I'd heard about the Technicolor Cinestyle Picture Profile from a few friends. Eric Cheng asked if I wanted to make a post about it in the forums. I've been very happy with the flat profile I made in Picture Style Editor. There are several available on the web with similar results. So I said to Eric... why bother? It's the same HDR flat profile easily available online but released by Technicolor. Normally I'm not that dismissive of new things, but I was thinking, how much more can they improve?
Then a TV editor friend called me about this and told me about the S-curve LUT profile for Color that accompanied the profile. He thought it was a very useful tool for color correction as the other Picture Styles didn't have a LUT profile available (unless you made one yourself).
I decided to give it a whirl and downloaded the Picture Style and LUT profile. I went out to shoot some sunlit stuff and also indoors natural lighting stuff using the profile and threw it into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 with the aid of LUT Buddy from Red Giant.. I later switched to FCP because I wanted to check out the various updates to H.264 converters like Magic Bullet Grinder v1.5 (Still slow as hell, using 1 core per conversion), 5D2RGB v1.2.2(still the best quality converter but slow) and Canon's own EOS Movie Plug-in E1 v1.2(slow but at least there's no need to have thm files). Basically MPEG Streamclip is still the fastest converter with good results.
I won't go through what I found in detail as there are some real professional editors who will give a much better review than someone like me. I will say that compared to my flat profile, the technicolor cinestyle has a smidgen more data in the blacks. Obviously an absolute flat look with blacks very light to the point of being dark grey on my color correction screen. Yet the detail is very much intact in the dark. I have to say the Technicolor guys made a great Picture Style with a very flat profile with very good detail in the blacks, basically allow maximum use of the gamut of the H.264 8bit clip. It puts the clips into a REC.709 log space (something that 5D2RGB did in conversion). It does look good and pretty as good if not better than other flat profiles.
When I threw the clips in Color, using the LUT S-Style curve, the look was nice but I prefer to use my own controls (Lift/Gamma/Gain etc) to get the look I want. Still it's a nice look in itself.
Now there are 2 philosophies in shooting with ViDSLR. The post-production factions will love this Picture Style as they will have nice leeway to play with color correction. However, the minimal post crowd will probably want to use their own profile to control the look. With the H.264 8 bit clips, the resolution isn't high so the fear is degradation when color correcting too much in post. The crowd is the get as close to the look one wants type, which is a good call if shooting on short time etc.
Whatever the working style, Technicolor has done a great job with the Picture Style! Try it out and see if it works for you.
