Cineon and DPX footage items



A common part of the motion-picture film production workflow is scanning the film and encoding the frames into the Cineon or DPX file format. The DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) format is a standard format closely related to the Cineon format.

Cineon data is stored in a logarithmic format, with each color channel taking up 10 bits.

Cineon data has a 10-bit white point of 685 and a 10-bit black point of 95. Values above 685 are retained, but are treated as highlights. Rather than abruptly clipping highlights to white, After Effects interprets highlights using a gradual ramp defined by the Highlight Rolloff value. You can modify the 10-bit white point and 10-bit black point input levels and the output (converted) white point and black point levels to match your specific footage items or creative needs.

Use a project color depth of 32 bpc when working with Cineon footage items so that highlights are preserved, in which case you don’t need to roll off the highlights.

After Effects provides three basic ways of working with the colors in Cineon footage items:

  • The easiest—and recommended—way is to enable color management and assign an input color profile to a Cineon footage item in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box, corresponding to the film stock on which the footage was recorded. If creating output for film, use the same profile as the output color profile so that the output file matches the film stock. One advantage of using color management features to work with Cineon footage items is that compositing with images from other footage types is made easier. See Interpret a footage item by assigning an input color profile.

  • If you need to manually modify the settings for a Cineon footage item, or if you don’t want to use color management, then you can use the Cineon Settings dialog box. To open this dialog box, click the Cineon Settings button in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box.

  • If you need the settings for the interpretation of the Cineon footage item to change over time, then you can apply the Cineon Converter effect to a layer that uses the Cineon footage item as its source.

When you choose Cineon Sequence from the Format menu in the Output Module Settings dialog box, you can then open a Cineon Settings dialog box to set output options. You can choose whether to output DPX (.dpx) files or Cineon 4.5 (.cin) files in the File Format section of the Cineon Settings dialog box.

Additional resources about Cineon and DPX footage items

Stu Maschwitz has a post on his ProLost blog that goes into some details of what it means to say that color values in Cineon files are in a logarithmic color space.

Pete O’Connell provides an article on the Creative COW website that describes working with Cineon footage items.