Epic-W workflow from camera to ACES

Discussions - Using ACES Cameras/On-Set
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#1

Hi.

I’m building workflow with my client and we have now on the issue of calibrating spot meter and selecting proper cam color profiles for ACEScc grading in Resolve with Helium sensor.
I wonder how exposing and calibration on your Sekonic would go if we keep ACES workflow in mind.

I know people using wide gamut LUT but my concern is how to calibrate to filmlog or similar.
In my mind all lut’s are limiting in some point.

In Redcine that i have now should i select color space as 2020 or redcolor4?
Gamma i would put on redlogfilm. Any ideas i would appreciate.

Maybe this is not the way to get most out of the sensor but this is the thing i just imagine it now getting the meter calibration in log type space to get most out of the sensor. Maybe i’m wrong also.

Somewhat confusing to me overall so maybe you could help me with some ideas.

With Alexa it seems straight forward tho.

#2

Stupid question… are you trying to monitor ACES on set?

#3

Not currently. My goal is just to see if thinking about it before hand helps.

I just started to think i could make a test in calibration phase to see if it differs lets say i do one profile with ACES and one with REC.

My point would be to get most out of the camera sensor and maybe even ignore monitoring for the moment as mostly on camera small monitors are not very accurate by my current experience and they are adjusted wildly to the environment (also my knowledge with on set monitoring is rather limited at the moment)

I have gathered this much: you either in Red Cine or Resolve go with RWG/Log3G10 and leave IPP2 display transform off and export your grey chart samples for Sekonic software and do calculations by that. I’m not sure if from standard Resolve project it will be forced to rec or not. From Red cine it should be “direct” export. In a way some sort of linear should be maybe better option than REC keeping details in mind?

Also i’m not sure if making exports out of Resolve with ACES enabled help which is my current workflow.

So this whole part for me now is a bit confusing how to get the most of Helium sensor data
and how to calibrate your spot meter to take it in to account keeping ACES in mind and to have most data out of it. Now mostly how i have experienced dop’s have exposed to rec but if i get that material to ACES project available data is cut in half if i look at my scopes and i would want to have most thick “negative” out of the camera. My reasoning is that we would use spot meter calibrated to sensor as best as we can keeping out workflow in mind. Without it i see wildly under exposed material and have to deal with noise reduction most of the time and not so much nice material as one would like to see.

As a colorist i have also the role of dop consultant and workflow / color pipeline specialist even tho i’m missing so many points but i also do not see that there are anyone that is well informed. I really want to push ACES knowledge here for that.

#4

Had a go yesterday with new version of IPP2 on Helium sensor and it seems to work nice now. I did test in ACEScc with Resolve and was really happy about it. We got the same images like client saw in their side and we could work without red provided transforms in the end of pipeline. In a way as ACES has nice rolloff we can do the same things in just adjusting the footage like we always do but they have done it in different technical lut’s and there is many of them.

Tech side in cam: it was RWG and Log3g10. All lit with household lights and nothing that we see on pro set. So one can imagine how good all would look with proper light setup.

For now it seems promising and things seems to work as they are intended keeping ACES in mind.
My subjective visual feel but still seems like good starting point for colorist. Does not matter so much which body DOP uses as colors are there.