Technicolor recommend an S-curve shaped LUT, so in Premiere Pro CS5 for example you can use Magic Bullet Looks to change the RGB curve since this works on the premise of a LUT. If you prefer to make your own LUT, you can grade the image however you please. Once applied in LUT Buddy this will give your footage it’s lifelike colour back, whilst maintaining the dynamic range, shadow detail, highlight detail and smooth gradated tones which are the benefit of CineStyle. It’s free and allows you to load the Technicolor grading LUT you downloaded at same time as CineStyle. Be sure to restart FCP or Premiere after installing the plugin. I use Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere CS5, and the LUT Buddy plugin from Magic Bullet. Next step is to import your footage into the NLE to get editing and grading. So with the camera in movie mode and the user preset / CineStyle selected, you’re ready to shoot. These can be adjusted on the CineStyle user preset on-camera, like normal picture profiles are adjusted. They also recommend sharpness to 0, contrast -4 and saturation -2. Technicolor recommend ISOs in multiples of 160 where possible, for better noise performance. I recommend reading the Technicolor installation guide here Switching to M (manual stills mode) on the camera enabled me to get around that, and install CineStyle on the camera as User Preset 1. I used a 600D in this example – and with the camera set to movie mode I was unable to install CineStyle in the EOS Utility software since the button for opening a custom picture profile was greyed out. It is not available to download from Canon but updates are available here. Install that and make sure it is updated to the latest version. Now you will need the Canon software CD-ROM that came with your camera since it contains the EOS Utility software. Make sure you download the LUT (Technicolor_CineStyle_v1.0.pf2) from the same page! Grab Technicolor CineStyle from here (you will need to fill in your details to download) if you don’t already have it. Standard DSLR video footage lacks dynamic range compared to the amount the sensor is capable of producing in RAW stills mode, and CineStyle gives you a lot of it back!ĬineStyle gives you more ability to choose the look of your footage whilst editing, whether it is hazy low contrast but detailed, or contrasty and punchy – dynamic range does not have to suffer as much, and the gradated tones – the transition from light to dark shades of all kinds of colour is smoother.Īs a result footage looks smoother like cinema – less electronic and less like video. With CineStyle exposure isn’t as critical an issue, it is harder to accidentally eliminate shadow and highlight detail when shooting. Highlights too can suffer with normal colour presets, especially if you compensate for missing shadows by upping exposure – light sources and shiny surfaces can become ugly splotches of white with ugly neon outlines. The image looks contrasty but there is not a gradual fall-off from shadows to black, and there is an overall reduction in dark detail. With DSLRs you are usually stuck to an approximation of what the original footage looks like.Īs well as that, blacks tend to be crushed easily – shadow detail disappears and turns black. You can customise the LUT curve on a graph yourself using grading software or plugins in your NLE (non-linear-editor) package.ĭSLR footage is nothing like a RAW image or 250Mbit ProRes 4-4-4 footage where so much colour data is stored in each frame that you can play with it willfully and extract colours that are not apparent in the original footage. In practical terms you just need to know that using Technicolor’s preset LUT will grade your image and remove the flat grey mist from ungraded CineStyle footage, making colour more lifelike but keeping more dynamic range and smoother gradated tone. LUT stands for look-up-table – in techie terms a LUT consists of a table of cross referencing values, from 0-255 (8bit colour) which form a curve when plotted on a graph. Gone are the questions about which picture profile to choose – now you do it afterwards when you edit the footage, and it can be changed at any time.Īs well as CineStyle the LUT plugin is also free! Think of CineStyle not as a picture profile but essentially an empty vessel for dropping your LUT into. I have had a LUT of fun with the CineStyle picture profile, it really does make for an image with much more dynamic range, and colour that you can change afterwards to any picture profile, rather than only at the time of shooting! Here is a guide on how to do all that, with Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere CS5. The key to good looking CineStyle footage on Canon DSLRs is a LUT curve. Cinestyle has transformed my Canon DSLR and footage looks so cinematic with it.
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