I’m going to assume here that most of you reading this already know what Technicolor is, whether you know it as the all-encompassing digital media company, or just the people who gave Looney Tunes color back in the 30’s. Well, Technicolor has now released a little software update for your Canon DSLR that allows you to take full advantage of your camera’s chipset. Essentially it optimizes the dynamic range that your camera can take in by pushing the capabilities of the chip. This is very important for those filmmakers concerned about getting the most flexibility out of their cameras. The way it works is it records video (and still images if you so desire) to a color log space, as opposed to Canon’s standard H.264 Rec709 colorspace. What this does is gives you footage that looks, in my opinion, really washed out and bland in camera, however in post, gives you an enormous amount of control in programs such as Apple Color. Technicolor even provides you with LUT’s for various programs, including Color, so you have a base to work your own adjustments off of. I’ve only been playing around with this on my 7D for a couple of days now, but from what I can see, I really like how it is looking. It gives the footage a lot more depth, and the ability to colorgrade footage is enhanced greatly. Here’s a little side-by-side preview of raw CineStyle footage versus colorgraded footage.
For those who want to see some more footage using CineStyle, I did a short video to test some different settings, that can be viewed here. If you’d like to read more about CineStyle, Technicolor has a page which explains it in detail as well as includes the download link, and that can be found here.
Push It A Stop 