BW grade for short "Pobeda"

[Margus Voll]

Still frames from short film "Pobeda" i graded

Director Vladislav Mukovnin, DOP Ermins Baltais, Producer Diana Põdra

It was shot on RED Epic and graded in Davinci Resolve Studio 12.5 using ACES 

[Orash Rahnema]

I love how it looks "silver" and not black and white.

I have never tried to grade black and white in ACES, how did you find working on it, did it have any benefit?

 

[Margus Voll]

I went with ACES as i like color management there better and some material was shot in color also but half of it with red glass filter. For me it felt logical way to do it as i do with all my latest grading jobs.

[Thomas Singh]

What's the benefit of red glass filter? Do you mean warm gels?

[Margus Voll]

I mean actual red glass filter in matte box to help with some details.

 

This was something that came out of camera after that filter. No other colors at all.

[Orash Rahnema]

It definatelly has the black and white red filter look above all the first frame you posted, I thought it was done in resolve tho, using rgb mixer or something like that.

I mean, it's a really tough decision to take on set, to filter so heavy the image knowing that theres not coming back.

I really respect cinematographers like that.

Margus, having the image already red filtered did help with noise?

I have done quite few b&w treatment and many times i go towards the red filter look, but most of the time i have to stop long before i would like (i'd love to get a b&w image as you got) as the image gets really noisy.

 

 

 

Edited March 12, 2017 by Orash Rahnema

[Margus Voll]

Usually i got noise if under exposed like the shots inside. Outside with red filter not so much. At times when pushed really hard i saw some patterns emerge and i tried to avoid that but not the regular noise but some not so common patterns.

[Orash Rahnema]

yes exactly, not proper noise, more uncommon pattern, i guess it's the lack of information of the single channel that emerge.

 

[Margus Voll]

I think i had it more on coloured shots tho.

[Orash Rahnema]

yeah, sorry, that's what i meant.

I have never had shots that were filtered in camera.

I always worked on normal shots that i was treating like red filtered, using tools like rgb mixer or splitter and combiner getting rid of the green and blue channel.

But i always ended up needing to have the effect dialed down quite a lot because uncommon pattern were picking trough.

So it was interesting to see and know that shots filtered in camera were working muck nicer and you were able to achieve suck black skies and silvery skins