: Rosco is the world’s largest and oldest color filter manufacturer operating today. Founded more than a century ago, it has developed numerous color filter lines over the years, including Roscolux, Cinegel, Supergel, and e-colour+. In this blog, we turn the lens onto Rosco e-colour+ to answer some of the most common questions posed by film and television professionals about this popular color filter range.
Friday, November 12, 2021
The Top 5 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Rosco e-colour+
www.rosco.com
: Rosco is the world’s largest and oldest color filter manufacturer operating today. Founded more than a century ago, it has developed numerous color filter lines over the years, including Roscolux, Cinegel, Supergel, and e-colour+. In this blog, we turn the lens onto Rosco e-colour+ to answer some of the most common questions posed by film and television professionals about this popular color filter range.
: Rosco is the world’s largest and oldest color filter manufacturer operating today. Founded more than a century ago, it has developed numerous color filter lines over the years, including Roscolux, Cinegel, Supergel, and e-colour+. In this blog, we turn the lens onto Rosco e-colour+ to answer some of the most common questions posed by film and television professionals about this popular color filter range.
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There is something about being an electrician that I really miss and I think it has everything to do with the gels. At my last job we only used Rosco (though we did have a few cabinets of Gam, Lee, and Apollo gels, though we never really used them). Something about working with the resident LD and knowing exactly what she was going to swap things out to given the way she would angrily stare at the stage was a fun game for me. Terri and I worked together for about 5 years and I miss being able to work so closely with lighting.
I'm not sure what else to say other than that it was interesting reading about the development processes for the cinegel and ecolour+ lines. Also I didn't know there was an award for technical advancement. It would be interesting to see what other things have gotten such accolades.
Typically when surfing through the green page looking for articles to find ones to comment on, I will often skip over articles like this or tool reviews as I struggle to imagine what kind of thing I would write about a common tool, or in this case, lighting gels. Most of this article is not much different than I expected, the first of the five frequently asked questions is “what is Rosco e-colour+.” Thank you, but I do in fact know what a lighting gel is. However, the second question gets interesting – I had no idea that this line of Rosco gels was the same as Lee gels. There are obviously only so many different gel colors you can make before the differences become completely unnoticeable, but the fact that Rosco e-coulour+ and Lee gels are the exact same down to the numbering system is something I never would have expected. I also never knew how gels were made, which is addressed in the third question (albeit indirectly). I didn’t know that the gels tend to be dyed polyester film. I assumed that the polyester was colored before it was rolled/extruded into the flat sheets. It also discusses how the e-coulour+ (the previous being Cinegel) is just surface coated with dye, which also surprises me. It make me wonder how it adheres. In any case, I was plesently surprised with how much this article actually engaged me.
While not super deep on the process, I enjoyed the background on the two types of gel, going into creation, why they don’t always match up because they were created to different standards, some of which are less in use now because they were not based on digital cameras, and even more interesting how the color is added to the gel, here either on the surface or internally. I don’t really look at the manufacturing of the things I use very often, and even in a similar vein to the idea that I can look at two gels and not really tell the difference until I put it onto a light, human color sensors are not always the best for doing that, and we see that in those manufacturing processes likely making the gels looking visually similar to me but very different in their practicality and what they do onstage. Both of these colors fulfill the requirements and standards, but go beyond in different ways to fulfill different purposes.
Sometimes I'm surprised that the colored gel industry still seems to maintain prominence even with the use of LEDs and moving lights. When I first used the color picker on a light board for an LED I wondered why gels even existed and we didn't just switch over to them. From my few experiences on film and TV sets, I understand that there's more nuance to color use and quality, and that you simply don't always have a color-changing light. Even after reading this article, I'm still sort of unsure of the difference between the e-colour+ gel filters and any of the previous ones we have looked at in our cute mini gel books. I'm assuming it probably has to do with the structure and makeup of it (i.e. how the polyester is coated), as in the response for question 3 of the article. Regardless, it's super cool to me how color and light continue to be explored in new and unique ways.
I think this article was a lot more basic than I was expecting it to be. But I guess that would make sense since a lot of the frequent questions probably don’t come from people already deep into our field, and I don't really know what I was really expecting from it anyways. I do think that it was interesting reading about the differences between e-colour+ and cinegel. It’s cool that the different manufacturing processes can create so many differences in colored plastic sheets.
This article kinds of brings back memories from high school theatre when I used to help my best friend (who was the head of the lighting department) with sorting gels after every show and helping try to find the right colors when hanging lights. While I’ve never had interest being a lighting designer or engineer; I do miss doing the work of hanging plots and focusing lights.
There were some interesting subtleties to the differences between gel types that were illuminated for me (no pun intended) by this article. The difference between deep dyed PET and surface coated polyester, especially in terms of low-intensity fidelity to hue, was something I was not aware of, and that could definitely have some bearing on why you might choose one gel over another. That said, it was kind of comical to me towards the end of the article, though, when the 'why should I buy this' section had to resort to "we roll our gels on one inch rolls instead of two inches and that might save you some storage space," and that really goes to show how subtle the differences are between different gels. As long as you get gels from a vaguely reputable manufacturer, the differences are going to be pretty minimal, and you can pretty much just choose the color you like the best.
I thought the background around color correction in rosco e-colors was really interesting especially because I hadn’t considered that correction would be different. But there are color differences in their correction filters as well. A Cinegel Full CTB, for example, does not match an e-colour+ Full CTB. That’s because Cinegel was originally designed in the United States to match the Kodak film standards. e-colour+ filters (and Lee filters), on the other hand, match the AGFA film standards used in the UK and Europe. Although these standards are no longer as important as they once were due to the widespread use of digital cameras, they do explain why the CTO & CTB colors of Cinegel and e-colour+ differ. Also the different filter ranges were really interesting to me aswell. The idea that there is a set color wheel but we have different levels of broad color selection is crazy. It’s very interesting background.
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