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Participant
March 25, 2024
Open for Voting

El Zone System by Ed Lachman

  • March 25, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 954 views

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the El Zone System app talked about here. I simply want to have it integrated into P.P. to aid in the pre & post production process. 

 

I have recently discovered the power of the app called, "EL Zone System" developed by Cinematographer Ed Lachman and would like to see if others can help bring attention to this so we can have it in premier pro. More specifically, in the lumetri workspace. Below is a brief glimpse:

 

 

In short, the El Zone Stems is similar to the false color feature found in Premier Pro and other monitoring tools that helps identify differing areas of brightness. Although, it is a lot easier to distinguish & communicate the lighting contrast ratios like the key to fill ratio or key to background ratio for example compared to the false color tool. You can read more about this app here which has been adopted by many suppliers and end users already.

 

On important stage this can be used in for us P.P. users is in pre-production as you can analyze inspriational movie stills from shotdeck.com for example and figure out your lighting ratios. As of now I am using my atmos ninja monitoring tool that has this app while connected to my camera to take advantage of the El Zone System functionality. It would make pre-production a lot smoother to do it from a computer with this app integrated into P.P. instead of taking a picture of a picture (inspirational movie still) so my monitoring tool can analyze it. 

 

Hopefully we can have this tool sooner than later. Have any of you heard of and/or used this feature? I would like to hear your thoughts. 

 

1 reply

R Neil Haugen
Legend
March 25, 2024

I work for/with/teach pro colorists, and yea, I've seen alot of things about this, and including interviews with him. In all, it's a solid system.

 

I do have a bit of an issue ... his "middle gray" is at "0", with as many stops above as below.

 

In reality, in video work, the 18% reflectance of "middle grey" should be around 38-44IRE depending on the camera in use.Which ... would be more properly in his scale expressed as "-1".

Everyone's mileage always varies ...