CCD 2004 DCTL

Point, shoot, 2004.

The colour of a mid-2000s CCD compact camera, rebuilt for modern footage, together with the camera itself. Punchy, saturated colour, deep blue skies, vivid yellow-greens and the hard, bright highlight clipping of a small digital sensor. The digicam look that Gen Z brought back, made with the precision of a cinema grade.

What you will notice

• A steep, video-like tone curve with deep blacks.
• Hard digital highlight clipping about three stops above mid-grey, so bright skies and windows burn to clean white.
• Clean, neutral whites rather than a warm film cream.
• Saturated reds and oranges, deep blue skies instead of cyan, and bright yellow-green foliage.
• Skin kept natural inside the punchier palette.

The camera, not just the colour

• Input Profile: built-in transforms for 15 inputs, from Sony S-Log3 and ARRI LogC to Apple Log, DaVinci Intermediate and Rec.709.
• Sensor Softness: the slightly soft, low-resolution rendering of a small sensor.
• Digital Sharpening: the crunchy in-camera sharpening halos around edges.
• Sensor Noise: fine luma grain plus coarser chroma blotches, strongest in the shadows, moving with your footage.
• Vignette: gentle corner fall-off.
• Date Stamp: the orange seven-segment date in the corner, with your own year, month and day.
• Look Strength, Exposure, Saturation, White Balance and Highlight Clip to tune the colour.

How to use it

1. Select your input. Apply the DCTL to your log footage and choose its profile under Input Profile. In a colour-managed DaVinci Wide Gamut project, choose DaVinci Intermediate.
2. Balance first. Set exposure and white balance before the DCTL.
3. Apply CCD 2004, set the Look Strength, then add as much texture and date stamp as the shot needs. The DCTL outputs Rec.709 Gamma 2.4.

How it was developed

CCD 2004 was built by measuring a set of photographs from CCD compact cameras made between 1998 and 2008, including Canon IXUS and PowerShot, Sony Cyber-shot, Fujifilm FinePix and Nikon Coolpix models: their highlight clipping, tone curve, saturation by brightness and the hue of skies, foliage, reds and skin. The result is an original look that reproduces those characteristics on modern log footage, working on scene-linear light after a published-specification input transform for each camera.

Best suited for

• Music videos, fashion and social content with a Y2K feel.
• Travel, party and holiday footage that should feel like a found memory.
• Flash-lit or harshly lit scenes, where the hard clip looks most authentic.
• Bright daylight with blue skies.

Requires DaVinci Resolve Studio. Sample images: OpenEXR test images, © Industrial Light & Magic.