How An HDR Master Let Us See The Invisible Craft Behind 2001: A Space Odyssey

What if the secrets of a 1968 masterpiece were hiding in plain sight—just waiting for modern color tools to reveal them? We dive into 2001: A Space Odyssey with a forensic eye, exploring how a carefully mastered HDR release lets subtle artifacts surface: matte lines stepping in eight-frame rhythms, hand-painted star fields, and reflections that whisper clues about the set. Instead of diminishing Kubrick’s vision, these discoveries deepen our respect for Douglas Trumbull’s team and the analog ingenuity that still holds our gaze at 24 frames per second.

From there, we pivot to the craft of color as a science. Our guest, Paulo Martins of Alchemy Color, breaks down how to treat your camera like a measurement device. He walks us through building rigorous profiles with thousands of color patches under D50 and tungsten, navigating metameric pitfalls from spiky LEDs, and establishing a dependable baseline inside Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Then we get practical with a methodical, 32-bit approach to inverting color negatives—rooted in open-source insights—so the “print-like” result honors the negative without baking in an arbitrary lab look.

If you’ve ever wanted film’s character without surrendering control, this conversation maps a path. We talk chart-driven emulations, creating accurate 3D LUTs, and exporting Cineon log for seamless grading in DaVinci Resolve with print film and halation treatments. Whether you’re reverse-engineering a spaceship window to glimpse a soundstage or building an end-to-end digital film pipeline for stills and motion, the throughline is the same: use precision to serve the illusion. Tune in, get inspired, and see how curiosity, calibration, and careful workflows can bring the texture of cinema to everyday images.

Enjoyed the show? Subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help others discover the craft behind color.

Guest Links:
IG - https://www.instagram.com/alchemy_color/

Website - https://alchemycolor.com/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@alchemy_color

YouTube Video on 2001 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcpDS1r6mQY

Corridor Crew VFX React - https://youtu.be/Dx3Vv6j4tmE?si=EgjUpcG4OuEgop5A&t=1092 

PixelTools
Modern Color Grading Tools and Presets for DaVinci Resolve 

Transcript

Opening And Guest Intro

Speaker 0:00

I love that film for for a long time already. And and there were some comments going around like uh oh, why did you do that? Uh this is an insult to the artwork, this is an insult to Kubrick himself and stuff like that. And I'm like, no, I actually I revere the men the men in the team, Douglas Turnbull and all of his TV, even more, because being able to see this little piece of history that was always there, and now we can see it because computers.

Speaker 1 0:26

Welcome to Color and Coffee, a podcast that's focused on the craft of color and the artists behind it. I'm your host, Jason Bowdach, and each episode we'll sit down with some of the most talented artists in the industry and have a casual chat from one artist to another. We'll share their stories, their insights, their tips, and maybe even a little gear talk. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, join us for some great color discussion. Sit back, relax, you're listening to Color and Coffee. Hello and welcome to this episode of Color and Coffee. I'm so happy to bring you guys on for another episode as we start to get towards the end of 2025. It has been such a great year, and I'm so happy to bring the podcast back for season three. I have a really, really awesome guest for you guys. His name is Paulo Martins, and he runs Alchemy Color. They do custom camera calibrations, they do film emulations, and they do color calibrations. Welcome to the show, Paulo.

Speaker 1:32

Hey, thank you for having me. Nice to meet you, and hello everyone.

Discovering 2001’s Hidden Mat Lines

Speaker 1 1:35

It's truly my pleasure, and I'm so happy you were able to come on the show. So, first off, I need to tell people the story about how I discovered you, because it's pretty funny actually. For those that don't know about Quarter Crew, they are a VFX YouTube channel and they do these amazing VFX breakdowns. And I discovered you via a Quarter Crew video where you were breaking down a Stanley Kubrick 2001 Space Odyssey, where you actually helped them find out that Stanley Kubrick's mat lines were visible on 2001 Space Odyssey. They were talking about how Stanley Kubrick, for those who don't know, is obsessive about his VFX. He did not like that there were generations on film and he used a really, really in-depth process. But you, my friend, were able to discover the mat lines in 2001 of Space Odyssey. Can you go into a little bit about how you did that?

