Matching Clips

[Marcelo Cosme]

Hello.
I have a question that should be for some as well.
We currently work with various camera types, codecs, and sensor sizes, all of which end up influencing the final file. What process do you have for matching between dji drones for example and cameras like Red, Arri BMCC and F55. I honestly am never happy with the result, it may be perfectionism but it can also be a failure in my work.

Thank you!

[Thomas Singh]

Hi Marcelo, this is where ACES plays a role and the reason why it have a chance to be the industry standard the next years. @Margus Voll can probably elaborate some on the advantage when it comes to matching different footage with ACES.

[Nicolas Hanson]

My 'weapon' is actually to use an invert LUT (built into Resolve) on all the linear footage. When I got everything in 'log' I use a log to lin LUT and that gives me a great 'contrast starting point' at least. I also tend not to use white as absolute brightness as bending the highlights towards a warmer tone will help. If that fits the story of course ;-) 

[Margus Voll]

Think of ACES in colors like DPI on photography and print. REC will be like 100 DPI ACES is more like 2400.

Overall different camers getting to more similar baseline for sure helps but it should be doable without it also.
Matching different cameras sometimes is depending also how well different cameras have their color science made.

Why i use ACES as much as i can is to eliminate all that fuss around LUT management specially with VFX involved.
Overall i agree that in some ways you get more even starting point in a way but to me it is due to more clean transform
without any lut mayhem lets say Arri FIlm matrix removal from the footage for example.

[cameronrad]

From what I've read and seen, the ACES system seems pretty similar to the ICC system in photography. These screenshots are from the VES Practices and Standards book and show some of the structure of both systems.

ICC:

 

ACES:

 

 

Typically with stills to match different cameras, I create either ICC profiles, DNG Profiles, or LUTs under different lighting (Daylight, Tungsten, Fluorescent) with a Colorchecker SG chart and will use that as a baseline adjustment for the cameras. I know with Resolve you can use the 24 patch colorchecker, however from my experience with stills I don't think that 24 patches is nearly enough to get a quality match in my opinion. This also seems like a good target for matching/calibrating.  http://www.basiccolor.de/basiccolor-dcam-target-en/ It has more patches than a Colorchecker SG and it has a blackbox target

Edited April 20, 2017 by cameronrad

[Abby Bader]

There should be a difference, and when the production use cheap cameras they should expect cheaper looking images. That said, I always start every session with balancing and matching contrast levels. Reducing and hue-shifting the strong video colors from the cheap cameras often help.

[Margus Voll]

8 hours ago, Abby Bader said:

There should be a difference, and when the production use cheap cameras they should expect cheaper looking images. That said, I always start every session with balancing and matching contrast levels. Reducing and hue-shifting the strong video colors from the cheap cameras often help.

This is something i have done with documentaries when they shoot those Sony "consumer" cams. Those with bad colors i mean.