Log images have become very popular since today every digital cinema camera manufacturer offers a log output option. But log images look weird and require completely different math operations than normal linear images so they must be converted to linear before working with them – most of the time. This article reveals the advantages of log images, how they work, and how to work with them.
We saw in Part 3, Camera Space, that the modern digital cinema cameras produce a torrent of image data that needs to be stored for later editing, visual effects, and color correction. How that data is stored has a profound effect on the retained quality of those captured images so the modern visual effects artist needs to understand the consequences of their choices of file formats for storage. The rapid increase in available disk space and network bandwidth has reduced the need for data compression as the primary motive in selecting any particular storage file format. Instead, the emphasis now is on protecting the quality of those images and “future proofing” the project. To do that effectively you need to understand the various file formats along with their strengths and weaknesses.