Speaker 2:28

That was a funny side quest. I had a Blu-ray rip of the 4K mastering, I think the 2018 mastering of the film. And I decided to throw it onto DaVinci Resolve and start contemplating the idea of remastering the film. So you naturally you see with digital tools nowadays that there's little things that can be improved, let's say the white point of certain objects in space during the animations of the let's say the moon landing, for example, you have little things that could simply not be achieved with analog means. So I decided why not? Let's explore how this works in the digital domain. And soon I realized that that Ultra HD master was absolutely superb. There was so much information in that in that master, in that file. Even though it's uh I would say I think like a 50 megabits per second 10-bit file in HDR. So it's Rec 2020, 1000 nits, PQ. It's fabulous.

Speaker 1 3:31

It's scene referred, but it's sort of display referred, scene referred. It's not really the final, it's not the original film scan. It's intended to be viewed on a display, but still, there is a significant amount of range and data in there.

HDR Masters And Forensic Color Tools

Speaker 3:42

Yeah, not only that, and the way that it was transformed and transferred and mastered into into HDR. It uh it's it's fair. You can still feel the film nature of it, the emulsion, the the little weaving, the shadows are not absolutely stable, the little noise in it. Everything was captured in a really, really fair way, let's say it. Naturally, I started I decided to do something that I did a while ago with a copy of Dune, the latest Gilles Villeneuve Dune, that I know that that film had a print film pass, even though it was shot on digital. So there was a film pass, and while I was watching the film, I realized that there were little specks, little simple little imperfections here and there. So I decided to just boost the exposure, and you know, fair enough, that it was there. You know you can see that during the film scan there were like little imperfections that got captured. So in doing that in 2001 in Space Odyssey, I started seeing the matlines very, very clearly. So then I compiled all of the shots that have the matlines visible in them, and decided to make a small, a short video with some text explaining more or less what you should be looking at with the boosted exposure. And it got got picked up by Ren on Reddit, and it ended up having my four minutes of fame in a Corridor Crew VFX React video.

Speaker 1 4:58

Aw, Reddit, man, it's the best. I mean, I can't say enough positive things about Reddit, the things where you learn things that you never thought that you would imagine. So congrats on that. Corridor crew is a really it's one of my favorite channels. I learn things every time I watch them, whether it's about VFX or it's on VFX on movies that I've seen and watched for years. So can you talk about some of these for those that haven't seen that video? Can you talk about some of these mat lines? Because that to me was what was so interesting was that not only the fact that they were hidden so well, but they almost look like first gen rotoscoping, but they're not rotoscoped on a computer, they're essentially drawn and expanded by humans, essentially.

Speaker 5:36

I know the basics of the process. I didn't ever went to really deep into it, but I know that, for example, when you had, let's say, the sequence where one of the astronauts gets out of the pod and goes down to the spaceship, those two models are in the same frame together, and the background is just stars moving slowly. In situations like those, Kubrick most likely shot one of the models first and then shot the other one later on the undeveloped film. So it was a first-gen pass, and you just burn data into it, burn information into it. And in the case of the mat lines, I don't know exactly how they were achieved, but they are very, very manual. You can tell that they happened for a film that was shot on 24 frames per second. They happen around eight frames each. You see, like the stepping at eight frames. You see, for example, an object moving across a screen, and you have eight frames, eight frames, eight frames, eight frames. It's it's really fascinating to see that the tactile human aspect of it. And my favorite is individual stars getting painted out manually, and you see the brush strokes on the individual stars as a scale model passes in front of them. There's a lot there. I mean, there's um and it's surprising that all of that could be captured by the HDR master. It would most likely be impossible to see on the original 65mm screenings, because I mean, independently of dynamic range, you're looking at something at between 50 to 880 nit. It's really dark. So, I mean, that's a thing that digital goddess. It's the the forensics of it and the fact that you can really reveal parts of cinema history at your fingertips. That information was always there. And I was lucky to find it and immediately spent the whole afternoon making a video too so I could share it with everyone.

