The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP005: Film Print Emulation (FPE)

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Film print emulation (FPE for short) is an often discussed, but often confusing topic of discussion for DPs, colorists, and others working in postproduction. In this episode of The Offset Podcast, Robbie & Joey discuss what film print emulation can mean these days and how there are things to like about pursuing a filmic look, things to avoid, and how different people mean different things when discussing FPE. 

Hey, welcome back to the Offset Podcast. This week, Robbie and I are talking about something that colorists have been talking about for a long time. Film print emulation. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Joey, film, huh?

It's a thing, I hear, that our industry is largely based on for the past 100 or so years. Film, when you say film to somebody, it conjures all sorts of things, right? From nostalgia of your first movie theater experience, for some of us, it might be the smell of chemicals in our nose as the film develops, right? For some of us, it might be this thing that we've only read about in online and in books, right? And never have had any practical experience with. Over the past, I think, over the past 20 or so years, as we have transitioned from, you know, really film acquisition as a key part of the acquisition chain to digital acquisition, you know, analog acquisition with analog cameras and then finally to digital cameras now, digital cinema. cameras. Film has for most of us, kind of the actual film part of it has kind of left the lexicon of what we do day in and day out. Not a lot of us are handling actual film. Not of us are working on projects that originated on film. There might be some of us that are still doing projects that have ultimate distribution back to film, right? That's true for some people. But regardless of where you stand, there is this love affair. about all things film, right?

One only has to Google the phrase film print emulation, or FPE, for short, to be overwhelmed. I hate the acronym. Yeah, very quickly be overwhelmed with a million Google returns. Some people selling products and Luts and O-FX and various things. We're not going to call them all charlatans. But. And then there's some people who are going to espouse the beautifulness of film and how digital sucks and how some people go, you know, digital's the best and film sucks.

There's a lot to this man. And in the past 20 years, film print emulation has become a hot button topic for a lot of colorists. And I wanted to talk about that today because I think that there are some pros. There are some cons. And there, as you said, there's some Charlton stuff mixed in where. It's just, you know, nobody knows what they're talking about. So let's talk about film print emulation. And I want to start with what does that mean to you, Joey to Anna?

What does FPE mean? Because honestly, it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Yeah. And that's kind of the problem with it is film print emulation means whatever you want it to mean. Right? Let's break it down a little bit. film print. So are we emulating the printed display of a film? Or are we emulating the color characteristics of the negative film? Or are we emulating the whole process? And when you start

looking at tools to do some of this, and you start looking at visually evaluating things in this context, you know, every film process is different. And historically, films have been made with chemical processes and color timed with chemical processes, and they were very, very specifically supervised to that project. That's why when big, big movies shoot on film, they buy gigantic batches of film so they will be from the same production run

because that's how finicky some of this chemistry is. They don't want big shifts up and down in various directions from, oh, you know, this source film was shot, was manufactured two years before that one. So there is kind of the technical side of film print emulation, and there's kind of the creative side of film manipulation. I'm not a firm believer in the technical side, because like I said, all film processes can be emulated,

but every film process is different. So, you know, this really started early in the days of what was called Digital Intermediate, where you shot a film on film, brought it into a computer digitally, and monitored it under a transform to emulate what the final print would look like. So you could manipulate it digitally with the goal of printing it back out into film

and having visual consistency from what you saw digitally to what is now in film. But what now colorists are doing is taking digital sources and wanting to pretend like it's looking like it was gone through this film process for creative reasons.

and then printing it back out to digital. So when you get on the forums and you get on the people selling Luts and they say, oh, subtractive film process, three layers, blah, blah, blah, blah on my Lut. That's magical. That'll be $1,000. I'm sorry, they're talking out of their rear ends

because if they were to emulate on a technical level, a particular exposure on a particular, film with a particular print. You could do this with test patterns and having access to a lab and very high quality measurement tools. You can do this, how the digital intermediate process used to work, right? They would run it through the whole process, profile every step so they could emulate it digitally. Right.

