COLOUR SPECIAL
THREADING THE NEEDLE OF
M odern cinematography standards, and while controlling how colours render on cinema or TV screens has never been trivial, the interaction between all those options can make colour feel more technical and less creative than we’d like. There was once a time when electronic cameras made pictures from one shade of red, green and blue. Brightness was defined by whatever a cathode ray tube could achieve. Back then, 700 pixels per line was a lot, and we were happy to accept that green simply meant whatever the phosphors in that tube would create. Even so, in the early eighties, long before electronic cameras became digital cameras, Panavision had been willing to adjust the internals of a standard-definition video camera (a CEI 310, which subsequently became offers people a lot of options. That can sometimes be a euphemism for too many
Colour science may have evolved, but modern set-ups are not immune to old challenges, discovers Phil Rhodes
WORDS PHIL RHODES
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