Speaker 1 7:26

That's what was so fascinating to me. Not that they're so much visible, but to the fact that using the magic of filmmaking, that there are things that we just don't notice. And as soon as I started to they were pointed out to me, I did start to notice, oh, there's no stars there. Oh, there's no stars there. And because our eye is being directed in a specific direction, it just worked. It reminds me of tricks that James Cameron did, who I'm sure was inspired by this film, because that's what film is. It's magic, it's misdirection. And so for me, it was just a peek at film history and how visual effects were done before we had computers, before we had CGI and digital technology, and it still works perfectly. That's what I love about it. It is so amazing.

How The Practical Effects Were Layered

Speaker 8:14

Yeah, like if you talk about suspension of disbelief in cinema and you take it to probably to its most extreme condition, which is believing that you're in outer space. And if you think that the film came out in 1968, it's as good as it gets. It's and even if you start scraping away and doing all the CSI and DaVinci Resolve with exposure cranked and on six tops up, doesn't matter. I love that film for a long time already. And there were some comments going around, like, uh, oh, why did you do that? Uh, this is an insult to the artwork, this is an insult to Kubrick himself and stuff like that. And I'm like, no, I actually I revere the men, the men in the team, Douglas Turnbull and all of his TV, even more, because being able to see this little piece of history that was always there, and now he can see it because computers.

Speaker 1 9:37

You know, I originally had that same thought too was man, if he found out about this, he would be livid. But it's more of just a curiosity in the same way that I love behind the scenes documentaries, and I love watching how did they make that and behind the VFX. It's just an innate curiosity. And so for me, it doesn't actually ruin the movie at all for me. In fact, it's just I can't believe they did all that. And this was the level of artistry that they were able to achieve in the 60s. For me, it's just awe-inspiring. And it's not that it makes anything we do now easier, we do things just differently now, but it's just a peek at what they were doing and the level of his genius, honestly. Like for those that don't know, he had an obsession with not when you were doing analog and opticals back then, it was really difficult to do this without getting another generation on film. And Kubrick hated that, and so they were able to avoid that by essentially printing each RGB layer onto a different black and white layer, and he was just meticulous about that. And when you look at that combined with his craftsmanship, there was so much time and care placed with these effects for us not to be able to see this until now. And so I don't really think it's a bad thing, I just think that it's absolutely incredible that I mean no one saw this until now, other than people that worked on the film. And it's also a testament to the technology that we have now and the film scanners and the ability to see into film. Like we can talk about how great digital is, but it's just it shows how amazing film is and how awesome celluloid is that we are able to essentially go back in time and get better quality scans of this. It's almost like 150, 60 years ago of this amazing film and get more information of how this was done. Like it's just awe-inspiring to me. That's the best word for it.

Ethics Of Revealing Invisible Craft

Speaker 11:36

There's another video that I'd recently released, not recently, like two weeks ago or so, where it's another forensic analysis of a sequence in the in 2001 Space Odyssey. You have one of the pods rotating and there's a window, and it's funny that the window is deliberately slanted back, so that if you shoot the pod from the front, the window will reflect whatever is dark behind the camera, or better yet, above the camera in the studio. But there's a certain rotation, there's two rotations, one of them has better informed data than the other one, where the pod, as it rotates, you see some specks of light, you see a little some mushy information at the bottom, and then you see a streak of light pass really fast from one side to the other. And that got me thinking. I mean, this is obviously the set. This is a sound stage. It has to be. You see a little speck of light, you see something mushy at the bottom. Okay, let's look into it. I took that shot, I just rescaled it, made it so that the rotation is corrected, so you just see like an ellipse rotating in front of you. It stabilized, it's denoised. The 24 frames per second are interpolated to 60. Then I decided to export a vertical video. So then they got me thinking, okay, there's distortion because of the window, the window is tilted backwards, and there's a little bit of uh, is it concave, let's say, because a streak of light passes by it in a weird way.

Speaker 1 13:00

Yeah.

