Access to the Image Sharpness control for artistic purpose

Joint announcement between the Imago Technical Committee and Sony

15 février 2021 - Modifié le 7/02 Contre-Champ AFC n°317

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The Imago Technical Committee and Sony are pleased to announce that after several meetings at IBC exhibitions, one of the requests from the cinematographers, DITs and colorists community gathered by the Imago Technical Committee (ITC) in its latest survey has been fulfilled by Sony’s Japanese engineers.

Indeed, after the analysis of the "Requests to Manufacturers" survey launched nearly two years ago by the ITC, access to texture and especially sharpness parameters appeared to many professionals as a real need to master the artistic process.

We are therefore extremely pleased to inform the community that control of sharpness for X-OCN and RAW materials is now available in the new version 3.5 of the Sony RAW Viewer (deBayer software)*.

The sharpness range is –300 to +500, and the default value is 0. For all cinematographers who want to use the F65, F55, F5 and Venice cameras with high contrast lenses but avoiding a clinical or overly sharp appearance, as well as for colorists or post-production supervisors, access to this setting is a great improvement for dramaturgy and the ease of special effects.

Détail du panneau de contrôle — **Close-up on control of parameter**

The Imago Technology Committee would like to thank all the Japanese engineers involved in this research and our correspondents : Sebastian Leske, European Product Manager News & Cinematography, Fabien Pisano, Sales Head South Europe and Richard Lewis, Chief engineer Cinematography & 4K Application Specialist, for their valuable assistance during the discussions with the Japanese Sony representatives.

There were some test projects at Pinewood that the pandemic has postponed. We hope that we will soon be able to run them to give the community access to samples and images to easily choose their settings.

The ITC would also like to highlight a new tool from Sony to enhance the creativity on Set : the new .ART file system.
LUTs are important for displaying the creative intent but with a generally very limited quality used on Set in todays cameras. The.ART (Advanced Rendering Transform) file system offers a serious optimization to overcome these situations during on Set monitoring.

Discover all these possibilities.

In general, the Imago Technical Committee wants to give the cinematographers and all other artists/technicians every opportunity to control texture-related parameters.
SDKs in post-production or sharpness parameters for internal codec recordings in the cameras as well as selected parameters of sharpness by RGB channels are the next steps in controlling the entire artistic process.

* RAW Viewer is application software that allows you to view RAW/X-OCN/XAVC/SStP files recorded using the F65/PMW-F55/PMW-F5/NEX-FS700/MPC-3610 (Venice/CineAltaV) unit or a combination of the unit and the SR-R4/AXS-R5 /AXS-R7 portable memory recorder. You can view and perform basic color grading on files transferred to your computer using an SRPC-5/SR-PC4 data transfer unit or files stored on memory cards inserted into an SR-D1/AXS-CR1/SBAC-US30/AXS-AR1 drive unit.In addition, you can export RAW, X- OCN, XAVC, or SStP files to DPX, Open.