The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP056: The Post FPE Era?

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

In this installment of The Offset Podcast we're discussing why there's been an obsession with film print emulation over the past few years and if we're ever going to move on from FPE mania that is gripping the color world recently. The 2020s at least in most western media, could easily be defined as the FPE era.  One only has to look to the plethora of FPE tools available and to their screens to see that FPE is everywhere.  But is that a good thing?  What constitutes good FPE and poorly executed FPE, and will we ever move past the obsession with the film print look.Specifics covered in this episode include:What's good vs poorly executed FPE?How the goal posts for FPE keep movingWhat about HDR in an FPE world?Remastering of film orginated projectsWhy developers are choosing FPE for productsEnd user fatigue & is FPE popular everywhere?Check out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast.  You can also watch this episode on YouTubeBe sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.  If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcast

Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Offset podcast and this week we're discussing, will there be a post-FPE era? Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Color Direct Connect volumetric autocal. Calibration of reference displays is critical in our industry and there's no easier way to calibrate than by using Gaia Color, which is standard on DM, XMP, and XMP. PC series monitors. Guy color calibration allows supported probes to be plugged in directly to the monitor for fast, accurate, and automated calibration with no computer or operator expertise required. You can learn more about this powerful system at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody, welcome back in into another episode of the Offset Podcast.

I am one of your hosts, Robbie Carmen. And with me, as always, is Joey Dana. Hey, Joey, how are you? Hey, everyone. All right, Joey, we'll dig it into episode, I think this is 56, and it's been a while since we've kind of done a creative topic, so figured we should dive back into that. And this week, we're going to be exploring the idea of,

is there going to be life after the film print emulation era that I think we find ourselves in right now? It should become no surprise to anybody that if you are involved in post-production, specifically color and finishing work. The past, what would you say? Maybe two, two and a half years, three years has literally been nonstop film print emulation from, you know, this stock, that stock, this grain, that grain.

And it's just like every day a new flavor or tool or whatever comes out of this. And we have a lot to say about this, obviously, as we normally do. But before we get started, just a couple things of housekeeping. Just remember you can always head over to the offsetpodcast.com to check out our complete library of episodes, get show notes. And you can also head over to YouTube and you can watch a video version of the show. Of course, the show is available on all major podcasting platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just search for the Offset Podcast. And if you're on social media, you can find us on Instagram as well as on Facebook.

Just again, search for the Offset Podcast. All right, Joey. So let's dive into this. You know, I think that it's clear that the proliferation, and that's a word I'm going to use because I think it makes it sound more like arms race, you know, 80s, Cold War kind of thing. I think the proliferation of film print emulation, I can't decide for myself if it's been good, bad, neutral. What's your general 50,000 foot view on what the past few years has meant and brought to the industry in general? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been a major evolution for the colorists that kind of work in the same ecosystem that we work in, right? The huge, you know, Hollywood post houses have always worked either in film print or an emulated film print or something with an advanced film based pipeline because they were doing major Hollywood motion pictures that up until recently still literally printed to film.

And that look is very ingrained in the kind of high-end Hollywood cinematic world. And those of us that don't necessarily work in that level of ecosystem, you know, we didn't always have some of the tools to make some of those looks, although there's a ton you can do just with the built-in tools and resolve. And the tools and resolve have been evolving. Even the built-in film look creator and the film grain that's built-in to resolve is absolutely fantastic now. So you can see, you know, it's a lot of trickle down of really good image science that was once kind of, you know, gate kept at the top to now being available not just with a couple of different plugins or not with a couple of different tools that are built into resolve or even some of the other tools that are out there. But now it is a absolute smorgasbord of options for any kind of film print emulation.

I mean, all the categories of it, from volumetric color to grain, to halation, to bloom, to optical simulations. There are so many options for every part of emulating film out there now that it's really become kind of trendy. And it's also become kind of difficult to separate the good from the bad, right? Because anybody can throw out a plug-in and it can do really dirty things to your image, or it can do really great things to your image. And obviously there's the colorist's input as well, which takes center stage. And, you know, it's, it has become a very saturated environment for us as colorists that are not at the top of the heap anymore. Yeah. I agree with all that. I mean, I think it's, you know, one of the things that we'll get into a little bit later is sort of

like that, that consumer fatigue about this kind of stuff. I think it's real. And I think you kind of hinted at that and like I said we'll explore that a little bit later to me um I still start at the 50,000 foot view I still start with why do we think this is the end all be all right and I'm not saying I've gotten some flack from people offline in various places of being like you're such a hater of film I'm like no no no no no no I love a film look I love I think I I'm attracted more to the the secondary elements of a film look because it tends to be because film has been traditionally so expensive to process to shoot on, to distribute on, that that means just as a natural part of that, you're dealing with good set design, good lighting, you know, all of those other elements that make it up. So I think one of the things that happens a lot of time is that people think you're crazy when you try to separate film as a medium from all the other aspects that go into a solid production, lighting, set design, costume.

makeup, whatever it may be, right? Yeah, and I think it's 90% of a film's look. Right, and I think it's really easy to kind of combine the two kind of things is like, oh, no, you just get all that extra stuff when you emulate this film. And it's like, if you got crappy looking video, throwing a film print emulation on it is not going to make it all of a sudden magical, right? And I get, you're going to get crappy looking teal and orange video. Right.