Speaker 13:00

I ran it through an app that does a slit scan photography.

Speaker 1 13:04

So I was able to extract-appropriate for the film.

Speaker 13:08

Exactly. So I decided to extract the single line in the middle of that elliptical window frame as it passes and as it reflects whatever was behind the camera or around the camera. And I have an image. You can see the soundstage.

Speaker 1 13:23

Really?

Speaker 13:24

Yes. You see what it's it's ghostly in the sense that you only have a handful of pixels to work with, even though it's an ultra HD scan. But I think you can see you see obviously a light projector, you see a projector hanging in darkness, you see a wall that looks like some sort of sound insulation, and you see a wooden structure with stairs. You see two flights of stairs move going up to a place where a light projector would be, and you see the floor. I made another video, you can look it up on on YouTube now, and where dissect everything and all the exports from the slit scan technique are all there. You can just download the PNGs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 13:58

That's fascinating. It's almost like a reverse HDR image, or excuse me, HDRI image that you essentially reverse engineered out of the film. Because that's essentially sort of what we're doing now when you have a CGI object, is you try to get an HDRI image to properly light it, and you sort of reverse engineered that. And to me, that's fascinating. But in its context, we see it and our brain goes, oh, that's just a star or a meteor or something flying past the ship, because we just have the context of where it is and what it feels like. And so we don't think twice about it. That's what's so cool. So, Paulo, I know that you do digital camera calibrations and film emulations, and you actually do a lot of stuff in an area that I hear a lot of people are interested in, myself included, which is working with still photography. Can you tell us about your work in that area as well? Because a lot of people, including some of our previous guests, have talked about how much they want and how much they do use Resolve for still photography work. And you are not only calibrating digital cameras, but you're doing film emulations for Lightroom and still photography. So I'd like to hear more about that.

Reverse Engineering The Soundstage

Speaker 15:02

Well, uh, when I started working professionally as a photographer, there was uh I have a need the need to capture color accurately. Either I was doing events or I was doing later on product photography and artwork reproduction, specially. You need to have, let's say, a specific artwork with very vibrant colors properly captured, properly processed, and printed on paper as faithfully as possible. And so that got me into calibration. And so with the the humble, here it is behind me, with the humble color checker passport that I bought back in 2010. It tells me that I should replace it every two years. There's no mod uh there's no change in the color, by the way. I started going deep into what calibration could be and what it how it could improve the way that I work. Started off simple with the free software that comes with a color checker, then there's a version for Adobe from Adobe, and then I recently evolved with for uh with the Luma Reaver Profile Designer, which is the the most complete, I think for now, for the time being, is the most complete software that you can use for calibration. And so having a handful of professional cameras throughout the years, I always worked, created profiles for them, and I could have faithful reproduction, color reproduction with specific light sources. And name those two, the two main light sources will be Daylight and Tungsten. So I actually have these two back here. When was the last time that you saw a lamp with a filament inside?

Speaker 1 16:36

It's been a little while, I'll admit. They've all been replaced by LEDs.

Speaker 16:40

And in Germany, Germany has a lot of fluorescent tubes. You see so many fluorescent tubes everywhere. You may think, okay, Germany. No. In some regards, Germany is really, really way behind when it comes to technology at the core level in terms of internet speed and lighting is one of them. So it was really easy to buy these. And these are actually general electric, I think. These are really good light bulbs. So this is basically the perfect light bulb, perfect color reproduction, emits a lot of heat. You can't you shouldn't use it for artwork in a gallery, for example. But I decided to use this to calibrate for tungsten. And then I bought this LED. This is from a Chinese brand called UG LED, and it just basically measures perfectly. It emits a D50 color temperature CCT. And so with these two light bulbs, I thought that I could create a series of products that would give photographers the opportunity to have something dependable, a dependable starting point for their edits inside of Lightroom or Photoshop using the Adobe Camera Raw plugin. That requires having cameras in studio, illuminated with light bulbs. I have more of these, not only two, illuminating a series of color charts. I have a lot of color charts here next to me, and then creating a product that tells you that gives you the confidence that any variant that could be present in the scene will just be a consequence of, you know, like a stray light, something with a white point that's slightly different, an LED that's not quite as good as your reference color. You have that ease of mind of a good starting point. And so that's how calibration started. And uh the I started off with Adobe Camera Raw, the plugin. The implementation is pretty good. I would even say that it's better than capture one, and naturally also started doing that with video. DaVinci Resolve has a little tool, color checker, not a color checker, color chart tool in the color panel that allows you to match colors. It's not great. It feels like a feature that was kind of forgotten, but every so often it works. But it is an approach, it's a possibility. Yeah.

