Las Vegas – Whilst exploring the sprawling exhibit halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center at the National Association of Broadcasters conference aka NABShow 2011, I heard some buzzing about Technicolor at the Canon booth. With my trusty Canon 7D and Rode Videomic slung over my weary shoulder, I made a beeline towards a quirky but amiable gentleman named Joe, tucked away in the shadows before a small table, representing all on his ownsome for the mighty Technicolor.

Joe explained that for the past year Technicolor decided to respond in kind to the many custom picture styles and gamma curves that have been passed around online, and – perhaps to alleviate their own headaches in post as HDSLRs become increasingly used and accepted a a broadcast ingestion medium – create their very own, Technicolor branded Picture Style they call CineStyle.

“But I heard that all these gamma curves are just messing around with Canon’s built in limitations, so its really just artificially manufacturing a sense of increased depth, shadow detail etc. – potentially introducing digital artifacts and so on, so what is Technicolor doing?” – you might ask.

Well, for starters, Joe confided that they were able to work with Canon to get in “a little deeper” than regular users in getting access to the gamma curves. “Not as much as we would have liked, but at least we were able to get a bit more control than the average user might.”

Second, when the Technicolor Cinestyle is selected, it shifts the standard H.264 REC709 color space used to log color space; video images and stills alike are recorded in log color space, the first implementation of its kind for Canon EOS cameras.

It is very important to note here, that log doesn’t automatically mean better than REC709. In fact, one can’t simply open a log-captured file and start pushing a pulling colors at it, expecting to get beautiful results. Just like you convert into log color space, you need a method for essentially converting back out of it. Log-captured files will look VERY flat, desaturated, almost silver in nature. When preparing to work on such files, one must apply an appropriate S-curved gamma to it to get back into something resembling the sort of picture we want to achieve.

Fortunately, if you are expecting to take your footage straight to Technicolor for color mastering, the Cinestyle was designed and optimized for Technicolor’s post pipeline, though the files can be used with an NLE.

In addition to the gamma curve / Picture Style that is Cinestyle, this new picture style is specifically designed for the needs of cinematographers, optimized to work with Technicolor’s DP Lights and on-set color-correction system. So start looking for a good DIT with whom to consult whilst on set!

Now for the really good news: the Technicolor Cinestyle will be available absolutely free from their website: www.technicolor.com/CineStyle as of April 30th, 2011.

And i that wasn’t enough, Technicolor is planning the development of a series of additional “looks” to be deployed for Canon HDSLRs in the near future.

So, despite the fact that Canon reps were stone-faced when we pressed them about any potential firmware updates in the near future, at least the good people at Technicolor were there, looking out for us, championing the improvement and standard of good image capture, and that they are giving it away for free is newsworthy enough for us to share the love, emphatically.

View or download a PDF from Kodak about Conversion of 10-bit Log Film Data To 8-bit Linear or Video Data (click to open or Save Link As to your desktop)

What do you think of this article? Will you use Technicolor’s Cinestyle? Please post your thoughts in the comments section…