Colour Science for Digital Cinematography

Registration: EUR 275+VAT. To register, contact sft@hff-muc.de.

When cinema was acquired, graded, and exhibited on photographic film, a very small number of film manufacturers set the colour science. “System design” was the exclusive domain of the film manufacturers. Now, it is extremely rare to shoot, post, or exhibit a movie on film. There is a diversity of manufacturers at every stage in the digital pipeline. Manufacturers may or may not perform adequate system design among their own products, but in practice every production uses equipment from several manufacturers, and a large question arises: Who does the system design?

Cinematographers plan that the images launched into the production/post/grading/mastering pipeline best serve the story being told. The cinematographer should be the primary high-level system designer. But a rather new knowledge base is required: the colour science of digital cinematography.

Topics include:

• Light levels in the scene and at the camera (LV, EV, EI, “nits”)
• The overall acquisition/post/mastering pipeline (OETF/OETF⁻¹/SR/DR/EOTF⁻¹/EOTF)
• The definition and use of scene-referred image data
• The conceptual bases of BT.709 and BT.1886
• ACES at acquisition; ACES IDT; ACESproxy
• Colourspaces at acquisition
• Theory and practice of log and quasilog codes and their relation to sensor noise
• Colour in OpenEXR, OpenColorIO
• Colour issues with stock & reference footage; textures; digital matte painting
• Colour in CGI; RGB and spectral rendering
• Colour transforms by math or LUT; interpolation issues

In addition to being of interest to cinematographers that use real cameras, the workshop will also be of interest to the CGI/VFX community, who use virtual cameras. It is important in many CGI/VFX productions to produce images that look like they came from an actual camera, so all of the issues above are in play.

The workshop is suitable for people in the following jobs:

• Studio colour scientist
• Colour pipeline, media engineer
• CG or Comp supervisor/lead
• Lighting/render/shader TD or developer
• Cinematographer, DIT
• Colourist
• DI / mastering engineer
• Post production engineer/technician

Bring your questions about cameras/CGI/VFX: We plan for a dynamic, interactive session.