marvels cine style road test

DSLRs were never designed for film work, but there's no doubt they've completely changed the game in the world of independant filmmaking. And while they're capable of producing some astouding imagery, they need a lot of work to make them useable in the real world.

One of the most important refinements to come along in the past two years has been the advent of engineered Picture Styles. I've written a bit in the past about the granddaddy of them all - Technicolor's CineStyle. Since it's release it's the style I've used almost exclusively in order to achieve the most latitude when grading my footage. But the more I used the Technicolor style the more I started to have a big gripe with one aspect of it...

The Technicolor profile is pretty noise-y in the dark areas of an image. Enter Marvels Cine picture style from Marvels Film Productions. This is a free picture style that promises to shoot a flat, gradable image while preserving more of the dynamic range of your shot.

Over the weekend I had a chance to shoot I short documentary of a church launch, and I thought it would be a great chance to put Marvel Cine through its paces. Here's a quick look of some of what I shot compared to the final grades I created in action -

My first impressions were overall pretty favorable once I got the footage back into my editor. The first thing I was I noticed was the accuracy of the colors and black levels. If I was shooting something I knew wasn't going to get a color grade, this is likely the style I would shoot in. Take a look at what I'm talking about here -

Coming straight out of the camera this shot needed almost no grading at all. Of all the cameras I've ever shot with, this combination of the Canon 5D Mark II with the Marvels Cine in default settings produced the most natural image I've ever seen. (and I've shot with more than a few cameras over the years) This is not a small thing. 

The downside is that this image isn't what you'd normally consider "flat", meaning that some decisions are already baked in, at least to some degree. Moving forward I'm going to try to dial down the contrast in the style setting itself and see if I can't achieve something flatter.  Having said that, on shots where I was a bit underexposed I still found the image to have a lot of room to work -

When you're shooting documentary-style your going to have your moments when you don't nail the shot. In the still above I was trying to adjust for the outdoor color temperature and I didn't have a viewfinder handy to really gage proper exposure. These are the moments great picture styles can really save your bacon. In this case I found the Marvels Cine to have plenty of room to push the image around and still get a great-looking final result.

  A few minutes later I found myself shooting in a super-low-light environment with the only illumination on the source's face coming from a laptop screen. To pull off this shot I needed to open the aperture all the way up and crank the ISO up to 3200. This was a great chance to find out what kind of information was still available in the mids and highs, and how would it grade. Turns out the imagery had enough there to produce a useable shot. 

This shot also highlights my very favorite thing about the Marvels Cine style - blacks are blacks. I could push the mids all day and the blacks stayed dark and noise-free. Which immediately makes this style a keeper for me.

This final shot was from the end of the spectrum. With tons of directly sunlight spilling in from a wall of windows this shot really gave me a chance to see what kind of light roll-off I would have moving from the white levels to the mids. As you can see from image above, it really does alright here, with the blacks grading down smoothly.

Moving forward I'm going to do some more tests, especially seeing what happens if I dial down the contrast within the setting itself. But even with what I'm already getting out of the camera I think this is going to end up being my default for most of what I do.

So anyone else out there using this Picture Style? What are you experiencing? Leave a Comment below and let's kick it around...

Comments

[driving lessons Bromsgrove]

Road tests are necessary to ensure that they can really apply what they learn during the course. It is one effective means of implementation.