Assuming that you are (or have) optically printed, of course if a scanned image you can change the color and increase contrast.
That's right.
examples I see of it seem VERY warm
If these examples are shown online, they're virtually always scans from negative. The color balance was either automatically rendered or adjusted to taste by someone in the imaging chain. You can print Portra cool, warm, magenta, cyan or yellow just like anything else.
You could also try one of the kodak Vision3 movie films.
That's a low-contrast, low-saturation route. I think it's the opposite of where Ben wants to go.
I can’t remember if portra UC used Vision2 or Vision3 technology.
Neither, probably...
Firstly, it's doubtful the cine films were technology leaders at that point. I think there's a clear statement (by Joe Manthey maybe? ex Kodak emulsion engineer) who indicated that still film served as the technology pull, so it would have seen innovations/new technologies implemented before cine film.
More importantly, the "X is based on Y" reasoning I sometimes see is problematic from an R&D perspective. Look at technologies like a well-stocked larder. When you're going to bake a cake, you're going to take ingredients from this larder depending on what kind of cake you want. Now, imagine you invented a new "strawberry flavor" ingredient because you figure people will like it. So on that day, you decide you're going to bake some nice muffins with that ingredient. The next day, you use it in a cake. Does that mean the cake is based on the muffins, because they both use the new strawberry flavor? What the demand on day one would have been for cake, and not for muffins? Would then the muffins have ended up being based on the cake instead of vice versa? In reality, neither is the case. Both are based on the same technology, and that technology was developed in response to a perceived market requirement. The technology then ended up in the first opportune product in the roadmap that would benefit from the new tech, whose development effort wouldn't be harmed (too much) by the inclusion of this new technology, where the market requirements made sense etc.
What you
can obviously say is that films from the same manufacturer tend to share certain technology traits, and there will generally be some similarities between products from roughly the same era. Then again, there will also be plenty
more similarities between films from entirely different eras and entirely different manufacturers....
Note, finally, that the Vision film stocks are ECN-2/CD-3 products, not C41. They do share technological similarities with C41 color still film (see above) and yet they are fundamentally different in other ways.
To answer Ben's question:
1: If this is a hybrid workflow, shoot whatever regular C41 400 speed film you can get your hands on and adjust color and contrast to taste.
2: If printing optically, things are a little more complicated. For 'punch', try something like Gold 200 and overdevelop it and expose at somewhere between 200 and 400. You'll see contrast and saturation go up - but also grain and acutance. Or...just shoot Portra 400 and print on something like Fuji DPII. That gives
plenty of punch already and saturation and looks absolutely nothing like most Portra scans I see people post online (hence my earlier remarks...)
At Kodak the major film types – color neg, cine, slide, and B&W – were designed and developed in silos, i.e., the people involved generally stayed within a single film type, and because of that not many specific components were shared across platforms with the possible exception of color couplers. As an example, they may have been using T-grain emulsions but not the same ones. At the time, color neg was the tail that wagged the dog.
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