Your only film print emulating that one film process. And that lab in particular, right? And that lab. Right. And that time. Right. You know? So to me, the goal of...

an accurate film print emulation is just you're trying to hit a moving target and there's no point. Yeah, well, I mean, so you hit on a good point here that I think is something that is a distinction that is important to make. I think that you're right that FPE in large attempt, it's about what is your goal? Are you trying to emulate the distribution medium of film and what it looks like projected on a screen, playing off a projector, you know, that kind of look. Or are you trying to recreate the acquisition aesthetic and look and feel of the actual,

you know, an actual acquired thing on film, right? And they're kind of two different things. I think as an acquisition medium, it's a pretty good goal to have the film look as an acquisition medium as a look, as a feel to a guy. Because honestly, I love the look of a lot of. acquired film, right? The other side of it, the distribution side, I don't really understand so much because I don't know about you, but I'm sure you have, you know, most people have been to a theater where everything kind of looks like crap, right? The print has been beat up,

it's, you know, there's scratches, there's, you know, gate weave, there's all these things that we have from a nostalgia point of view associated with film. but they're crap, right? Like, gate weave and like, you know, jitter and all, like, that's not good, right? It's just a byproduct of them. It's a mistake of the, you know, the handling of the film, the projector, the process, whatever, right?

So I think you have to be, when you go into this, regardless of whether you're doing it from a technical or creative thing, have to realize what your goal is there. And I personally think it's a, it's a perfectly good thing, or it might be a little lofty, but it's a perfectly good thing to try to treat your digital sources so they look, behave, feel a little bit more like film.

But the distribution side of it, what it looks like in the theater and those prints, eh, I'm a little, I'm a little iffy on. Yeah, and that's why you get into what I call the creative side of it. And that's where it actually gets a little bit of fun.

It does. Because there's a million intangible aspects that go into the characterization of what an image looks like, whether it be a film image, digital image, By the time it gets to our eyes, it's not film or digital, right?

It's just photons. Right. So there are a million different aspects to that image formation process that you can react to creatively. To me, my goal when I'm doing any kind of creative look is to take the things that I feel aesthetically work with the mood of the project and the creative needs of the project and look good. Yeah. And put them in and the things that don't don't put them in. So I take a builder's approach to it. I love grain.

I think grain is a great way of adding entropy to an image that your brain will interpret as detail. That's why a slightly grainy image usually appears a little bit sharper because you've got a little bit more localized contrast around the edges where the grain is and your brain likes that. It also helps dither out banding and stuff like that.

And it's just in general a very aesthetic thing that I like. Some people like exceptionally smooth images because they feel modern and clean and fresh. And that's fine too. That's a creative decision. When it comes to color for film prelimulation, there's a lot of commonalities, I think, that people associate with film, but they're really not part of film. It's just a lot of film over the time has had color response similar to this. It's not all film, but usually, and Robbie, you've seen this in basically every project I've ever graded. I like to push pure blues

To Sianney Into a little bit more sian-y teal You know not to say the teal orange thing But just like I like my blues To have a little bit more green in them Than real blue To the point where when I see like a deep pure Like primary blue

I almost kind of react negatively To be like eh That looks kind of I hate to use the term of videoe Because again all of this is subjective And it's not actually inherent to the format, but it looks a little video to me. Yeah, I don't know.

I get it. So grain is one of them. I think you're right. Some of that look and color, I think, is another one. Actually, we'll put it in the show notes here. But company three colorist Ivan Lucas, who just did the grade on the Barbie film, who's incredible colors. I love his work.

He has a really, really rich history of proper photochemical development from his time working in France and now in the U.S. Anyway, he's just gifted. He has a great discussion about kind of the initial process of FPE and kind of choosing proper what transforms to work under, as you were talking about in the days of digital intermediate, he still kind of works that way. And that's an interesting thing. And even then, he kind of basically describes of it as like a pick and choose, try to see what works.

So I know what gives us the best feel for the film, that kind of stuff, right? So you mentioned the grain, you mentioned kind of filmish color, right, trying to emulate some stocks or what, you know, the response, I guess, of some, of some acquisition stocks. I think of a couple other things in that builder's equation. I think about halation, right, and how things handle edges. I think about blooming and highlight roll off a lot. That, to me, is potentially one of the biggest things about an FPE when it's convincing is how the highlight, because, you know, in film, you don't really.

really, I mean, you don't, you don't clip in the same way that. There's no pure white. Right, you don't clip in the same way that you do in a digital image, right? So that, that knee, that roll off going into, you know, pure white is a lot. Which is essentially transparent on the film. Yeah, it's a lot softer, a lot more aesthetically pleasing. Funny enough, that's actually one of the complaints that a lot of people have about like Aces workflows, that they do that too much, which I kind of like, but that's another point.

