seems to get because modern cameras just don't record as much variety. Its like filming under a low cri light, if the colors in your subject aren't also in the light you used no program will bring them back.