Adobe 12040118 - After Effects Standard Tutorial page 126

Todd Kopriva provides links to free excerpts from books about Camera Raw by Conrad Chavez, Bruce Fraser, Jeff Schewe, Ben Willmore, and
Dan Ablan on his blog.
For more information about Camera Raw, see Camera Raw Help in the Creative Suite 5 component Help document.
Cineon and DPX footage items
A common part of the motion-picture film production workflow is scanning the film and encoding the frames into the Cineon or DPX file format. The
DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) format is a standard format closely related to the Cineon format.
You can import Cineon 4.5 or Digital Picture Exchange (DPX) files directly into an After Effects project as individual frames or as a sequence of
numbered stills. Once you have imported a Cineon or DPX file, you can use it in a composition and then render the composition as an image
sequence.
To preserve the full dynamic range of motion-picture film, Cineon files are stored using logarithmic 10-bpc color. However, After Effects internally
uses 8-bpc, 16-bpc, or 32-bpc color, depending on the color bit depth of the project. Work with Cineon files in a 16- or 32-bpc project—by default,
After Effects stretches the logarithmic values to the full range of values available.
Cineon data has a 10-bit white point of 685 and a 10-bit black point of 95. Values above 685 are retained, but are treated as highlights. Rather
than abruptly clipping highlights to white, After Effects interprets highlights using a gradual ramp defined by the Highlight Rolloff value. You can
modify the 10-bit white point and 10-bit black point input levels and the output (converted) white point and black point levels to match your specific
footage items or creative needs.
Use a project color depth of 32 bpc when working with Cineon footage items so that highlights are preserved, in which case you don't need to roll
off the highlights.
When you choose DPX/Cineon Sequence from the Format menu in the Output Module Settings dialog box, you can then open the Cineon
Settings dialog box to set output options. Choose whether to output DPX (.dpx) files or FIDO/Cineon 4.5 (.cin) files in the File Format section of the
Cineon Settings dialog box.
After Effects provides three basic ways of working with the colors in Cineon footage items:
The easiest—and recommended—way is to enable color management and assign an input color profile to a Cineon footage item in the Color
Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box, corresponding to the film stock on which the footage was recorded. If creating output for
film, use the same profile as the output color profile so that the output file matches the film stock. One advantage of using color management
features to work with Cineon footage items is that compositing with images from other footage types is made easier. See Interpret a footage
item by assigning an input color profile.
If you need the settings for the interpretation of the Cineon footage item to change over time, then you can apply the Cineon Converter effect
to a layer that uses the Cineon footage item as its source. See Cineon Converter effect.
If you need to manually modify the settings for a Cineon footage item, or if you don't want to use color management, then you can use the
Cineon Settings dialog box. To open this dialog box, click the Cineon Settings button in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage
dialog box.
Manual settings in the Cineon Settings dialog box:
Converted Black Point Specifies the black point used for the layer in After Effects.
Converted White Point Specifies the white point used for the layer in After Effects.
10 Bit Black Point Specifies the black level (minimum density) for converting a 10-bit Cineon layer.
10 Bit White Point Specifies the white level (maximum density) for converting a 10-bit Cineon layer.
Current Gamma Specifies the target gamma value.
Highlight Rolloff Specifies the rolloff value used to correct bright highlights. To get over range values when working in 32 bpc, set the value to 0.
Logarithmic Conversion Converts the Cineon sequence from log color space to the target gamma specified by the Current Gamma setting.
When you're ready to produce output from the Cineon file, it is important that you reverse the conversion. (To convert from logarithmic to linear, set
Current Gamma to 1.)
Units Specifies the units After Effects uses to display dialog values.
Additional resources about Cineon and DPX footage items
Stu Maschwitz has a post on his
logarithmic color space.
Pete O'Connell provides an article on the
Todd Kopriva provides links to information about troubleshooting color problems with imported DPX files in
Interest blog.
More Help topics
Change pixel dimensions of an image
About Smart Objects
Color fundamentals
ProLost blog that goes into some details of what it means to say that color values in Cineon files are in a
Creative COW website that describes working with Cineon footage items.
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