Another one is, besides grain is, you know, dirt, scratches, we have, you know, gate weave, we have jitter. That to be capped and obvious here, but here's a big one. I think that people often overlook about FPE is temporal resolution too about what the source is, right? People are like, oh, well, I shot in 60p and now I want it to look like film. Well, guess what? You don't have a fighting chance because 60P is... But that's the thing, though.

You know, people have also been shooting high-speed film for slow-mo for hundreds of years. Looks completely different, temporarily. I actually had, and I know I've told you this story before, but I think it's very relevant. I was working for a new client and they're like, yeah, can we do like a film look on this? Yeah. I'm like, yeah, of course. I started pushing all my shadows blue. I started doing hue versus hue and putting grain all over it.

I was like, yeah, this is an awesome film print look. Yeah. They were like, no, but it's like, now it's just, it's still way too smooth. Well, they weren't even talking about color. They weren't talking about grain. This was 60i television. footage, I'm sorry, 60P HD footage from a major sports broadcaster, so very good temporal resolution. They wanted it to stutter like 24P. That's all they wanted. They wanted me to put a fake

frame rate limitation on it. Everything else we threw out in the garbage. This is my, this is my first. What do you mean by Phil? This is my first experience with this. And I think a lot of other people who are like me in their mid-40s, going back to the early 2000s, probably have this experience, you know, Graham Natress, who's now with Red, used to sell a set of tools, plugins for Final Cup Pro that gave a 24P look. And at that time, you remember correctly, that was the panasonic, what was it, the DV-100 or whatever that camera was, that was doing pull-down to get back. Reversible pull-down. To get back to 23-99, all that time. So, you know, listen, if you're going to, if you even want to get in the, the, the,

the universe of talking about FPE, your temporal resolution is a key component of that, right? And how that motion, you know, and even, not even just shooting that frame rate, shooting, you know, 180 degree shutter or whatever various shutter speeds that are associated with a, with a film camera, right? If you're shooting, you know, too fast of a shutter, right?

You're going to get that cicado look. Things are not going to motion blur. You're going to have, you know, it's just not going to feel that way. You know, I think so. And it's funny because this, despite the romanticism of film and everybody in our industry basically kind of touting film projection as the benchmark for so many years, this is completely subjective. The kids these days like high frame rates because they play it on their video games. And what's funny is, I go back to, my dad was a broadcast engineer for CBS News.

He was very early in innovating with electronic news gathering. he was a broadcast engineer working with, you know, essentially 60 frame a second interlaced footage for decades. Yeah. You know, he still, to this day, will go to movies and complain that the motion is too stuttery. Every time they move the camera horizontally, it's all stuttery, they need a higher frame rate. We look better than this in the news and the 60s on CBS, you know. So it is a complete, every aspect of this imaging pipeline is completely subjective. Well, it's, dude, it's even, it's even like the subjectiveness of it is also like, it's almost like, it's definitely genre based, but it's also regional based too.

Absolutely. I remember a couple years ago, we were traveling to China to do some training with the Flanders Scientific team as part of BIR TV. And at the time, you had come along. It was me, you, Patrick Inhofer, and Dan Moran. And Dan, who's just an unbelievable creative colorist, has, you know, really built up a lot of his portfolio with his FPE kind of dirty, grungy, textured kind of looks. And he was doing a class on FPE for this group at BIRTV in Beijing, China. And it was, you know, 200 people in the room. And he was doing his thing.

