Teasin’…

An independent film with influences ranging from Japanese Cinema, classic Road-Movies, Graphic Design & Music Videos. Currently In Production.

Comp-Fu Answers Part 2

Once again I’ve pulled out keywords from my piwik reports!

graphics to rec709 lut
— anonymous

“Graphics” can mean a dozen things. If you have designed some stuff in Photoshop or taken screenshots, for example, they are probably in sRGB. To convert it in Nuke for a rec709 project, just select sRGB in the read node. This will linearize it and if you put on the rec709 LUT you’ll see that it appears a bit darker than in Photoshop. In Fusion, you can convert the image using the Gamut tool (input sRGB, output ITU-B-R.709, both gamma checkboxes enabled).

in fusion for which reason there is no gamma slider??
— anonymous

That made me laugh. All I could think of is this meme 🙂

I guess you mean the nifty viewer controls that Nuke has? You need to add a viewer LUT for this manually. There’s the GainGamma Fuse that ships with Fusion or my gpu accelerated sRGB/rec709 LUTs.

nuke ramp tutorials
— anonymous

Oh come on. What’s next? A tutorial on how to prepare a peanut butter sandwich?!

how many lens flares in total recall
— anonymous

Well, I didn’t count them when I talked about the movie on my blog. But here’s somebody who did!

Skyfall

I’ve caught up on the latest installment of the Bond franchise – Skyfall.

Short verdict: If you love formulaic Bond movies, this one’s not for you. If you are sick of orange-teal color grading, skip it as well. Skyfall fits well into our times, where it’s enough for a blockbuster action movie to be filmed well so it can get tagged as “gritty” by the marketing department. It has references to the Bond franchise here and there but overall the plot is ludicrous and far from original (chase across the roofs of Istanbul like in The International and Taken 2? Check.). But at least the movie really is well-made in terms of cinematography and stunts.

orange/teal right down to the interior design and user interfaces

The movie has a particularly nice last act. No far-fetched showdown on a space station or a sinking building in Venice (although some might say that this is what made Bond movies Bond movies). It was slow-paced, it had nice cinematography and a refreshing lack of in-your-face CGI and gadgets.

On the other hand, most of the movie belongs into the fantasy genre. It starts right off with Bond surviving a 100 meter fall from a bridge and goes on with the numerous depictions of 90’s style computer hacking. You know, giant screens with lots of motion graphics and random numbers on it, technobabble and computers popping up animated “ha ha you’ve been hacked” messages. Computers are used as a lazy plot device that can do anything whenever the scriptwriters require it to. In other words: it’s magic, which makes me think of Skyfall as a high tech Harry Potter movie.

Oh no! An encryption algorithm that only 6 people in the world know about! Let’s just look for the letters that are not hex numbers and we’ve got the key.

6/10 (the “at least it wasn’t THAT bad” level)

Comp-Fu Answers Part 1

Welcome to my new show where I answer questions that are based on google searches that brought users to my website. (disclaimer: I’m using piwik for web site statistics and search keywords are transmitted by the user’s browser. It’s anonymous though, so relax.)

what is color space and color temperature
— anonymous

Thanks for your question, Mr Anonymous. Color Space and Color Temperature can be looked up on Wikipedia. In VFX specifically, the term color space usually means the way that a color is being split into separate channels for digital processing. RGB by default (red, green and blue channels). It can be converted back and forth to spaces like HLS, Lab, YUV and so on where you still have red, green and blue channels but now each channel contains a different color attribute. In HLS, the red channel contains a color’s hue, for example.

Color temperature is a measure for how cool or warm an image appears (top row of the image). It has a well-defined physical background but basically it’s your white balance setting. It can be adjusted in most RAW converters and although it’s not a color space you can adjust it using the TMI system which includes a magenta-green-value in addition to the orange-blue color temperature axis. It’s available in Shake and Nuke and I’ve made a macro that brings it to Fusion.

color temperature in Nuke
— anonymous

I think there’s no color temperature node in Nuke, but I adjust the temperature of an image using a Gain adjustment:

Open the gain color wheel and enable the TMI sliders if they’re not yet visible. Then, adjust the T slider to your liking. The image might appear brighter or darker now so as a second step, I use the V slider of the HSV group and bring it back to 1.0. This makes sure that the image stays as bright as before (that’s not totally true, but it’s a good rule of thumb. Of course you can tweak every slider to your liking).

I choose the ColorCorrector instead of Grade or Multiply because it has a saturation slider that is applied before the gain and can be used to make the warm or cold tint of an image stronger (if you desaturate the image completely before tinting you’re doing what Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation adjustment calls colorizing the image).

game of thrones color grading
— anonymous

That’s funny. I’m no authority but a while ago I made a blog post on that topic. And coincidentally it involves color temperature 🙂

Hansel & Gretel: Wife Beaters

The-Editing-Room.com has a humorous script of Hansel & Gretel which I watched recently as well. After being slightly enthusiastic about the trailer’s vfx and steam punk-y flair I gotta say that Hansel & Gretel is an even bigger piece of crap than I had feared.

I can recommend it for people who enjoy watching women being hit into the guts and faces with blunt objects.

“Believe me, honey, this hurts me more than it hurts you.”

“Hello, I’d like to apply for the position of screenwriter. I have recently divorced my wife and am willing to weave my sick revenge fantasies into the plot…”

I applaud the movie for using make-up effects for witches and trolls, some aerial shots looked like well-done miniatures and a lot of splatter stuff felt like practical SFX as well. I don’t need this to be VFX all the time. Had they been consistent with it, the movie might have been a little gem in an era of CGI.

But towards the end – or rather mere seconds before the credits start rolling – we are treated with some top-notch bullet-time Krakatoa particles full-CG expensive eyecandy which feels awkwardly out of place. After all, the first 99% of the movie’s effects were not much better than what TV shows like Buffy or Grimm are doing. For example, not a single witch-flying-away-on-broom effect looked good.

I don’t really accuse it of weirdly budgeted effects or even plot inconsistencies. Come on, it’s a popcorn fantasy movie. I accuse it of being boring boring boring. That feeling creeps in after just a couple of minutes of watching dialog scenes that consist mostly of awkward silence. It’s like the actors are thinking “I’ve delivered my line, why doesn’t anybody yell “CUT” already?!” and it shows on their faces.

That, and the misogyny.

rating: 3/10 (the “way below expectations” level where it’s in the company of Uwe Boll productions like “BloodRayne” or “Alone in the Dark”)

Trailer Shot

The fruits of my labor (and Jan’s plus of a bunch of other hard-working colleagues in lighting, animation and fx simulation of course).

Pacific Rim

Wow, this looks like a well-made life action version of Neon Genesis Evangelion!

And maybe it’s actually enjoyable because apparently it doesn’t go the Transformers route of US military porn with a douchebag teenager and a tits and ass girlfriend. But after having suffered through Transformers with people around me drooling everytime they saw Megan Fox on screen… I’m kinda worried that today’s audiences actually expect a giant robot movie to have these things 🙂