Posts tagged: DaVinci Resolve
Last December somehow turned out to be Filmschool Month for me.
Patrick Geeraerts, head of the editing department of RITS in Brussels, asked me to deliver a lecture on the Ikonoskop for some sixty 2nd year students (directors, screenwriters, multi-cam directors, …). I asked what the scope for this class would be and he replied: “Try to broaden their horizon!”
I don’t know if I succeeded in broadening there horizon but the lecture went somewhat like this: 1923 - Kodak - 16mm film -WWII - S16 - Eclair - Aaton - Ikonoskop SP-16 - Ikonoskop A-Cam dII. And of course on the matter of 16mm not only as an economic but also an esthetic choice. About workflow and more importantly about how filming is all about preparation and less about improvisation (some will find this debatable).
I also let Lennert De Taeye, film student at KASK in Ghent and by now experienced A-Cam dII operator, use a camera at his school for the purpose of shooting some acting exercices.
But I’ll let him speak for himself:
“In December the ikonoskop was used to shoot several acting exercises of third year film students at KASK . The school provided a RED 0ne (first generation sensor), but I’m not very fond of the image this camera produces. Luckily Joachim was so kind to provide the Ikonoskop A-Cam dII! After using it last year on a project I started to like the organic feel of the images from the Ikonoskop.
The first day I worked as a cinematographer. We shot everything, except for one scene, on a dolly, with the Vocas shoulder rig. This rig and the Ikonoskop work really well together, the counter weight on the Vocas rig is very effective to stabilize the camera movement.
The second day the Ikonoskop was equipped with a TVLogic monitor. The compact size of the Ikonoskop was excellent for the type of shooting: very close on the ground scenes.
The third day the Ikonoskop stayed on the camera tripod and rails. As director’s monitor we used a JVC monitor, the SDI-output gives a really nice image on the JVC we used.
Last day was another shoulder cam day, this time with a very compact rig (the Vocas was unfortunately not availble).
The data was transferred, and backups were made, on set with the express card reader to standard USB 3 drives (=fast!).
The little camera did catch quite some attention. But everyone seem to like the image on the monitor. (Some even surprised that this little camera could produce such a great image).
We shot with a set of Zeiss Superspeeds. Timecode generated from the Aaton Cantar. Resolve 9 and audio autosync is great! Little disadvantage you need to resync timecode every time you change the battery.
Too handle the magenta issue I set the raw settings in Resolve 9 to BMD Film. Add contrast and saturation to bring back the image as shot. XML for round tripping between resolve 9 and FCP 7.
Looking forward to see the film’s projected in the school cinema!”
- Lennert De Taeye
The latest version of DaVinci Resolve, 9.1, now includes CinemaDNG Input Device Transform (IDT) for grading Raw images in the ACES colour space.
This gives in my opinion, out of the box, the most accurate colour rendition of the Ikonoskop footage. Or as Jesse Borkowski said on Twitter: “I know! It’s like I got a new camera!”
To set it up in your Resolve projects, here’s a nice tutorial by Jesse:
If you were using the IkonoVinci.lut, be sure to deactivate it when using ACES.
To celebrate this new year, a little tribute to the past year. It’s been quite an eventful one for me and it left me utterly exhausted. But nothing some hard decisions and time with family and friends can’t resolve.
It was a very educational year in regard to the Ikonoskop A-Cam dII. I’m thankful for all the people I’ve gotten to know, online and in person, just by sharing interest and passion about this camera and filmmaking in general.
Anyhow, this reel is a selection of shots from about 50% of the projects that were shot during 2012 on my dII’s.
They have been graded in DaVinci Resolve by me, solely for the purpose of this reel. The goal is to show a lot of different styles of grading. So I even changed style in the different shots from the same project. Except at the end, when there’s a little edit of the two girls walking and talking.
A big thank you to all my collaborators and clients.
Have a great 2013!
RawCinemaShop’s Ikonoskop 2012 Reel from Joachim Vansteelant on Vimeo.
UPDATE: obsolete as of firmware 1.27 (March 2013)
There’s a lot of magenta in the shadows of Ikonoskop footage in DaVinci Resolve. I don’t think it has always been that way, but it definitely is the case in Resolve 9 lite.
There are several ways to get rid of it. I offer you one solution here that’s very quick and easy. In my opinion you have to fix it before you do any Color Correction in the Color Tab. That’s why I’ve created an input LUT that fixes the magenta issue: IkonoVinci. Well it will fix it untill Blackmagic changes something on the decoder side and/or Ikonoskop change something on the encoder side. Then I’d might have to make a new one ;-)
This means you don’t have to fiddle about in the CinemaDNG settings (Camera Raw tab) in Resolve. So leave the White Balance, Color Space, Gamma settings and use the Camera Metadata to do the Decoding.
Unpack the zip and copy the folder into the LUT directory of DaVince Resolve. On OSX this would be: Library>Application Support>Blackmagic Design>DaVinci Resolve>LUT.
Now go to your Project Settings 
. Select Look Up Tables and select under 3D Input Lookup Table the IkonoVinci.ilut.
Then hit 
Now in your MEDIA tab 
you’ll still see the magenta. But when you go to the COLOR tab 
, you’ll see it’s gone. Now you can start grading.