And people want to argue that. And it just seems nonsensical to me. I'm sort of like, this is not. a savior, right? This is not like, just because something has film, you know, aesthetics in part or in whole doesn't save you from all of the other things. So that's one, that's one thing I feel strongly about. The other thing I feel strongly about is just that we, it feels like I get it. I like it. I think it has a lot of uses, but it's not, to me, it's not the end all be all of image processing, right? Think about the past 20 years and where we've come from everything. I mean, like,

I'm, you know, dating myself a little bit. But I remember when I, you know, back in the day, you know, that first, what was that camera? The Canon XL1, right? They're like DV camera that like Steven Sutterberg was shooting with and whatever. I mean, like, think about that 25 years ago or whatever, 30 years ago to where we are now with, you know, everything can shoot 23,9, 8, 24, you know, 120. It doesn't matter, right? All these wide, like, I feel like the film emulation discussion is also. some semi i don't know i don't know exactly how to express this but semi stifling or or are lessening all of the

technical developments that have gone into cameras in the past 20 or 30 years it's like we're taking these cameras that have gotten to be you know super machines and we're like no no no no no we're just gonna we're gonna just mess it up a little bit right we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna separate things so there's some halation we're gonna add all this grain we're gonna we're going to, like, all the color science that the engineers that these camera companies work so hard on. Yeah, we're just going to take that and do a little hue shift to it. Like, it just seems a little bit nonsensical, but also, like, potentially if it keeps going like this, it will stifle that further development, right? And I think we've already seen that a little bit. Like, when's the last

time that cameras come out that everybody's like, oh my God, this, I mean, like, it happens a little bit, right? You know, Ari comes out with something or Sony comes out with something. But it doesn't seem like that radical shift like when red hit or that canon xl1 that i mentioned right it just seems like it's all evolutionary not revolutionary and i wonder if our love affair and sort of where we're stuck with film print emulation is part of that equation you know and i don't know i don't know exactly how to articulate it but like that's kind of how i feel about it yeah i mean i think that issue is twofold one you're right the the camera manufacturers are going to gear their product offerings what the majority of filmmakers want, right?

There's no getting around that, and that's a good thing. We want the camera manufacturers respecting what the creatives want versus what maybe some engineer thinks is technically optimal. I'm all for that. However, I think we could acknowledge at this point, we might have reached peak camera. You know what I mean? Like every modern digital cinema camera,

starting at even the least expensive ones, captures a vastly, let's say, technically better and more detailed and more color-rich capture than we ever put on a display, whether we're working in HDR, SDR, printing to film, going to mobile, whatever. Every camera out there captures a image, when exposed properly, captures an image that is so much more than we're ever going to display. in even the best display mediums, that the camera,

and we've talked about this before, the camera's mostly irrelevant at this point. It's kind of a logistical preference choice for the DP and the production, and I feel like that's exactly where it should be because now you're leaving all of the creative imaging choices to the director, to the DP, to the costume designers,

to the set designers, the wardrobe, and then eventually down to the measly colorist to try to put it all together. Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. But I do think so, like, if I take the next step down from that 50,000-foot view, I think then it begs the question, what's good, what's bad, executed, you know, FPE.

And to me, there has been so many attempts at bad or mid-range FPE where it's not, and you, people do, I mean, you're for one, you've created some DCTLs and things of that nature over the years that have been in this general ecosystem of FPE. and you're the first one to say, like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I'm not doing anything technically sound here. This is more of just an aesthetic extrapolation of what I like and what I think. And so there's, I think that part of the problem is that a lot of people won't acknowledge that part of it, right? Yeah.

They'll be like, this is film, true film printing. You're like, no, it's not, because it's not film and it, whatever. But then there's people like our buddy Colin Kelly, who's, you know, he's, you know, teamed up with Mitch Bogdanovitz, you know, famed Kodak engineer, and they're trying to do things really from like that super technical math, physics accuracy point of view, which is a totally different world, by the way, than, oh, I want some, you know, whatever, teal and orange or some grain. Like, it's a different thing. We can argue the merits of one over the other, but to me, one of the things that the truly

good technical tools like Collins pipelines and stuff like that do is they're not garish. They're not in your face as like, oh, we put a filter on this. Like, I've actually started, and I think you have to a certain degree too, like, you know, tools like Genesis from Colin, you know, like they are, they're pretty seamless in their image development. And he talks about this a lot about image reproduction and sort of like that pipeline versus some of the other tools where it feels like I'm throwing on, you know, a lack of a better term, an Instagram filter or something like that onto the shot. So like to me, there's certain categories of this. And I think I gravitate towards the places that are less in your face, less obvious, less, you know, drastic moves. And I gravitate more towards the ones that are like, oh, yeah, this is subtle. It's doing these things.

It's technically sound. Like, you know, that does that make sense? Yeah. And I think, you know, for the tool builders, there's always a balance between trying to get as technically accurate as possible, which is a moving target because every photochemical film process is. is bespoke, whether it's the day the print was made, the temperature, the chemical balance, the way it was exposed. Every film itself is a bespoke unit of process.