Speaker 1 18:43

So what are you doing to essentially for some of your like color negatives that you're doing? Because I know that you're taking a lot of film emulations and essentially creating them for still photography. So can you talk through us your process a little bit about that? Because I know you have to negate both the digital camera and then you have to emulate the film, which is super interesting.

Camera Calibration For Still Photographers

Speaker 19:04

The way this all started was when I have the let's say the interest in buying a film roll. It's photograph on analog. I bought many years ago, I bought a EOS 50E for like 25 euros. That's like 30 something dollars. So cheap that camera. I bought it so cheap, and it's really good and it's really good condition. Let's do some film. Uh it's been a while. I've I've shot film back in the day, I've developed film manually, I've printed color and black and white. And so that got me thinking, what if I can bring all of the knowledge that I that I developed in camera calibration into film negative, color film negative in this case. So I started doing research, I started reading about it, and then my main concern was is there a scientifically accurate way of reproducing the color negative? Because if you look at a color negative, you don't see an image, it's not an image that is ready to be seen. It has to be either scanned or printed. So with that in mind, you will always be capturing what the paper does. So it's kind of like with cinema film with the print film or the scanner. So is there a way to take a step back and interpret the color negative in the in its truest form? So what I did was take my digital camera, my workhorse, the Sony a7 IV, the camera that does it all, including overheating. And so I decided to calibrate that camera to the nth dimension. So I decided to create a very special profile for that camera with I think 2000 and something color patches. It's basically the combination of all of my color charts illuminated with a D50 LED. So after have I created that profile, and that allowed me to turn my digital camera into a measurement device. So I was no longer aiming for something kind of generic that kind of looks good, but it's there's not a lot of tension between colors. It kind of just works. No, this was like super high quality, super rigorous. It works in the real world, but it's not like completely agreeable sometimes with real world colors, but it's measures really, really well. So I decided to, okay, I'm gonna have my digital camera photograph the negative, illuminate it again with this light bulb, a full spectrum light bulb, and rely on the capability of that profile to do all of the color separation that I read that I need in post-production. Something that a dedicated film scanner would do by other means. And in this case, we're talking about the fact that the film, the color color negative, compresses the red, green, and blue channels, let's call them channels, in these narrow band, very narrow band areas of the visible spectrum. So it's really compressed. So the way that color printing paper and film scanners work is that the backlight itself aligns with those peaks. So that works if you're using a digital scanner, a dedicated film digital scanner where the sensor is calibrated and tuned for that narrow band backlight. A backlight that aligns with those peaks is, for example, an iPhone screen. It aligns almost exactly with those peaks. So I decided to set that aside because if I use a narrow band light source to illuminate my negative with a digital camera that expects to see. Continuous transitions between colors, the camera would incur into something that is really nasty. That I mean most of the audience will know, which is metameric failure, stands for metameric failure, which is, for example, if this LED that's illuminating my face was bad quality, I would appear green to my blackmagic camera. So it's tense, it's a tense process. So I decided to rely totally on the value of having a good profile and a really good light source to illuminate my color negative. And then there was a process of inversion. Both of these processes, both it was inspired by um GitHub repository and uh that I found of a person called Aaron Bookler. I got in touch with him for a while, just exchanging some messages, and he basically had a really good method on how to take the resulting raw file passed by this profile that I created and invert it in 32 bits in Photoshop. With that in mind, I ended up with an inversion that looks really, really, really good. It looks really good to the point that I can make film look like digital, which is absurd, but it works.

