Digital Praxis Sony CVP Gamma Curves Set Standard For Digital Cinematography

Specialist digital film consultancy, Digital Praxis, has been providing bespoke Gamma Curves for Sony's range of CineAlta digital cinematography cameras for some years, and these curves have become the defacto standard for many cinematographers shooting HD video with Sony's range of CineAlta cameras.
BBC wildlife producer Mark Linfield said of the curves: "Having made the decision to shoot HD video for the previous 'Planet Earth' series, we needed to address some of its shortcomings when capturing in whatever conditions Mother Nature throws at us. Steve Shaw from Digital Praxis offered us a range of Gamma Curves for the Sony f900/950 cameras, which helped enormously in capturing the sort of high contrast lighting situations we often find ourselves in."
Added Steve Shaw: "The Sony CineAlta range of cameras can have user defined Gamma Curves installed to alter their capture characteristics and Digital Praxis has been able to generate a range of LOG based curves that enable the cameras to capture high-dynamic range, low contrast images, ideally suited to later post-production image manipulation."
Using these original Digital Praxis Gamma Curves as a starting point, a totally new selection of curves for the f900/3, f900R & f950 and the f23, f35, HDC-100 range of Sony CineAlta cameras has been generated by Digital Praxis. These new curves have been totally re-designed from the ground up to maximise the capture capabilities of the Sony cameras under all shooting conditions, including those looking to minimise later requirements for post-production grading.
The BBC's Mark Linfield was a key component in the generation of these new curves, with the BBC now shooting 'Frozen Planet' and requiring next generation Gamma Curves for their wildlife shooting - in Mark's words, "To life polar bears from the snow, Lions from dry savannah grass and chimpanzees from deep shadowed jungle floors, with bright sun dappled open areas."
Already, many cinematographers have adopted these new Gamma Curves, and George Hupka, owner/DP Downstream Pictures, Saskatchewan, Canada, reported: "I noticed right away the new Digital Praxis Mega Gamma curves greatly improved colour on overexposed areas... particularly on the flesh-tones and blues, which is great news. Compared to the standard Sony Hyper-Gamma, this is a huge improvement - none of that colour-shift on overexposed skin tones. Ditto with skies, the tendency for an overexposed sky to go cyan is greatly reduced."
And George went on to add: "Of course, while remaining in the ITU-709 world for TV projects, this 'more graceful overexposure' is very useful for an F900R recording to HDCAM tape! If I need to preserve more overexposure detail then the Log curves are certainly better, but for a lot of everyday situations Mega Gamma is ideal."
Award-winning DP, Sam Shinn, Iron Eye Productions, NY, talking about recent project 'Spain... On The Road Again', commented: "Our project travelled nearly 16,000 kilometres over the course of nine weeks and we often had three or four major set-ups every day. Moving around so much, I chose to keep our lighting package small; the biggest fixture we used were 800 HMIs to fight the bright Spanish sun.
"Without the use of the Digital Praxis Gamma Curves, we would never have been able to hold the highlights and see into the shadows. I would have needed a much more extensive lighting plan, which would have slowed us down so much it would have been unacceptable."
And Sam added: "Additionally, the curves gave us great colour. The show looks great!"
Further information is available at: www.digitalpraxis.net.
(KMcA/BMcC)