And, you know, all the Westerners standing there were like, man, this is cool. this is so awesome looking like I love it and he like literally legitimately getting questions of like why are you degradating the image like why are you making it so much grain yeah why is it less sharp now why are you like you know all those kind of things right so I think um it's really going to depend on the genre and the kind of mood but I wanted to ask you kind of just switch gears here for a second so as you kind of alluded to at the top of this conversation there are people who are doing FPEs

F.E. in a very scientific measured way, right? I've heard of people, even friends and colleagues of us who were like, oh, I got a hold of some film stock. I put it in my freezer, so it wouldn't degrade. And one day I'm going to take it out, and I'm going to put a meter on it. What are those things called? Densilometer or whatever they're called. And put it on it and measured the density of the film. So there are people who are doing this in a very scientific measured way that it's repeatable. To be honest with you, I only understand about 50% of it, but they are doing that work. And then there are people, as you said, that are literally just problematically in a plugin

or a DCTL or something doing this kind of work. And I wanted to ask you, these new tools that we have, is that a cop-out to do something, you know, use something like film convert or deanser or something like that. So, you know, you get to that technical side of you know, you're scanning the film, you're putting test patterns through the entire process.

Like I said earlier, you're emulating, you can very accurately emulate one film process. I think that's a fantastic starting point for building a creative film emulation, right? But let's say you had a bunch of old film stock in your freezer and you ran it through an entire profiling process with the most accurate instrument, in the world, right? You still were only profiling that set of film developed how that film was

developed and that chemistry at that time. And there's some variance there, sure. There's always and there's a lot of variance there, which is why, like we said, the olden days of doing digital intermediate, they did these processes continuously through the production. I think it's a great starting point. And a lot of the companies like film convert, DeHancer and some of the other film print plugins that are coming out, they go through those processes. as their base, right? But then they give you lots of modification controls to work with on top of that

because I promise you, if you just take the base settings of a particular film stock from any of those plugins and you go and shoot that film stock and have it professionally developed and professionally scanned and bring it in

and then apply a display transform to it so you can see it. It's not going to match exactly. There's too many different variables. But I bet you could dial it into match for that particular context, which is important to think about too, especially when you're dealing with films that have mixed sources.

Say you do have some film sources in your overall project and you need to match them together. That's when you start thinking about how do we bring this in and emulate the negative sides of film that we creatively might not want to do but to make the video stuff flow with the film, then yes, we need to emulate the same gate weave, halation, etc., that's in the film in the video stuff

so you can cut between them, right? Halation's a big one. Hallation is one of those things that it's love it or hate it. It is inherent to film. If you don't know what halation is, and it's funny because we're talking about halation in a film print emulation podcast,

but halation happens on the film negative, not on the film print. Right. Right. Hallation is you shoot film. There's three dye layers of film. roughly equating to your reds, greens, and blues. It's not exactly the same. It's relating to dye color, not...

Yeah, I get it. But yes, you essentially have what represents the red, green, and blue layers. Then you have the back of the camera. Light hits through that film, bounces off the back of the camera, hits the back of the film, starts exposing it again,

especially around harsh edges with a lot of contrast, which is why a lot of... basically all motion picture film has a black, what they call anti-hosephemy, elation layer on the back of it. That antiholation layer is not perfect on any film.

So you still get kind of little red flares around bright, high contrast edges that diffuse into the grain in what I think is a very pretty thing. And it can be confused a little bit for lensing issues sometimes, right? It can be confused a little bit sometimes as like, chromatic aberration kind of issue, kind of thing like that. But that's... The reason why it's usually red is because that's the last layer. Yep.

you know there has been halation has been a fad recently right and I'm guilty of it too somebody's like I put halation on this thing I'm like oh I'm gonna put halation on this thing

I'm gonna make my own halation it's gonna be better than your halation they just came up with a halation plugin it's awesome their halation plugins better resolve added a halation plug in oh who's got the best halation well nobody's really coming back to think is this really a good idea

yeah you know it's like you were so preoccupied with whether you could you didn't really think whether you should. And I think in a lot of cases, I don't know, I really like the look of it. But it only goes hand in hand with a nice heavy grain, in my opinion, because that flare around the edge has to diffuse into grain,

not into pure smoothness. I agree. I think one of the interesting things to me that's happening in FPE these days, and it's not obtainable for us mere mortals, right? but at the high end, I'm thinking of, for example, the Dune film from a couple years ago, right? Where they actually printed the film and then brought it back in to get that characteristic of the print, right? I mean, and that's like, you know, as far as I'm concerned, like, that's the right way to do it, right? Because you're actually using the actual medium.

