American Cinematographer - March 2016 - 37

Egg crates help
shape the light
for a scene set
in a casino.

on film behaves differently at [different
light levels], and the system applies
actual film grain at low lights, mids and
highlights. You can also play with it and
use, say, 35mm grain on the highlights
and 16mm grain on the lowlights.
What we found exciting, and the reason
we decided to go with digital, is that we
could actually design our own 'film
stock' with exactly the amount of grain
we wanted."
Once Behar got a handle on
Prieto's preferences, he built two custom
stocks from components in their library.
Both are variants of 7219. For one of
them, dubbed "Marty 16," Behar
explains that "we made the shadows a
little more coarse and thinned out the
highlights." The second, "Extreme 16,"
was developed for club scenes, psychedelic bits and raunchier locations.
"Rodrigo wanted the feeling of a 'pushone,' but without the implications in the
mid-tones," says Behar. "Because we
control the curve, we said, 'Okay, we'll
go with the push-one, but thin out the
skin tones.' So essentially you have the
skin tones of a regular 7219, but the rest
of the characteristic curve reacts like a
push-one of 7219."

After Prieto signed off on the
looks, LiveGrain was installed in
Deluxe New York's DaVinci Resolve
and Nuke bay. (LiveGrain has its own
lossless cross-platform codec with up to
15:1 compression.) To apply Prieto's
presets, colorist Steve Bodner would
simply add a node to the end of the
node tree, drop one in and activate it.
Occasionally, Morano and Franco went
further and tweaked the curve while
color-correcting a scene, but for consistency's sake, everything was always
based on the presets. For this season of
Vinyl, the cinematographers saw the
applied texture no earlier than dailies -
and in the case of most episodes, the
final cuts. Behar has since developed a
live preview, allowing users to see
LiveGrain in real time on set.
Prieto also compared F55 and
Alexa footage after going through one
of Deluxe's own U-Look film-emulation LUTs. He was particularly curious
about the F55's new color gamut - SGamut3.Cine/S-Log3. "Combined
with the U-Look, it created a very
specific feel to the color," says Prieto,
who felt the skin tones were richer and
the blues a little more cyan than the
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slightly purplish blue of the processed
Alexa footage. "That gave it a particular
feel that I really liked." The look was
fine-tuned in the LUT, where Prieto
boosted saturation and contrast. As he
notes, "The combination of this SGamut3.Cine with the U-Look and
LiveGrain created a look that worked
for the series."
Bodner notes that LiveGrain and
U-Look have their own discrete roles:
"U-Look is a film-emulation LUT that
manipulates the color, contrast, brightness, etc. - the overall color [data].
Livegrain is a plug-in that adds grain to
the image, so it adds texture and does
not affect color at all."
At Prieto's request, the F55 was
retained for the duration, giving
Morano and Franco access to the same
color gamut, LUT and LiveGrain
templates used on the pilot.
Season one of Vinyl was a
primarily single-camera show with a B
camera always on hand to accommodate different directors' methodologies.
A third F55 came into play for concert
scenes, plus a Vision Research Phantom
Flex4K for slow motion. The F55s
recorded 16-bit raw 4K onto AXSM
March 2016

37
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2016
