Steven Poster ASC interview: Is film dead? Is 3D a fad?

Phil Hinton

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Interview with cinematographer Steven Poster ASC at Panasonic Hollywood Labs (PHL) where he answers the questions of whether film is dead and if 3D is a fad or an art form.


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An image transform system that allows you to expand the gamut of rec 709 etc sounds dangerous! We already have tv's that can give you 110% of rec 709 and we know how good that makes the image. At what stage is this transformation being applied?

Just done a bit of digging which suggests ACES gives an unlimited colour space in the visible light spectrum. Sounds exceedingly interesting haven't quite found an answer to how that will then be applied to a consumer screen which isn't capable of displaying this many colours but I'm intrigued enough to keep digging on his one. Cheers Phil.
 
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Right so Aces is just a linear format. Film scans, Video, sRGB, raw, cgi all unbent and stored as linear values as a halfway house....the VFX industry has been doing that for about 10 years.

Maybe he should have mentioned linearisation rather than waffling about infinite real world color on a domestic TV (which is at best a misunderstanding if not deliberate hyperbole). Linear encoding is independant from gamut for a start. The actual gamut difference between dvd and BD is tiny so its impressive that someone who is a Dop finds the difference so extreme.

Reminds me why I walk out of so many industry lectures harumphing about needlessly mystified up waffle from the blue rinse brigade.

Think I mooted a linear format with lookup tables applied at the display level about 10 years ago.


.....

Oh yeah and none of this stuff is going to have any impact whatsoever downstream at the consumer end for the next 20-50 years if at all.


Just had dinner with one of the guys who actually designed and ratified aces and its exactly what I said it was. Its little different from OpenEXR apart from it having the linear in concept on all material and some sort of header flag for colorspace and its half float (16bit) instead of 32bit float however I'm told it can scale up to 32 as functionality requires (little different to OpenEXR again).

And like I said this is a production level container and will have zero impact into consumer land. Thhis actual precision that the work gets handled at is fairly common place , all aces does is standardise and neaten the workflow it doesn't necessarily make it any "better" in terms of quality at the consumer end.
 
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