But at the same time, I look at that sometimes. and I have conversations with people that are smarter than I am who are more versed on the technical and creative details of film pipelines than I am. And I got to be honest with you, man. Sometimes I just don't see the minute differences, right? I am partly convinced that people see things in emulations that are not actually there. That they're convincing themselves of something. about this magical thing called film that doesn't really have an additive effect in a, in a way that the average viewer would notice. Now, their argument is, yeah, of course,

it's not something that you can obviously point out. It's a feel. It's a, it's a, it's a perceptional thing, you know, a perceptual thing. I don't know, man. I just look at something like that. I watched the theater. I could tell that, you know, the filminess of it. Yeah, but I wasn't like, oh my God, this would be. a totally different film if it was, you know, completely, you know, had taken the step out and done an emulation of some sort of... I think, like, Dune looked amazing. It did. Take nothing from it. It looked amazing. But like, I think the process of doing a film out and then bringing it back in is essentially

seeding some of your creative control to randomness. Which is a thing. I get it. Which is a thing, you know, and you could always tweak it later. And obviously, the end result was wonderful. It's an interesting approach I don't think I would call it the right way to do it Because again, you're seating some creative control To random analog error Okay, so let me say a little differently

I think it is it's certainly a way of doing it But I guess the broader point that I'm trying to make And this is going to be a really unpopular thing I think people are going to think I'm throwing daggers, right? I just think there are some people that are a little bit of leadless about this right that are just sort of like my recipe my way of doing it is the right way of doing it this is the only way that we can get back to this film look you know and all kind of stuff and i i read these things as you do and as our listeners probably do ad nauseum and i just am like who cares right

there's a there's an adage that my dad always has always said to me for my whole life playing golf right and that is there are no pictures on the scorecard right and and What I mean in this conversation is the process, you can talk about it right or wrong, you know, the particulars of grain versus halation versus this dye layer or whatever, right? All that really matters is at the end of the day, it gets you to the place that you want to get to, right? And whether you're doing that by buying, you know, hundreds of thousands of feet of actual film and shooting a film that way or doing a print back to film like Dune did or whatever, that's not better, in my opinion, than doing it with a tool like film box or doing it with, you know, grain inhalation built in to resolve, right? All that really matters is that that look and the feel and the stylistic part works for everybody, right?

There's no right or wrong way of doing this. And what I get particularly, well, I'm mixed by is a certain set of our industry. trying to make the people that like clean, pristine, sharp-looking images, make them try to feel like they're, you know, that they're wrong, that they're lower on the totem pole, that those kind of images. I mean, in those people's defense, they are kind of wrong. But, you know, but it doesn't matter, right? If you're doing, if you're doing a commercial for, I don't know, a tech company, right? and it's supposed to be clean high-tech looking. The last thing that you want is freaking blooming and grain everywhere on that spot, right? And so it's really like I find a lot of the FPE elitists think it's a for everything kind of thing.

And if you're not doing it for everything, you're doing something wrong. I definitely fall into that category sometimes. You know, you get into this rhythm of I really like this part of the look, part of the look, this part of the look. So I keep bringing those into my projects, right? And you're right. It's not right for every project. And just to backtrack a little bit, we were talking about some of the plugins and the elitism that goes on with this. I think anybody overtouting the pure technical accuracy of whatever their film emulation solution is, that's a huge red flag. These are creative tools. Like I said, you could emulate one film

process. You can't emulate all film processes. If the big, The big selling point is we are claiming to be the most accurate and accurate has creative value, then no. I think that's where you get into charlatanism. Whereas, you know, I have no association with them, but I think film convert is a fantastic plug-in. Yeah. Because one, I can use it in my color-managed pipeline, right? None of these tools matter if you can't use them in a modern color-managed pipeline. I agree.

Right? Because then I can't use it in my projects, right? film convert and some of these others just just sit into the pipeline very well and it lets me do a look that I really like the way it looks. I am never going to claim that that is accurate to this film or that film or whatever. I'm going to say this is how I want this project to look and I like it. So I think there's I think there's a certain set of people that are FPE lovers, but, but, are pragmatic in its approach and more importantly

really understand the pipeline at a deep level, right? Our buddy Toby Tompkins is one person who comes to mind. Colin Kelly is another person that comes to mind about this, right? I think that the average Joe is when they FPE, it's like, oh, cool,

film convert, lots of sliders, just crank everything to 10 and you're done, right? I think the smart people, the non-evangelical FPE folk, right? They're one side of this equation. The slap it on and put every single slider to 11 is the other side of the equation.

