Color Managing Digital Cinema Camera Footage

When manually specifying a color transform for importing footage from a digital cinema camera, use one of the transforms in the camera/ directory. There are various options for different camera models and lighting conditions (e.g. daylight or tungsten).

The input transforms that specify the illuminant are not designed to perform white balancing — for example, using a transform for tungsten illumination will not turn whites blue-ish. Instead, the different transforms take into account the different spectral power distributions of the different illuminants.

Once the footage has been converted to ACES 2065-1, you can use the other transforms in the collection to convert it to your working space, if necessary.

Note: The camera/Canon/Technicolor_CineStyle_to_HD-video.ctf is a special transform for viewing and outputting video that was shot using the Canon CineStyle picture style.

Camera Black

Footage from digital cinema cameras can contain negative values in the noise around black. These negative values can cause problems during image processing, especially when adjusting hue and saturation.

All of the input transforms supplied with Autodesk Color Management for input from various cameras map negative values to small positive values losslessly. If you prefer to undo this correction and deal with the negative values in another way, you can apply the remove_camera_black transform after the camera input transform.

In other cases, you may receive images that have already had a third-party input transform applied, but still have negative values. In these cases, you can use the apply_camera_black transform to map the negative values to small positive values.