For those of you who have pulled monitor focus for a black and white scene or project, how do you find the ease of pulling focus off a black and white image? Is it any more difficult than in colour?
We can either put a B&W LUT in the camera and feed all monitors black and white, which is simpler in a way, or put a LUT on every downstream device that wants to see it in black and white, namely video village and maybe the directors monitor and operator monitors. The focus pullers could toggle back to colour if they wanted.
Thoughts? Do you find the loss of colour contrast makes it more difficult to distinguish focus on a monitor?
I have to say that I often set my monitor to black and white (while shooting a project in color) and add a little yellow on the Small HD 703’s focus assist. Works really well for most shots. So I could very well live with a black and white LUT.
I find I see contrast much better in black and white, especially in highly saturated scenes. So like Dennis I set my monitor to black and white when not using the LR2. There are times colour contrast would be useful. I don't imagine needing that to effectively complete a shot.
There may be others on set that would benefit from a colour image from time to time encase the project is changed into colour last minute (like Mist 2007)
Hi Kar, and thanks for sharing this doubt, which is kind of interesting in my opinion. Normally I would have on my monitor the same setting of the project, so B&W if the project is like that, but I do know a lot of focus puller that prefers this settings to pull, due to the high contrast (a lot of them also say that in some situations they find color distracting). As for me I have a user button assigned to black and white on my monitor, so I can easily switch. Problem is that a lot of times the directors watches the shot on my monitor, so I often need to have the “real” image on it😅😜
Update to the situation: We ended up transmitting Log C from the cameras to video village with a B&W 709 LUT on the monitoring end, and I had a colour de-log LUT enabled on my focus monitor. I greatly preferred being able to keep seeing in colour as I could pick up a lot of details that were hidden by the black and white (chromatic aberrations, diffusion levels, flaring, etc). Also helped 'pop' the subjects from the otherwise rather monochromatic background.