So there's no one we got the right emulation. But there is good technical practices and bad technical practices for color management. And the best film print emulation tools combine very good technical processes. You can kind of evaluate this with how they deal with things like, wide gamut colors, does it break apart or does it roll off gradually?

Do you have inputs that are impossible to use or can you use it with any input as long as you correctly map it? Things like that. And then there's the creative aspects of it. What controls does this offer the colorist? Because again, every film print is its own process. And you can very technically emulate a single film process. But a really useful film emulation tool is going to allow the color is to have a good technical foundation of the image science not breaking things and not making the image worse

but enough creative control in the right places to make the image how you want it to feel and how it best reflects again how we started the photography and what was actually done on set which is 90 percent of the look whereas some of the more garish tools out there you throw it on there and you're like oh okay yep now everything looks like that whatever that is yeah yeah yeah no I agree that's well said I think that you know to me part of the challenge here too is that I think you hit on what I was gonna say the goalposts kind of keep moving with what film print emulation is and I think you hit on the crux of the issue with that in that is is that it is a bespoke slightly different process every time like if you were doing this in a real process but

Also, I think that there has been, as film is, I don't know, maybe phased out to a certain degree as a distribution medium, there are now, you know, the guys that were doing it in the, you know, the 70s and 80s or whatever and doing it all those bespoke pipelines, hey, they're retired and I got nothing to do. They want to talk about it, right? And so part of this, I think, is like, now the accessibility of that sort of behind, you know, that black hole, you know, behind the, you know, the locked door of. the guy running the, you know, running the machine with the, you know, the printer lights or whatever, that information keeps coming out and these stories about, oh, this film, that's how it was done, this film, how it was done. And so the developers and stuff are also groancing that information as it becomes available and go, oh, well, now we can do X, Y, Z process that, you know, this famous color timer did or whatever. And so, like, I think that's, I don't know, that's how it comes off as sort of a, well, yeah, let's talk about the ultimate goalpost shift of film print emulation is Yeah, yeah.

The entire purpose of it now is different than it was when it was kind of invented, right? In the early days of digital intermediate, you would bring your film scans in and you would, the color scientists at Kodak and Fuji and at these big facilities and at these big film labs would profile the negative batches that they ordered for a film all the way through prints and they would make an emulation. And you would work under that. in the intermediate, you were looking at on a monitor, a direct view monitor, in approximation of what it would look like after it's printed. Right. So you were emulating the print. Now what we're trying to do is make a digital pipeline that will never be printed back to film look like something that was printed to film maybe because we kind of like that style. So the entire goalpost of what film print emulation is has drastically shifted over the past 20 years, from digital intermediate to general digital color grading. And I think a lot of people don't really realize that, that a lot of these looks and styles that are very, very trendy right now kind of evolved out of that transitional process. That's really, that's just, that's great insight, man.

And I think you're absolutely right. And I think, you know, it's funny. I haven't done that many print projects over, you know, over my career, but I've done, a handful of them, and I remember the first time doing that, being like, I got a, I got an emulation lutt from the lab. They, you know, they're like, oh, you got to work on it. And at that time, it was like, what? I got to, like, put this on my output and it was kind of confusing. And then they're like, oh, when you render, you're going to turn it off. And I'm like, what? You know, because then they were doing the actual, so everything looked whack and, like, really strange. And

but then they did the print. And I was like, oh, I get it. You know, and there's, there's, there's middle grounds that people are now doing the thing where you know they are taking their digital version of the film and they're doing you know these intermediate steps printing it back and then recapturing that and we don't have that feel like that's just an exercise and intentional futility but people have had wonderful results from it and if they're happy with it wonderful i'm not gonna yeah i'm not i'm not gonna argue the validity of it i mean i think that it's one of those things but i think those same people are also the people that prey at the altar of, you know, film is the ultimate medium, which I just don't really agree with

altogether. Support for this episode comes from conform tools. Conform Tools allows you to convert timelines between Premier, Resolve, and other NLEs while automatically solving common issues that normally need to be fixed by hand. Avoid time-consuming trim and transfer issues and securely send large media files to collaborators at a fraction of the size in minutes instead of hours. With a Growing toolbox of features, let conform tools handle the tedious stuff so you can focus on the creative. Built by post professionals, conform tools helps editors, colorists, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Learn more at conform.tools. I think that's kind of the next thing that we really need to touch on is, is projected film the absolute be-all-end-all of the best display of an image?

