I Got Engaged: Film Emulation Update

This will be a briefer article than usual, but since I’ve updated the film emulation pipeline I wanted to say something about it.

In April of 2021, I finally got up the nerve to ask the question I should have asked years ago.

Despite being together for half a decade, we hardly have any pictures together. It’s not because we don’t like to take pictures (I do it professionally), but we are always so busy enjoying the moment we forget to document it.

Knowing this ahead of time, the night before we travelled Bar Harbor, I packed the car with a suitcase, water, snacks, a tripod, an A7S, and a Ninja V.

Enhanced for detail.

This is where we move firmly into the #NerdyFilmTechStuff

• I decided to capture the entire video in SLog2, which I pretty vocally don’t like. This was because of the dynamic range benefits, and the challenge of exposing using scopes and tools, rather than my eye. The footage itself was captured in ProRes LT, a lightweight codec that still captures more than the standard A7S SD card ever could.
  The results are enlightening, but more on SLog2 and file formats in the future.

• For this video I wanted the image to feel very naturalistic, with a subtle overall grade that would bring out the natural colors (namely, grey and blue) in the environment. By the end of the video, when the sun comes out, I adopted a slightly more saturated, stylized approach to the grade.

• The bloom and grain effects (discussed in Part 1 and Part 2) were dialed back to a minimum.
  Halation and gate weave were entirely removed,
  The grain applied was also softened slightly with a .2 gaussian blur, and placed at half opacity in the overlay blend mode.

• The 4K image was edited in a 1080p timeline for efficiency, and exported in 4K.
  The video is designed for online delivery, where 4K support is not an essential piece (despite it’s benefits for YouTube upload)

And that’s all for now! More on the film emulation and engagement video in the future.