 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are talking about color science. What it is, how it got that way, and how you can use it to become a better filmmaker. Let's start with what it isn't. It isn't the science of color. It isn't the science of how different wavelengths of light are interpreted by our eyes as different colors. It's also not but it is related to the psychology of color. How different colors make us feel or what emotions different colors are associated with. Color science is how a particular manufacturer's camera sensor interprets and changes the colors it perceives to produce the image that the camera captures. It varies between models of camera but almost always one particular manufacturer will have pretty much the same color science. If you wanted to simplify it you could say that it's a LUT or lookup table built in to the camera. Now it would be fair to ask why camera manufacturers don't just give you all the colors that the sensor captures and let you choose and pick the ones you want in post-production. And to be fair some companies do this. The red camera company did this for about 8 years before it transitioned to a more manipulated color in the IPP2 color gamut. And Sony cameras still pretty much give you quote-unquote faithful colors. They don't overtly manipulate the colors coming off the sensor to the image that's stored on the card. But the other three big camera manufacturers, Arri, Canon and Panasonic, all sweeten or manipulate the colors coming off the sensor so that it leaves you less work to do in post. When Arri who made film cameras for 100 years designed their digital camera, the Alexa, they tried to emulate the colors of 35mm chemical film. They tried to make the digital image look as filmic and as cinematic as they could. And to do this they manipulated the way that the camera sees and processes color. They took both the reds and yellows which are seen commonly as imperfections in skin and shifted them closer to orange. So that skin seems more universal and it seems smoother, it seems more consistent. This is what film does and this is what the Arri Alexa did and other camera manufacturers followed suit. When it was Canon's turn to develop a digital cinema camera, they looked both at the Arri Alexa and at their stills cameras which already had built-in looks associated with them. They were even further to warm and brightened skin tones. They also pushed green into blues to make skies look more vivid and color saturated. And generally do a lot of sweetening that has since become known as the Canon look. Color science isn't just a simple remapping of colors, different colors and tones are affected at different ranges. So the mid-reds might shift towards orange but the dark and the light reds might shift towards something else. There is also an element of what you might call forensics in color science. This is when camera manufacturers add colors into the color science to compensate for something else that's happening in the image capture chain. So when the Blackmagic Ursa Mini was first released, it had a really strong purple magenta tint due to the IR filter that they'd put on the camera at the last minute. They were able to compensate for this in a later firmware upgrade. So you were able to upgrade the firmware of the camera which upgraded the color science and got rid of the magenta tint. Color science became more important as shooting times and turnaround times got smaller. So digital cinema cameras are originally meant to have a very long post-production time like film did where you spend days in the grade to make the image look like you want it to. But more and more people were shooting with these cameras and needing to upload a video that day. So color science and the look built into the camera became more important. Aside from dynamic range which the Alexa excels at, there is nothing to stop you building a lot to make your footage look like the Alexa's footage to change the color science of your camera to the color science of the Alexa as long as you shoot in a very flat color profile or shoot in raw. But the question is, do you want to have to do this to every single thing you shoot? Wouldn't you rather have a camera that shot images that once you brought them into a Rec.2020 or Rec.799 color space look good and cinematic right off the bat? If you like a certain camera's look and a lot of people like how the Alexa and how Canon capture colors it makes sense that you then lead with that and sell the color science of a camera. The red camera company who for the better part of a decade had a very scientific and flat accurate color science recently shifted to IPP2 which is a much more manipulated filmic, Kodak looking color space. Because the red camera shoots raw, you can go and open up all your old red camera files, debayer them into this new color science and have a whole new look. That's my look at color science, how it works and how you can use it. Thank you very much for watching. Please leave your questions in the comments and I'll see you next time.