COLOUR SCIENCE TECH
TO HAVE ANY LIGHT BE ANY COLOUR at the tap of a phone screen IS A REVELATION”
Panacam) to make it more useful in drama production. MAXIMUM FLEXIBILITY Panacam did not take the world by storm, but it did begin a quest for better colour in electronic camera equipment, which is still piling options on us today. Maybe a decade later, monitors started learning to make light using something other than glow-worm chemistry. Both brightness and colour range improved. Shortly after, cameras started to match that ambition with improved capabilities of their own, to the point that monitors had to start accounting for what cameras were doing. For decades, some of the most respected material ever shot used monochrome video taps. Now we happily select colour space, brightness encoding and a creative colour profile in pursuit of confidence that all those things are correctly configured.
It’s no surprise, then, that the modern demand for flexible, capable on-set monitoring soared at the same time as complexity in colour handling. The recent acquisition of Flanders Scientific by Atomos puts both the precision and affordable options under the same roof, consolidating what is now a mature market in monitoring that’s flexible enough to handle modern camera technique. Meanwhile, having added more moving parts to an already- complex machine, it’s unsurprising that DCS Labs’ line of precision colour reference materials (as well as more universal alternatives like the Macbeth chart) were widely adopted as a way of expressing what things should look like. Later, trade show booths were stacked with monitors that were bright enough to test sunscreen, and with a deep enough primary green to handle mysterious concepts like deep turquoise, which had previously been beyond broadcast
GOLDEN AGE Kodak’s VERITA 200D family of motion picture film stock (above); Aputure’s NOVA II uses the BLAIR light engine (left)
TV. Then, just as big streamers started demanding a wide colour gamut and high dynamic range, LED lights started offering colours to take advantage of it. Early LED designs gave us something similar to white light, but the temptation of full colour mixing, and the improved modern whites arising from more colour channels, was too much to resist. Recent technologies, typified by Aputure’s BLAIR engine, don’t even use a white-emitting LED to create quality daylight. Today’s lights, cameras and monitors can handle almost any colour, and we haven’t even talked about post- production. Adobe’s recent interest in new colour features addresses the fact that people now walk into film school fully aware of how critical grading is, and it
31
DEFINITIONMAGS
Powered by FlippingBook