which a lot of people think that, and that's fine. But I think that concept has really limited us creatively in this new era of HDR. In the SDR world, absolutely. If you could make your SDR output look as close to projected film as possible, it looked amazing. Right? That was the high point. But now our display technology has dramatically changed. and we have the opportunity to go into realms of displaying images

that a printed film could never do. And in a lot of cases, we kind of aren't. Yeah, I agree with all of that too. And I think it's, well, let me say it this way. You know, you and I are both space nerds. We like the idea, you know, partly science fiction, but also like the real space part of things. And I've been watching the, I know you kind of faded off this series

after the first season or two, but I just finished watching the Apple TV fifth season of For All Mankind and then started watching the opposite of that show, which is called Star City, which is about the USSR rise of that same period in the alternate reality that for all mankind existed. Anyway, but there's a line in there that one of the protagonist says of like, you know, basically like all these people were like,

the moon, the moon, the moon. And he's like, no, we got to go to Mars and tight. and Pluto and like further out in the ego and that this kind of feels similar to me that like all the film people are like the moon the moon the moon the moon and we're forgetting about Mars Jupiter Saturn you know and that's kind of what it feels like when we when we get into this thing it's like you feel like a little bit of a looting tune when you talk about like well what about HDR and people are like oh that's just BS like it's not filmmaker intent it's crap and it's just like I don't know man I think that there is something to to be said about the evolution of this. I don't want to be stuck on the moon forever. I want to go explore the rest of the solar system. And that's what like kind of HDR represents to me a sort of bit. And I also don't think that that means that we have to completely forget about the moon and forget about film.

I think we can combine the two approaches a little bit as we further our explorations out into the solar system for a semi-bad analogy. But I hope you get like that. Yeah, you know, there's kind of two ways that fill. Film print emulation has worked its way into the modern world of HDR, right? There's what I consider kind of the default for most things, especially, you know, really high-end shows, and I'm not criticizing them. They look great. But the general mentality is we're going to work in essentially SDR, and we're going to containerize this into HDR, maybe make it a little bit brighter so we get a little bit more contrast. but things like bright highlights are always going to desaturate

because a lot of people think that looks pretty. And in a lot of cases, it does look pretty, but in other cases, bright fire, bright flames, you could want more color in there than a film print could ever hold. And we're not really doing that when we containerize a film print emulation into HDR and stretch it. So there's some balance there again with the creative and the technical and the display of, we can take the aspects of film that we really like, whether it's a volumetric color thing,

whether it's a little bit of grain, whether it's this or that, and we can apply that in an HDR world, but we can still explore where we can go to what a film print could never display. And I want to talk about two examples of that. One, an earlier show in the HDR era that I thought used HDR incredibly effectively,

but maybe too aggressive, for a lot of people's taste, which was altered carbon. Altered carbon looked insane in a good way. I got to go back and watch it. I got to go back and watch it. I remember it struck me at the time as being like, whoa. Like at the time where everything was like super vanilla, you know, and just wait for its moments.

This was like hit you over the head. And I, I, after the first episode or two, I was like, yeah, I'm into this, you know? Yeah. But there were parts of it where it got a little garish, you know, especially with some of the really bright highlights in high contrast scenes where, you know, there's always the typical example of, well, I want to make a cinematic shot and there's a window behind someone. Well, in HDR, if I make that window 4,000 nits, now I made a shot about the window, not the subject, right? And that's a, you know, that's a creative thing that's going to evolve over time. And I don't think they got it right in every single scene in that show, but they went so much further. than anyone ever did in HDR basically before or since.

And I think it's a great example of what we can do while keeping a really premium aesthetic. And a lot of that premium aesthetic is, like we keep saying, lighting and production design. But let's tone it down a little bit, and everybody knows what I'm going to say, because I've said it a thousand times, the benchmark of film style in HDR is still glow.

It is bright, it's not subdued, there are really saturated bits, but there's detail everywhere. The grain is absolutely beautiful and looks right for the era, but still looks modern. It is literally like all of the best of every single possible thing, from film print to HDR to modern display technology to great production design. Part of this is tempered by the fact that I love the 80s, so those colors just speak to me. but that to me is the benchmark of where we can do film prelimulation and still really feel it in HDR and not be like this is what it would look like projected to film on your LGO lead. I actually think that's, I mean, well, first of all,

I have to say that Ian, Ian is going to start thinking that we're going to stalking him because we mention him like every third episode. I've watched that series like seven times. It's great. I actually think that I think it was Skip Kimball I think did Stranger Things. I actually think Stranger Things was fantastic for that combination of

homage to the 80s film look because it had a very 80s look but man there's some there's some really awesome HDR in that too like in like and I think that you know one of the one of the challenges I think with getting real film looks and in HDR stuff

is primarily the idea that things can't things like in the film they're not that bright. They don't get that. There's not that much contrast, not that much in the sharpness of the highlight. There's a lot of aesthetic things that people object to,

but like, I agree. Like, there are now tools and ways to get things bright, but not make them feel electric, right? Let's look at Stranger Things. Yeah. The intro to Stranger Things,

that red title that comes in, it's got that little bit of film flicker. It's got that a little bit of grain. It feels like a projection, on purpose. that red at the brightness that it is in HTR with the amount of saturation it has could never be projected on film. Yeah, because it would just voluntarily click. It would just collapse in.

You could never project that red with film. So I mean, that's a great example of kind of straddling those worlds. And you couldn't do that if you just did what a lot of things are doing now, which is kind of SDR pipeline film print, but a little brighter. Yeah, or the other approach of that is that people are so scared of it that, you know, if they're going to get HDR NIST, it's going to be on like super mega obvious things, right? It's going to be like, you know, take like the Disney stuff with like the Star Wars, like the Mandalorian, right? It's like, hey, 98% of the show is 100 nits. And then, oh, we're going to show a laser.

