7 minute read
TAKE SCENE SLATE•ARRI TEXTURES
THE FINER DETAILS
ARRI has come a long way since the day August Arnold and Robert Richter invented the ARRIFLEX 35 in 1937, the world’s first celluloid motion picture reflex camera. At the heart of their entrepreneurial process was the desire to give cinematographer’s control over the image, a philosophy that remains just as strong today.
Over in Munich, where the magic now happens, ARRI recently released the much-anticipated Alexa 35, a 4K Super 35 camera incorporating new features designed to move ARRI’s approach to offering greater creative control onwards in leaps and bounds.
Spearheaded by ARRI’s in-house image science team – led by Harald Brendel, head of ARRI’s Centre Of Competence In Image Science – the Alexa 35 offers Reveal Colour Science, which takes full advantage of the sensor’s ARRIRAW image quality for richer colour rendition, along with ARRI Textures, an advance that equips cinematographers with a range of pre-set choices over image texture – incorporating grain, detail and sharpness characteristics – something reminiscent of the celluloid era.
We spoke with ARRI’s Dr Tamara Seybold, technical lead in image science, and image science engineer Carola Mayr, about the special texturing technology that has been developed for the new camera.
Seybold, who initiated the ARRI Textures project, has an impressive history, carrying out her PhD on motion picture de-noising at the Technical University Of Munich in collaboration with ARRI, before joining the company’s image science team. Now on maternity leave, Mayr has taken the reigns. The passion and care for which Seybold and Mayr have for the project is obvious, with tireless work carried out by them and their team these last few years.
“ARRI Textures are all about control over image,” Seybold explains, “with the option to choose between a pre-set range of sharp, clean or more gritty textures. The textures themselves are applied in-camera by altering the amount of contrast at different levels of detail, perceived as sharpness and grain characteristics. We call it grain, but it’s not something that we add or simulate artificially, it’s that we change the image-processing in a way that looks like grain.”
This is something that has allowed ARRI to stand out from the beginning, where it embraced the digital grain on the Alexa Classic and its Alev sensor when many other manufacturers chose to remove that from theirs.
With over 30 different parameters occurring in the image-processing chain before the ARRIRAW image is created, Seybold explains that providing total control over this would be very difficult for cinematographers to specifically tune themselves.
Therefore, ARRI Textures provides a concise, manageable workflow, offering one default texture and seven additional textures for cinematographers to choose from, with more to come in future developments.
As Seybold clarifies, “The idea of using ARRI Textures is that it’s a little like filmstock, it’s not something you can change afterwards. It’s a cinematographers choice that will get baked-in to the recorded image.”
The ingenious idea was birthed at the 2017 IMAGO conference in Oslo. “I spoke with many cinematographers about how they were using older, vintage optics to bring a special or more individual look to the digital image, and also about their creative concerns about how digital cameras have a certain uniformity to the images being produced,” Seybold explains.
“I grabbed the feeling that people really wanted to see more differences, to have individual choices, relating to the special project they were working on. So, building on the technology of previous ARRI cameras, the main intention of creating Textures is to provide greater filmic and cinematic alternatives.”
Seybold is keen to emphasise that ARRI Textures were not designed to be used in place of vintage optics. “Textures are really an add-on, they won’t replace
F567 Clarity - CityLandscapes34
ARRI Textures won’t replace old optics… they are designed to work with any lenses of your choice
old lenses. They have been designed to work with any lenses of your choice. The effect of these textures is subtle, and with older optics or strong filters you can achieve much more exaggerated looks.”
During the creation of ARRI Textures, Seybold, Mayr and the team worked closely with colourists and cinematographers to develop a set of specific textural looks. These accomplices included Florian ‘Utsi’ Martin, a talented senior colourist at ARRI, with a history working on The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (DP Andrew Lesnie ACS ASC), and cinematographer Tom Fährmann, who along with being an ARRI consultant, is also a professor of cinematography at the HFF München, the University Of Television & Film in Munich.
She explains that, “We spent a lot of time analysing different filmstocks to observe and compare how the grain affects the image, and it was particularly important to our development process to get specific notes from cinematographers and colourists regarding how grain interacts with the shadows and highlights under a whole host of lighting scenarios. Later on, ARRI Textures were further examined by several additional cinematographers around the world, who conducted field tests and provided even more detailed feedback on the varied qualities and looks.”
ARRI Textures represent the manipulation of around 30 image-processing parameters, these have been cleverly distilled into memorable alpha-numeric codes and words that help describe each texture.
For example, “P425 Cosmetic”, is one of the eight textures released. The first letter indicates the quality of grain in the image – including colour, coarseness, size and geometric shape. Letters that are farther away from each other in the alphabet represent types of grain that are more or less different from one another. The second character/number indicates the amount of grain, and third and fourth characters/numbers represent the amount of contrast in the fine and course image structures, with all three variables ranging from 0 to 9.
Textures like P425 Cosmetic function as a softer, finer option, being slightly more forgiving to skin whilst keeping structures and highlights pronounced. Whereas Textures like G733 Nostalgic are more grainy and designed to emphasise nostalgic film emulation. Other Textures with varying effects include, K445 Default, G522 Soft Nostalgic, F567 Clarity, F578 High Clarity, L345 Shadow and H457 Deep Shadow. All have their own specific qualities of contrast and grain, producing different effects at various ISO settings and exposure levels.
A lot of the trialling of ARRI Textures was completed using Sony’s flagship BVM-X300 4K OLED critical reference monitor, well known for its highlight/black performance and colour reproduction, and the process of choosing a texture for cinematographic purposes is being squarely aimed at the testing and pre-production stages of a production.
“Appropriate testing and monitoring are vital to viewing and assessing the effect of ARRI Textures before they are used,” Seybold clarifies. “On-set, you wouldn’t want to switch through the different textures and try to observe them on a small, field monitor – the effect will be more subtle than that.”
Currently, you cannot create your own textures on or for the Alexa 35, as Seybold explains, “We will offer more textures in different strengths for download, and maybe there could be a tool where you can create your own textures in the future. But it would take quite some work to create additional options or software like that. At the moment, the company is focusing on extending the current ARRI Textures set.”
Seybold describes the work ethic within ARRI’s image science team as “fantastic”, and whilst they obviously need to be intimately concerned with the technicalities, she says “Mathematics alone don’t help. New developments such ARRI Reveal Colour Science and ARRI Textures are the result of a creative, collaborative and symbiotic process between ARRI and the people who shoot with our cameras.”
The new Alexa 35, and its ability to provide cinematographers with greater creative control over the images they shoot, is incredibly exciting. Although Seybold and Mayr could not be drawn about what might be coming next, they did at least agree that, “This is just the beginning.”