Speaker 1 23:45

So at that point, you don't essentially have a negative, you have what should look like a print without the characteristics of that specific print. Am I understanding that correctly?

Speaker 23:54

You can put it in those terms, yes. I mean, I'm taking away an essential step in what the negatives should go through. The optical image, the optical projection of that negative should go on paper, then you develop the paper and you look at the image with a good light source. And I'm basically taking that away from the process and suggesting a new approach. A lot of people write about the advantages of using certain types of LEDs with a certain color temperature, with is it peaky, is it wideband? Wideband is usually bad. I made wide band lights, the backlight, look substantially better than a narrow band. And I reinforced this in one of the videos that I made with like a tutorial with this entire process, that independently of having a wideband light source, what you need is good color separation when you interpret the raw file. So I have a digital camera, I have a film scanner back there, but it's not that great. So that led me into exploring the possibility of emulating the negative with this process in mind. And so the way that I did that was simply like most people do, shooting color charts. And so I shoot the color chart, I invert it with this process, and then do a matching process with 3D Let Creator.

Building Accurate Profiles And Light

Speaker 1 25:08

That's fascinating. I love that, and I love the detail and intricacy that you took to go through that, especially with the different lighting methods that you have to do, because it becomes really easy to just try and port over digital film emulation techniques. But I love that you did this entirely using sort of still techniques. Because I mean, there is similarities, but there's also a different world in the terms of printing back to paper and stuff like that. So I I really appreciate the path that you took and the intricacy that you're applying to this. Because I am not great at still photography. That's a lot of people get into color from a background of still photography, and I actually went the opposite way. I got into still photography after my background and being a colorist because not being a cinematographer, I wanted to be involved in the image creation process and still photography and even shooting on a film camera is a great way to gain an appreciation in that. So I love that for those of you that want to experiment with that, you have not only released some products that help with that, but you're sharing your knowledge about what it takes to match these two. Because shooting film and developing film, it's an incredible process. It takes a lot of work. You have to ship off your film, but not everybody has the time and patience to do that. And so I appreciate somebody like yourself that takes and creates products that make it easier to bring the look and feel of film to a digital process.

Speaker 26:37

Yeah, I mean, I would have loved, if I knew nothing about this, about let's say manually inverting a color negative, I would have loved to find information about it online, a full tutorial on how to do it. There's a obviously there's a bit of gatekeeping on my side where I have what I call a universal method, which is basically what was described by that person, Aaron Buckler. And I basically took his process and made a video about it. It's all there. You go to GitHub and the methodology is all there. Auto-invert the negative. And you can use that methodology with digital scans that you make with an iPhone, for example, with whatever backlight you have laying around. And then putting all of my knowledge of camera calibration into these processes, I knew that I could create a product while still helping the community. So I think this is the fairest way of doing it. You have to share information. I mean, the type of things that I do that ended up becoming a product took so much work and so much investment in terms of money, in terms of the color charts, the software, for example, the light sources. This single lamp costs 35 euros, for example. It's pretty expensive. Not these ones, these ones are cheap, but they cost an electricity. So I decided that it was important to monetize that, of course, but still give something back to the community. Because I think people really with the prices of film skyrocketing, I mean, also it has to do with the price of silver, and we never know, we don't know exactly where manufacturers are, if uh in terms of you know continuing the project or not, if if Kodak is gonna release new films or gonna stop completely, if Fuji uses the same films as Kodak, which I think that's kind of like the rumor that you see with the spectral responsiveness of Kodak. Gold is it gold 200 and Fuji 200? It's basically the same film. There's a lot of some mystery behind it, and I think it was important to clear it up with a technique that I invented or improved because it wasn't originally mine, but actually make like a good tutorial that could help people. And the product side of side of it is a different story because it takes a lot more work to get done.