Cool. That can be 400 nits. But like the rest of the show is, you know, and so like, I get that approach, but it just seems safe to me. I mean, the other one that I think that other area that's worth looking. into is kind of the remastering area with this because I think that if we're gonna if we're gonna make a really honest assessment

of film print emulation in the modern pipeline in the modern HDR pipeline how do old shows that were actually acquired and originally you know distributed or printed on our films printed on film how do those make it the way out there

and I think there's several examples of that right you know from I know I know you have a couple favorites, like Battlestar Galactica is one that you talk about all the time. Like, I think that's really interesting because in those approaches, it's showing that here's something that was actually acquired on film. We're plugging into this pipeline now. In what's your opinion?

I have some, I have some thoughts about some of those older shows, and I've seen good versions, and bad versions. I saw somebody the other day posted a, uh, a comparison of all of the different versions of the matrix, right? And, you know, kind of, you know, like, hey, this green wasn't in the original. Like, whatever. Like, there's a lot of different, you know, remastering is a whole other subject that we're going to talk about in a later episode.

But what's your feeling about that? Does plugging these old, this old content, film-based content into a modern pipeline, does it show off the bad parts of film? Does it show off the good parts of film? And, like, does it let HDR kind of breathe on its own while still respecting, you know, kind of the old method of capture?

Yeah, and I think it really depends on the source, right? Let's go back to the idea of things that actually were creatively built to be projected on film. Films like The Matrix, you know, things that were, you know, Hollywood movies. As much as I literally just went on a rant about how we shouldn't containerize film print emulation into HDR, I think for most of those things, unless there's direct input from the original creative team, which there isn't always, I think those should lean more towards the containerization of get the best, use this modern display technology.

and this modern encoding technology to get the best possible reproduction of what this looked like projected on a modern display, right? Because that was the creative intent of the time, even though their possibilities were limited, right? But then there's this whole other ecosystem of shows and television that was shot on film, captured with lots of data, but mastered for SDR. And you look at the late 90s, the early 2000s, like you said, some of my favorite shows. They didn't look massively filmic. They were higher contrast, but kind of stuck in the limits of what SDR could do. So, you know, if you look at kind of the display evolution, right, SDR is incredibly limited on what it can show you. A film projection is way better than traditional SDR television and what it can show you,

but still pretty limited, especially in brightness and gamut in the higher brightness. Now HDR, the world is your oyster. You can be bright. you can be saturated, you can be dark, you can be desaturated, doesn't matter, you can do anything. So you look at the three examples I want to talk about for old shows that I think should be remastered from film negative in HDR is Battlestar Galactica, 24, and earlier episodes of Law and Order. And I know those are all kind of different genres, right? Battlestar Galactica, very dark, gritty sci-fi, but half of it is on

you know, the occupied worlds where the aliens have invaded and nuked everything. And the photography there is beautiful, but not respected in the SDR masters we have now in terms of, I shouldn't say respected. It's not displayed well in SDR because things clip like crazy. That whole world where it's bright blue or bright yellow everywhere where they're like post-nuclear Holocaust, there's got to be more detail in those film negatives that could be pushed into a more saturated yellow. with more detail than where they were kind of like, we're just going to clip this because that's the best we can do in SDR.

I think that is ripe for an HDR remaster with, yes, it was film. It was all 35 millimeter. It would look incredible and it wouldn't look anything like what we consider film print emulation today. I would love to see that. 24, action, right?

Much more down-to-earth, much more realistic feel, right? It was never heavily stylized, but also shot on film. So a lot of the, especially the early seasons, you can only really see on DVD, right? They were finished in SDR. Sorry, in, in, uh, SD. You know, again, shot on film. There's so much clipping in the highlights and shadows that could be eliminated with a remaster.

And it could give you that more realistic feel like I'm there. Like it's not stylized. That's the same reason I brought up law and order, right? It was never a stylized show. It was never supposed to look like a nuclear holocaust, like Battlestar Galactica, or a future insane thing like altered carbon, or a retro homage to the 80s like Stranger Things or Glow. These shows that were shot in like the early 2000s, mid-2000s that were realistic shows shot on film could be shown in a very realistic way in H.T. that I think we have never seen in the way they were mastered for SDR. Yeah, I agree with all that.

And I do think, I want to be clear that I do think that there are, this is not a one-size-fits-all discussion. I mean, I think there are certainly, there are certainly people that are doing creative things with kind of homage to film print looks with, you know, combining HDR. I think Apple TV ecosystem in general has probably done this better than anybody else because they're kind of pushing HDR really hard in a strong way. You know, I'm thinking about shows like that were popular this spring like plurberus.

And I think that's how you said that plurperous. I think it's pluribus. Something like that. And, you know, obviously, like we've talked about before for all mankind and foundation. And like, so there's a lot of, a lot of that going on where I think that people that can combine it. And I think that it needs, some of this also is out of the filmmaker's control. It has to do with a little bit of like the distribution side's expectation of what is quality on their platform, right? And if you know, if you're looking at something that's all clipped out and crazy, that's not our, you know, that scares people.

