Issue with picture profile?

[Thomas Kaufman]

I'm shooting a series, and giving diretion to other crews on other cities. We're using the F as primary camera, and Canon 5d as a second. I've loaded the picture profile from Abel that comes close to the 5d "look", and so far it looks fine.

But a crew in San Francisco did as I instructed, loaded the Abel profile, and the F3 had a distinct magenta hue. They swapped out cameras and tried again. Results were the same, but now the image had a red cast to it, more pronounced than before. The cameras were from Chater and Chater had loaded the profiles.

I'm attaching a word file with frame grabs. If anyone can help me with this I'd be very grateful.

Tom Kaufman
Washington, DC-based DoP

[Leonard Levy]

If you want intelligent response, you should include more information about how these were shot.
- What kind of lighting
- How did they white balance?
I have found the Canon to be yellower than the F3, Which is true here, but in my case I preferred the Sony.

[Thomas Kaufman]

These images were shot using the pre-set 3200k setting on the F3, and lit with tungsten lights.

[Dave Sperling]

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that the same picture profile is having a very different result in different F3 cameras.
I suppose the first thing I would look at is making sure that all the cameras have the same firmware version and are using the same lens set.
I'm going on the assumption that you are sending an SxS card with the picture profile on it? Or are you sending the master profile(s) as an electronic file?
Do you have anything standard (such as a shot of a color chart and gray scale) that was shot with the different cameras?

[Leonard Levy]

Originally Posted by Thomas Kaufman

These images were shot using the pre-set 3200k setting on the F3, and lit with tungsten lights.

Ah.... My guess is its a preset issue though lenses could also have an effect. You probably would have been better off having them white balance.

I Never trust presets in different cameras to necessarily be the same. I had a problem when my F3 came back from Sony repair a few years ago . The preset was a little magenta. At first they didn't notice because the bench had flourescent lighting. They fixed it but it took some intervention from upper management for them to take me seriously ( fortunately i had a connection forged on these forums.)

If you are under genuine 3200 lights then the preset and the white balance should be quite similar , and its always a good idea to test that when you begin using a camera you don't know . either one could be off a bit.
It should be easy for Chater to check that especially if one is Red and the other magenta. In my case I had a few F3's and EX-1s to compare to and none had the same issue + my camera was fine when I sent it in.

Tell Chater to give me a call if they are curious about it. We are neighbors. They're very exacting and good people and so should be interested.

lenny

[Leonard Levy]

More expensive cameras have the preset adjustments available in the menus for the tech, unfortunately with the F3 and Ex-1 they are further down and need to go to Sony. I don't know about the F5 and F55

[Thomas Kaufman]

Thanks, Dave, I will check on the firmware versions. The SF crew used a Zeiss CP.2 50mm on the F3, while I've been shooting my F3 with a Leitz 50mm. Both 5Ds used the Canon 100mm primes.

The 5D standard Picture profile from Abel was loaded onto 2 different F3 cameras via sxs card, and both F3 cameras showed a distinct magenta tinge. Cameras were from Chater in SF.

I'm attaching the images the San Francisco DP sent me, thanks again for taking a look.

Tom

Originally Posted by Dave Sperling

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that the same picture profile is having a very different result in different F3 cameras.
I suppose the first thing I would look at is making sure that all the cameras have the same firmware version and are using the same lens set.
I'm going on the assumption that you are sending an SxS card with the picture profile on it? Or are you sending the master profile(s) as an electronic file?
Do you have anything standard (such as a shot of a color chart and gray scale) that was shot with the different cameras?

[Leonard Levy]

Firmware should not affect the color.

In my case Sony had swapped out a board and when it came back to me it had the magenta pre-set issue. If my board was off then I'm guessing Sony Japan sent out a bunch that were off . The board had adjustment abilities though as it was a simple fix for them and came back perfect.
Could be the lenses also since that's the other constant in your story, but it looks pretty magenta for that.


Lenny

[Thomas Kaufman]

I have two clips from the F3, using the Chater profile and the Abel profile. You can clearly see a magenta cast in the Abel profile. I'm using the same profile on my F3 with no magenta cast.

My .mov clips will not upload, anyone know why? Each clip is under 3 mb.

thanks

[Dave Sperling]

Have you looked at the relative color produced by the cameras (yours and theirs) without any picture profile applied?

I know that on my F3 (and those of several friends who bought about the same time) the output without a picture profile tended to be slightly greenish, so when we built our picture profile settings we set a phase value of +6 or +7 in the Matrix settings of many of the profiles to counter that green. Obviously if we had started with a camera that had a completely neutral output and added that phase shift it would have pushed the overall output to the magenta side. Hence the question about whether the cameras look the same without any profile settings applied.

Afterwards take a look at the profile settings and see whether there is any kind of phase shift built into the matrix.