I think people like Toby and Colin those kind of colorists that I've learned a lot from over the years go, no, no, no, no, no. If we insert this part of it in this part of the pipeline, we get this result. Or if we insert this part of it over here further down the pipeline, we get that part.

But they're not, they're not dogmatic about it. using the knowledge that they have about the pipe, the film pipeline, and trying to emulate that and add value in the parts of the pipeline that they have access into, right? Yeah. And that, and that's, you know, that's, that's, that's a great thing. Like, I'm thinking back to, you know, when Cullen developed some of his, um, his initial DCTLs, right? You'll remember he had, uh, and I think he still sells them, but he had a negative part of

things. Mm-hmm. he had a print side of things, right? And so to me, that was like, just right there, I was like, oh, this is so smart. You understand the pipeline enough that you're breaking out these processes into different parts of the pipeline

rather than just this one, you know, general slap it on at the end and crank all the sliders to 11 kind of thing. Yeah, and just a quick, like, big up the Cullen for those plugins, they were, they, I think he still sells them and what he still currently has, very good creative look development tools.

I would say one of my favorite short films I ever graded was when we first got access to those plugins and I was really exploring them and it just had an overall look to it that I just absolutely loved. Yep, yep. And Cullen's a great example, again, because he really understands

the underlying pipeline, he's not just slapping it on there to slap it on there. It is pragmatic. It is intense. driven. And that's, and to me, that's the best, you know, I think I just, you know, when everybody mentions this, this, this, this, this FPE thing, my first thought is just, oh, you just mean slapping some grain on it and like, now it's femic, right? But that, you know, doing that scientific part about it and then taking the results of that scientific part about it and realizing that,

nope, I'm in a modern digital color correction tool. That has its own workflows with color managed pipelines, et cetera, et cetera. Let me insert where I can. can, that's the, now I'm going to use it again, that's the right way to do it from my point of view. Yeah, I agree with that. That is the, the kind of, that's the creative approach to take. This is a tool we're using as a tool. The big thing that people get mixed up with too, that I think is really important to mention is if you're being this heavy handed with an image effect on your, your image, you're really throwing away a lot of the DP and directors work, and they might not appreciate that.

If you talk to, if you look at any of, okay, let's go back to the name, film print emulation. When you hear that, what are people as a whole associate it with? They don't actually associate it with a particular set of looks. They associate it with the perception of high quality and high budgets, right? I can make it look like this movie. Well, no, unless you hire those actors,

that set designer and those production and those lighting guys, you're not making it look like that movie because 98% of the final look of a film happens in front of the lens, right? So, to be able to kind of, again, when these guys claim

that we can technically make it super accurate to the look of such and such film, no, that's charlatanism. That's, they're making, they're talking out of their butt because they're just, the lighting, the production design, The creative intent, all of that matters so much more than a volumetric color manipulation

to make it look like a certain film process. You know, I don't know if you've seen it. I've only watched the first few episodes of it. But a shout out to our, at least to my color philosophical hero that is Walter Volpato. Walter created a show, I think it's the now in the second season called Winning Time, which is the show about the Los Angeles Lakers, the basketball team back when... It looks amazing.

The days of Cream al-Duljabar and Magic Johnson, that stuff. And it's... Honestly, it's pretty heavy-handed in the way that it looks. But you can... It's without... It's with considered thought because when you look at it, right? The look and feel of the color, the grain, everything actually matches up perfectly with...

wardrobe, makeup, set design. It's not like you had this modern, clean-looking story and in production design that just had some grain and some relation and stuff slapped on top of it. It makes sense for the period, 16-mill kind of look, right? 8,000 kind of look to. It makes sense for the period, the concept, the story, and those two things are not divorced, right? And to me, that's what I was trying to go back to, like, when I mentioned, like, you know, doing a tech ad that's supposed to be super, you know, super clean or whatever, right?