Speaker 1 28:45

I will be perfectly clear. There is absolutely magic to shooting on film. There is nothing quite like it, and having to wait and see if those images turned out. But sometimes you just want the end result to have the look and feel of still photography. For instance, I mean, the other saying the best camera is the one you have with you. And everybody has an iPhone now, and a lot of people know that your camera is essentially a data capture device, like you were saying. And it's really, really amazing to be able to use the camera that you have with you, yet still apply a look and feel to the dozens and dozens of stocks that have been on the market for decades. And so sometimes you don't want your iPhone photos to look and feel like iPhone photos. I know a lot of people have disdain for the iPhone processing that Apple forces upon us. So it's really nice to be able to use a natural capture profile, which a lot of the apps now allow, and then run it through a process like the things that you offer to apply a film-like look and feel. Even though it's not the same as shooting on film, you can start to apply film style philosophies. And it doesn't cost the same, and it's certainly, I mean, you still have to process it, but it isn't the same level of processing. So I really do appreciate you putting out products like that. You don't have to go through the same development time that you've put into it. You can essentially grab one of your products for a nominal fee and start working with essentially digital film, which is a really, really useful tool. So for those of you who are looking, you can check out Paulo's website, Alchemy Color. We'll have a note in the description. If you want to check out some of Paulo's products, they're really, really cool. And if you're getting more into still photography and want to add that look and feel, well, definitely I can recommend his products myself, and we'll have a link to his YouTube videos. As we start to get to the end of our episode, where can people find out more about you? Your Instagram, your website, can you share more about that?

Inverting Color Negatives Scientifically

Speaker 30:48

The website is just alchemycolor.com. On Instagram, I think it's also alchemy.color. I can't tell from the top of my head right now, but it should be fairly easy to find with the triangle. The Illuminati triangle is the logo for the company. Uh on YouTube, it's also AlchemyColor. You're gonna find just a handful of videos I don't release that often. So it's mostly like a research, research projects or or product launches. Um and you can also email me at info at alchemycolor.com. I'll surely reply. And especially if you if you want to test the products with some of your images, just send me some raw fells and I'll gladly return the resulting emulations.

Speaker 1 31:32

That's incredibly generous. And last but not least, what are you working on next?

Speaker 31:37

So I recently finished color grading a film, a documentary film, with archival footage. I love working with archival footage. Uh more than having really good high-quality images uh from a really good camera to start with. I love doing restoration. I love getting the most out of bad footage, let's call it. Recently finished that. Uh, next year I'm gonna start a documentary uh that will be shot in Portugal's France and the Spain, north of Spain in Pays Basque. This has to do with gastronomy. It's something still in the scripting phase, but it's gonna be a good one. Very earthy, let's call it. So I'm definitely I'm gonna film that uh film. I mean using digital films. I'm gonna record it. I don't film, I record. That's coming up and a launch of the last iteration I would expect of the film emulations that will have not only emulating directly to what the film would look like under the methodology that I described, but it also includes the negative. So you see the film as a negative, you export a TIFF, and then you run it through Negative Lab Pro. You can do that. And especially the one I'm mostly excited about is the Sineon export. So you run open a raw file, you tweak exposure and write balance, apply a film stock, and then the print is Sineon log. You export a rec 2020 file, import it into the DaVinci Resolve, and run a print film emulation on top with a Halation Grain, etc. And it really, really looks like the illusion starts to become complete. You look at the images and it it pauses you. You're like, okay, this is a digital file. It's strange, but it's it's gonna happen. Yeah, that will be version two. Yeah.

Speaker 1 33:24

I'm super excited for that. I've seen some samples of your Cineon product, and honestly, they look incredible. It's really, really cool. It reminds me of when people re-roll up 35mm film for still photography, and then you get to go and have essentially a full film print workflow. So I'm super excited to see that. We'll have links to that in the description. Thank you so much for joining us, Paulo. It's truly been such a pleasure to have you on the show. And for this episode of Color and Coffee, I'm Jason Bowdach, and we will see you in the next one. Happy grading, everybody. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and your podcast app of choice. Search for at Color Coffee or at Color Coffee Podcast and join the conversation. If you're using Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please leave a review. Huge thanks to FSI, Demystify Color, and Pixel Tools for sponsoring the show. Until the next episode!