So what do they do? They turn it down. Now the execs are happy. Now they have something that's one size fits all. And it's not pushing one way or the other. And we just get into this blah. And as you've said many times to me before, everything kind of looks the same. You know, and undoubtedly people have seen all those articles about like, you know, the decolorization of modern media content, right?

That everything's now flats, neutrals, whatever. And that's a really nuanced, complicated discussion. But I think at least one part of it is the play it safe mentality with distribution side of things really does crank it down. Right. And like some of the ones that you pointed out, like alter carbon, like there's a reason that there are a lot of those shows. shows like that have not been done again because they weren't playing it safe. I think that there's more latitude in features to be a little like the Joker comes to mind as one that was really popular.

The whole John Wick series as another one that comes to mind if you see it in HDR. And those are a little because there's like, oh, yeah, we don't want to see it. This is a movie. We can make it crazy and we can make it whatever it is versus a television show where, you know, networks might be worried about viewer fatigue and as a lot. and is it too much? So it's complicated. Now, let's switch gears a little bit

because I think one of the things also that's part of this proliferation is, you know, I think about this in the terms of, hey, you're a developer, right? At no point in time has development been more accessible to everything. We've talked about this on our vibe coding episodes.

We've talked about this in our refactoring episode that we did last week. You know, this stuff is accessible to people now. So part of the problem is, is that like everybody is able to a certain degree to jump on this idea of, you know, DCTLs, OFX, etc. And it seems to me that FPE is just really low-hanging fruit, right? Oh, like, I want to make a creative tool,

hmm, coming up with my own, you know, version of, I don't know, the Warper or HDR tools or something functional, really difficult. But I can make something teal and orange super quick that has lifted blacks, hey, it's a film print emulation. Let me sell my tool, right? And so I think part of this problem is like this multi-headed... Guilty.

Combination of factors of, okay, film print emulation, everybody likes it, seems cool, it's cool. It's never been easier to make stuff. You combine those two together. Now we just have everybody and their cousin Tony making film print emulation because it seems like this is an accessible color-esque tool. that I can make easily without having to do the really hard thinking, hard math to get it right or to even break new ground. Yes. And there's two aspects to this. And there's the good part and the bad part, right? The good part is, especially with using kind of vibe coding and LMs to write software, you know, we've talked about this.

What an LLM does at its core, no matter what, is move text around. That's it. It just moves text around. Everything else downstream from that is a subset of it's just moving text around. Now, the beautiful thing is most color math has been figured out, documented, and published. So if you need to go from Aces CCT to linear to some other kind of weird color space that nobody's ever heard of to manipulate something, you could tell an LLM, do this, then do this, then do this. Here's the matrixes or here's the transform equations. Put them together. And it will put them together in the right order exactly how you specify.

And it will make a technically correct tool that does exactly what you want. It does that very effectively. So if you can kind of conceptualize exactly what you want pipeline-wise, an LLM can execute it for you massively effectively. And that's not a bad way to go if you're looking for something specific. However, I think the best tools, that are out there also happen to be the most expensive. We've talked about Genesis.

We're both big, big, big fans of Genesis. I would probably say that if somebody has a film print product, I can emulate what it's doing in Genesis or in any of the other really good emulation tools that are out there, not excluding the film print or the film look creator built into resolve. Using that and regular color tools combined, you can build something that matches

just about every tool out there with these really strong tools that are kind of the top of the heat. Yeah, and to me those strong tools, I think that there's a little bit of a confidence factor that goes into them because, you know, film box is another one from the guys of Video Village that's similar.

Like, it's like, hey, you know, we're going to be at least semi-transparent with our process. and the thinking that went into it. And I think that gives a little confidence. But I think the other thing about it, too, is that, like, those top-end tools are fixing problems that you didn't even know you had.

And you mentioned a couple of these earlier around the periphery around the edges of this, right? You know, one of the, like, I encourage everybody to do this. Find some shots or some test shots or whatever that you can do this with that are going to show you, like, gamut problems. Like, how does it?

it fold down from, you know, this crazy saturated, you know, off the charts red, that kind of stuff. Because like, it's more than just quality of the image. It's color fidelity, you know, color purity and all of those things that kind of happen around the edge and where, you know, some of the algorithmic approaches to this that are, you know, vibe code or whatever can break down because that part of it is much harder to solve than moving text around to, you know, hey, you have published, you know, specs on the math of this, put it in.

That part of it is still, I think, a little bit where the science and the technology meets the art, you know, and I think that the top end tools are doing that better than the person who's, you know, inputting stuff into Claude only and going, or, you know, JAT, GPT, and say, give me a film print emulation, you know? Yeah, and I'll fully admit,

And I think anybody, and it's all about, you know, kind of presentation and where you're putting your tool in the ecosystem, right? I will never claim that some of the tools that I've released either for sale or for free. You know, I've got some free tools that have been out there for a while, like my saturation tool that I've developed, things like that. I will never, you know, get on a soapbox and say, this is the best approach. This is technically superior. This is, you know, absolutely super premium because most of the stuff that I build is does. for saving time. I'm more geared towards efficiency and making workflow stuff. So if it's a shortcut, you can look at some of these tools that I've built and say, I could build this in a node tree

just fine with nodes. You're absolutely a thousand percent right. But when I'm going through a thousand shots in a day, I like to be able to press one button and have it. You know, so it's a balance there where that's where some of the pricing, people look at some of these more advanced tools like Film Box and some of the others and they say, why is this so much more expensive when so-and-so's whatever tool is 30 bucks or 50 bucks? That's why. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with the $50 tool if you know what it does and where it should fit in your workflow. And there's nothing wrong with the $2,000 tool if you need that flexibility for developing looks for big advanced projects with complicated color science and you want to do more than what that $50 tool does.