Like, that's just not the place for that kind of thing, right? And it's arguable, like, you know, I see, I see some shows, some films that I'm just clearly bothered by how much they tried to make it look like that, right? To make the film, like, the film part of it almost becomes like a character. Now, in certain situations, think like Wes Anderson, for example, right? It's just become the shtick. Everything about those is just off the charts like, what am I looking at? Later seasons of halt and catch fire.

Right, exactly, right? Which I love that one. It's very heavy-handed, but I loved it. Again, another thing where the story lines up to the way that the pictures are presented. Where I'm bothered about it is when something is, again, clearly clean. Storyline is modern, clean, and all of a sudden, the whole thing looks like 8mm film, but we're supposed to be in 2023, you know, like in an, like, it doesn't make sense, right? So I think, I think that, you know, kind of, you know, choosing wisely as Walter,

did and hit that team for that show. It makes perfect sense. And I would say one last thing about this is that subtlety I have found is a loss art with a lot of this process, right? In other words, and you said this at the beginning, like adding a little bit of subtle grain can like, you know, change perceived sharpness about things, right? That's a very subtle thing, right? You're talking about grain in that process that.

you have to really pixel peep to kind of see, right? And I think that subtlety in an FPE is something that a lot of people don't provide to it. They just go, I want 100% of this look and not taking the builder's approach that you have mentioned, you know? Yeah, and I think the other part of the equation that we haven't really talked about yet is the display part of the equation. We've talked about manipulating the images, the sources, stuff like that. But now we're moving into an era where while film projection used to be the gold standard for high fidelity display of an image, now it's not. Modern laser projectors for cinema, modern HDR TVs have a far better display capability of film projection. So how do you take these creative looks and bring them into that world?

That's where it gets harder. That's where you mentioned winning time that Walter graded looks great in HDR. Yeah. Right? There's no real like HDR film projection. There's no benchmark to compare, oh, well, if this was an HDR film print,

it would look like this. That doesn't exist, right? So we're taking those creative aspects and putting them into a modern context. And I think, like you said, in those situations, discretion is, and subtlety is so important because people want to say,

I've got the best film print look on this thing. But if you can't really notice it, if it's subtle, nobody's going to be like, oh, well, I want to buy that lot from you. Right. So part of it goes into this inflation of selling looks that is just pointless in my head. But I want to bring up another example for people to just watch and critically look at creatively

and just take in. and that is Ian Verdevik's work on glow Dude, hold a second I think that is the best looking Filmick, not film, but film Ike, HDR grade I have ever seen

And it's just all the right pieces and all the right places To make it work with the story Dude, hold on a second This is so funny Because we did not pre-plan this I am literally Because I couldn't remember the name of the show

I'm literally on IMDB right now I searched for Ian's name. And I was like, what was the name of that show? Yeah, in fact, glow, right? 2017 to 2019, 30 episodes. Absolutely, in my opinion, the best you can possibly do with this kind of creative style that we're talking about. Totally.

And Ian is, in my opinion, obviously a master caller. She's one of the best out there. But his level of subtlety, like he did a show that I'm also looking here on IMDB, The old man, which I think was Amazon. And that was again, it had obviously shot on modern cinema cameras, but took the builder approach to texture and look without hitting you over the head with it, right? And I think that's the important thing about FE. Another friend of ours who I think does great work in this regard, Brian Singler, who does a lot of high-end spot work, he brings a lot of that same. kind of thing, right? Like, I'm going to sprinkle this where it aids the look and feel of it,

but not hit you over the head with it. I think that's the thing about FPE that a lot of people are trying to do, and I think they do it poorly, is just, you know, to borrow the spinal tap analogy, everything to 11 with a particular look. And it's just like, no, I think you could do much better at two or three, right, than 11, and just sprinkle it in. And again, that, that's Sprinkle approach of not taking it to 11 only can work with good photography, good lighting, and good production design. Well, you said this earlier,

and maybe you didn't say this exact way, but I'll say it this way. Oftentimes, the decision to go heavy-handed is hiding something. Yeah. It's hiding mistakes. It's hiding problems. How many times have you sat with a client go,

