What a wavelet actually does

Imagine a photo as a stack of clear sheets. The bottom sheet is the blurry blob — sky, face, wall. Each sheet above it adds a sharper layer: edges, then pores, then grain. A wavelet is the math that peels a picture into those sheets. You can throw away the finest sheet and still have a picture that looks like the original.

The same dusk skyline split into stacked sheets: blob, shapes, edges, then grain.

01 · The stack

It splits the picture by how fine the detail is.

First it stores the big shapes. Then the medium edges. Then the tiniest sparkle and noise. Cinema RAW cameras already do this. CineForm does the same kind of split, so you are not translating the footage into a totally different language.

Same skyline: tiled ringing on the left, clean wavelet edges on the right.

02 · Why not tiles?

The other common method chops the frame into little squares.

Apple ProRes and a lot of internet video use a discrete cosine transform: they break the image into an 8×8 grid and compress each square. That works great until you push the grade. Then those squares can ring — a buzzing halo around high-contrast edges. A wavelet is a field, not a grid, so a hard cut stays a hard cut.

Same skyline: brick-like tiles on the left, a slightly softer continuous picture on the right.

03 · When you squeeze harder

If you run out of bits, wavelets get a little softer. Tiles start to look like bricks.

That is the whole point of a smaller file. You are allowed to throw away some of the finest sheet. The picture is still there — a bit less crispy, not a crossword of blocks. 4:1 keeps the most detail. 8:1 is the everyday size. 12:1 is the smallest. None of them change the color science of the file.

A grain sheet peeling off the dusk skyline while the gradeable picture stays underneath.

04 · What you actually encode

You peel the finest sheet. The gradeable picture stays underneath.

The file out of Cine Compressor is still camera log, wide gamut, 10-bit. Rec.709 in the preview window is just so you can see it like a TV. The encode does not bake that look in. Set metadata, apply it to the queue, pick a ratio, and you keep a picture you can still grade.

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