I spoke with a Technicolor representative at Canon’s NAB booth yesterday and learned that Technicolor’s CineStyle profile should be available for free download on April 30, 2011 on Technicolor’s website.
For those of you unfamiliar with custom Picture Styles (as Canon calls them), every Canon DSLR comes with a piece of software called EOS Utility. Through this program, you can create your own custom Picture Style, which goes beyond the capabilities of defining user Picture Styles in the camera’s menu system. These profiles can then be loaded onto your camera and saved as one of the available custom user profiles.
A search around the web for these profiles will yield results for many downloadable files created from the EOS Utility, many of which were created with the intent to flatten the contrast of the Canon DSLR footage, thus adding a little more flexibility in color grading. Some of these user-generated profiles are better than others.
Although the official press release was a little vague on what this new “CineStyle” requires, it turns out that it is simply a user-defined Picture Style that’s geared toward Technicolor’s cinema customers who use Canon DSLRs in conjunction with their projects. By designing a standard CineStyle Picture Style to use across the board on video projects, Technicolor is making it easier to match the DSLR footage with the primary source footage in the color grading steps of post production.
Technicolor’s rep at the Canon booth gave me a brief rundown of the how and why for the new CineStyle, which you can see in the video below.
I’ll have the official link and full details when it’s released by Technicolor later this month.