I said before, it's confidence. I mean, I guess that could possibly look at as like a little bit of like elitism, like that you're like, oh, well, the expensive tool gets like, and maybe there's probably a little bit of that. And I think that, you know, certainly some of the people and the companies that are making some of these tools, they lean into that eliticism a little bit like, you know, but that's fine. But I don't think there's right or wrong. I think one of the realities of this, though, and let's kind of switch back to the end user,

I think there's a little bit of fatigue that's going on with all this, right? that it's just like, geez, another day, another plug-in, you evaluate it. And so then you're like me, right? You end up with an O-FX panel or whatever that has, you know, 40 different film print emulations and you're like, which one was it that I liked again? You know, and it's like they're all just sort of a different flavor of one or the other. And it's one thing that I think that, you know, is interesting about some of the, you know, tools like Film Box and Genesis and stuff is that I've actually,

and you probably noticed the same thing, that they have favored simplicity and under the hood work rather than here's 14,000 different controls. And I, you know, from a consumer, you look at that and go, well, it's not as full featured. It's not as, I don't have as much control over the image. But then I'm like, then I look at some tools that have 18,000 sliders. And I'm like, I don't know what any of these do. This would take me two hours to adjust all the sliders until it's right. So there's something to me about like that seems weird about paying more for less control.

And also like I said, I challenge you to take some of these less expensive tools that are making really high-end claims and not be able to emulate exactly what they're doing on the same footage with a higher-end tool that has less controls. Yeah, yeah. So that's pretty interesting to me. But so I don't know if we're going to get over that fatigue anytime soon because I think it's it's multi-headed as we say. but I want to sort of kind of wrap up this episode with a little discussion on the idea of like, what's after this? I mean, there's got to be something, right? And one of the one of the two or three things that I keep thinking about is, and we've experienced this because we've traveled various places around the world, you know, speaking to different groups and that kind of stuff. And it seems to me that every time that we've done a presentation or been part of a presentation and

other parts of the world where we start talking about film print emulations, people gonna gloss over a little bit and go, oh yeah, what? Like, huh? And so, like, I guess my first question about this is this film print emulation stuff more of a, I don't know, lack of a better term, like a Western issue or, you know, you know, whatever. Maybe, I don't have any data on it, but it just feels to me that like maybe we are, you know, we are self-important here and we think our market is, you know, our looks and our preferences

are the right way. Whereas when I travel other places in the world, it's more about clean aesthetic. It's more about like, don't you dare put grain on that because we want it like, we wanted it at 120 frames a second and, you know, with no motion blur and perfectly clean. Cool. Like, who's to say that that's wrong, right? And so like, that's kind of the thing is that like, I wonder if here in our, you know, the general Western market, the U.S. market, whatever you want to call it, we're ever going to switch to that because I think right now we have a whole bunch of proverbial gatekeepers on this that are like the tastemakers, if you will, that are telling us that like, no, no, no, no, no, that stuff is video-y-looking, it's fake-looking, it's gross, it's disgusting.

We need to go back to, you know, 1988 and the abyss because it's never going to get better, right? I know you feel that way. I actually, I wanted to, I'm going out of order here a little bit. I wanted to say when we were talking about remastering and I said that, you know, I think it should match the film print as possible

unless there's direct input from the creators. James Cameron recently did an HDR remaster of the Abyss that goes into HDR does not look like a projected film and had his direct involvement. And as I've said many times, the abyss is my favorite movie of all time. I loved every frame of it. I thought it was gorgeous. And we can definitively say that's right because the man who created it supervised.

Was involved. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm right. I mean, the different, not only is there regional taste things, there's generational taste things. The younger kids, as we've talked about many times, like higher frame rates. The youths like it to look like video games. They like it cleaner, you know, although now there's some video games that are kind of, you know,

marketing the people our age, and now they're adding like film print emulation into video games. So it's like this push and pull of both the generations, the world economy shifting as American media is starting to be consumed in other parts of the world. And we're starting to consume media from those parts of the world. The tastemakers might say, well, if our, if we have a huge market, in Asia, we might tailor the look to what they like. And the domestic market is just going to have to have to like that. And maybe it'll evolve. So we're seeing, you know, the world kind of shrinking in terms of content and

styles. And it's going to mix together. Yeah. And I think that I think if anything, if there's something hopeful to say about this is that's a good thing. We're going to find, we're going to see some stuff that we think looks really bad. We're going to see some stuff that we haven't ever. thought of would look good but looks amazing.

Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and the XMP 270 and XMP 310, the accessible, lightweight, and versatile monitors helping to bring HDR monitoring on set while also being very well suited to post-production work. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. It's hard to realize when you're in the middle of something, what's happening. And I think that, you know, I think that the move to, towards social media consumption, whether that be, you know, vertical videos, whether that be, I mean, like, I was shocked when I was talking about, I recently I talked to my son who's, you know,

he's a budding teenager about, you know, what he's, I'm like, what are you watching? He's like, oh, I'm watching a movie. And it was like, it was a movie, like a short, like a short film, like a 15 minute film completely vertical on some platform he had found. And I'm like, what? And so, like, I think that, you know, the taste makers are also, they tend to be a little nostalgic and look at new, look at new things as being, uh, attacking their sense of, yeah, it's attacking their sense of nostalgia or whatever. And I think that that's going to shift. I think that when, when our kids, you know, who are teenagers, whatever, you know, about in that now, when they come of age, if you will, and enter, if they enter, enter this industry, which hopefully it's still around, um, you know, their generational

aesthetic, as you said, is going to be different, right? And I think that we're seeing that, but I also think there's something weird about generational aesthetic that I think is worth some discussion. And that is just that, right, when you're young and you're enter an industry, you know best, you're trying to be disruptive, change everything, right? And then there's this period where, you know, you're making money, your status quo. And then you start to do this thing where like, you kind of go, oh, man, the old guys really had it right, right? And that's, I think that happens. It's a cycle.

It's a cycle. I think that, I think that that happens to every generation they look back on it and go, oh, remember. Like, so I wonder if part of this is, again, the tastemakers who are now arguably at the, the last quarter of their, their careers, right? You know, they might be 50, 55, 60, and they're going, no, no, no, this was the bees' knees back then. they're driving the conversation more than the younger kids, but I also think that like, it's just not the same circles either, right? There are, there are, there are the youngs these days

that are nostalgic for things that we would just completely hate universally. I mean, like, I, I see guys walking around cars and coffee filming my 80s car with VHSC and mini DV cam. quarters and thinking they're the coolest thing on the planet. And I'm like, okay, maybe not that. My 18 year old daughter going to college this year, she's just graduating from high school.

You know one of the things she asked for as a graduation program, a present? A walkman. A walk man. Right? And I'm like, dude, where, like, and then I started looking at them on eBay just, you know, to be looking at her. I'm like, I'm not paying that much for a walkman.

Are you kidding me? You know? Just go to the local dump. you'll find 15 of them. So you're right. Everything that's old again is new again. That's a, I mean, that's a theme that, you know, just human history, right? That's, we're always nostalgic for them, right?

But I don't know, it'll be interesting. And I would just say, I'll end it on this. I think that, I think the people who are head over heels for fimperimimulation should have a little bit more, a little bit more of an open view of the world, right? And I think the people who are anti-FPE and want the cleaning. And they should understand that nostalgia is a powerful marketing thing. It's a powerful, it's a powerful creative tool. And those kinds of things.

And so like to me, none of this is ever going to be one size fits all. It's never going to be dogmatic, right? It has to be looked at it. And I think that you just need to be careful about listening to the people who want to make this dogmatic. Because oftentimes the people who want to make it dogmatic have one goal that's to sell you something. Right. and if you look, if you can look past that and make intelligent decisions about what fits the project and what fits the creative goals of the project, then the, the world's your, you know, your oyster or whatever, right? You can pick and choose parts of these things that you like.

And, you know, going back to our friend Ian, who we, we have man crutches on, I think that's one of the reasons that you like glow so much. And I like his, you know, another show he worked on Tales from the Loop so much because it's like a combination of all. of the things. Like, it's the clean new, it's resolution. Yeah, I love that. Cinema cameras that are pushing the limits on that. But then it's, oh man, that's filmic. That's glow. But then it's highlights and contrast. So, like, I think the people that are doing this the best have thought through all the creative ramifications of this

and are picking, choosing the parts of all of this stuff to combine. The people who are purely dogmatic about it, it's just it's propaganda to me to a certain degree. It's just sort of like, you know, like, cool, like great that you think the Godfather is the most best shot film ever. But like, every film doesn't need to look like the Godfather, you know, like, move on. Yeah, and I think, you know, the last thing I want to say on the subject is I just hope if anything changes in the next, you know, few years as these tastes and styles and trends evolve is I hope both filmmakers, colorists, everybody becomes a little. less risk averse. We have been in the creative world,

very risk conscious, I feel like, in the past like five to ten years of this was a successful thing. It needs to be just like that. That's why we have so many remakes. That's why we have so many sequels. I want to see every part of the creative filmmaking ecosystem

just be a little bit less risk averse. I'm not saying go out and make crazy stuff and bring back insanity and shoot everything on Mini DV. I'm just saying maybe take a little bit more risks when you're kind of thinking about the creative aesthetics of things.

Well said, my friend. All right, well, good stuff. Just as a reminder, you can always head over to the Offset Podcast to listen to our entire library of episodes, all 55 or 56 of them, hours of enjoyment to be had over there. You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

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maybe something they'll enjoy. We'll appreciate it. And we'll definitely owe you one because we want more people to join the conversation. So for the Offset podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.