well, we just make it black and white, I think it will look pretty good. Oh, yeah, it'd be perfect. We'll fix the white balance right. it up and it'll be art. You know, and I think that oftentimes is like, you know, when you're sitting there with a client and you're going, okay, what do I do? They're asking for

something. They're asking for something. They're asking for something. Oh, I know. Let's do a grainy 16-mill look. Right? And it's like, turn it to, and I, you know, so it is sometimes a little bit of a mask for, sort of for problems. You know, the programs that we just spoke about, I kind of sound like an old man saying programs. The, uh, the films and the shows that we were talking about,

those are great examples of a consider. thought out, well done, put it in the right parts of the pipeline approach, right? Which is wholly different than I think a lot of the general industry of just slap it on there. And where you put it in the pipeline matters so much because it impacts consistency, right? I want to bring up one example, not to be completely self-serving, but it's one that I'm very familiar with, which was a feature that we finished about two years ago called the Road to Galena, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

And that had a filmic kind of look. You know, I sat with the director and the DP, and we developed kind of a base transform from the camera raw through Aces, which is how I was color managing it, to the display. And the film emulation aspect of it is just a node at the very end before the display transform that does some volumetric color stuff,

does a tiny bit of tinting to the shadows, and adjusts the contrast a little bit, just to get those little volumetric color things that I personally associate with the film things that I've seen that I like. Like I said, those tealish blues, kind of a little bit warmer highlights of everything. And by putting that at the end of the pipeline, it gave the entire film, no matter how I balance any particular scene, just this little bit of consistency. But it was so subtle. Like if you go to any scene and turn that node on and off, you get a reasonable grade without the node on any of them, right? They just don't, for example, have that same kind of feel, but it let us do scenes that were wildly different as they should be on a scene-by-scene basis, but still in this overall ecosystem of the film as a whole.

And I think that's where film print emulation can really be smartly used, right? It gives you a cohesive, creative anchor point for an entire film or an entire show where you never seem to leave the world, but different scenes can still be completely. different environments. All good stuff, man. This is, you know, this is a surely discussion that's not going to end. Our brief take on it. And I think it's also important to note that, you know, my feelings about this ebb and flow, as I'm sure yours do as well.

You know, some moments I'm all about grungy, dirty, you know, kind of filmy looks. Other times I'm all about clean, simple, you know, more digital looks. I think, you know, the thing that I've learned is just that it has to fit, it has to match the content, the look, the field, what people are going for. And I just really strongly urge people not to use FPE as a crutch to do something, right? Like, you know, it can be used judiciously to sprinkle some of these aspects and these nostalgic things that we like, grain, halation, you know, the printy color, etc. But I think where it's done wrong is when people hit you over the head with it, I think

it really has to gel with the story, has to gel with the overall creative direction to be done right. Yeah, and with any of these kind of, I hate to say trendy looks, but in a lot of ways, this is kind of trendy and has been for a while. You get into a rhythm, right?

You start as a colorist as an artist to like certain things, and then you gravitate towards that on projects that may or may not be right for it. You've got to break out of your comfort zone every so often and expand your horizons. And I'm guilty of that. I have gotten into rhythms where I'm like, oh, this looks awesome, this looks awesome, this looks awesome.

And they all kind of look the same, which in my head means they look awesome. But I'm probably closing my brain off to some possibilities creatively. I had a situation the other day, just muscle memory, habit, again, that same pattern. I was doing a spot for like a financial services company. And like, I grunge it all up. And I looked at it. I was like, no, this is just not right. Like, I don't need, you know, grain and my black level at, you know, 20% or whatever on the waveform here for this because that's just not what it is, you know?

So you're right. It's about matching it up. So ongoing conversation, probably never going to end, but at least our two cents on it in 2023. Some good stuff here. Thanks, Joey, for your thoughts. And to everybody out there listening and watching, thanks as always for checking out the Offset podcast. Remember, we drop episodes twice a month. So our library is continually building up.

Be sure to check out previous episodes on wherever you check out podcasts. Remember, we're also on YouTube. And then you can also drop by the Offsetpodcast.com if you want to come right to the site to listen to episodes, see show notes and stuff like that. So for the old Offset Podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen.

And I'm Joey Neanna. Thanks for listening and thanks for watching. See you next.