Visual Reset

The past couple of days I've been very busy.  Between grading, client meetings and family stuff I've been in and out of the suite. Because of this, I was reminded of an old tip to help your eyes adjust back to the calibrated (hopefully) neutral enviornment of your grading suite.  

Sure, it helps to have D65 lighting, a neutral wall (like a Munsell N5 medium gray) and surfaces that are near you that are also netural, but when you're going from one enviornment to another there is another instrument that needs some adjusting - your eyes. 

So one of the things I do is put up a  0% black, 50% gray, 100% white color screen on my video monitor and rotate them every 5 min or so for 15min so about 5min per screen.  I don't stare at each screen but having these representations of pure black, gray and white in my field of vision allows my eyes to adjust to the nuetral enviroment I'm in.   After I've adjusted to my enviroment I jump into grading. 

There are different approaches to this, some use a "confidence spot" which is a card with black, gray and white some where in the colorists field of vision but the idea is the same I just find putting up these fields in Final Cut Pro just a bit easier. 

Modified One/First Light in Color

Back in the good ole' days when most high end projects where shot on film there were often two stages of color correction. The first happened during the telecine transfer of each role of film to a video tape format and the other of course on the finished film. This initial process was/is known as a one or first light color correction (the nomenclature varies depending on who you ask). The goal of this process was to do basic balancing of contrast and color for the video edit or offline. During this first light pass the colorist would pay special attention to simply balance things making sure not to crush blacks or clip whites

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Reconform is your friend

Your working on a show in Color and then the client calls and says "hey we need to change the order of a couple shots" or "we need to remove that shot and replace it with a new one we'll send over to you" If your like many colorists you might ask "have you ever heard of picture lock?" but in all seriousness this is an issue that you'll encounter all the time. Just the past week I probably used reconform 4 or 5 times. Now I should say reconform works best if you haven't already rendered a show and sent it to FCP. If you've already rendered the best thing to do is simply place the shots on a new sequence send that to Color, grade them, send back to FCP and then cut them into your (from Color) sequence i.e. the one you first sent back to FCP with the full show. So how do you reconform a show in Color? Its literally as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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RED Final Cut Studio Workflow

It amazes me how many questions on the Creative Cow Color forum have to do with RED workflow. I think because RED gives you a lot of options - proxies, different apps to transcode and grade footage people are sometimes blind to the most straight forward way of working with RED footage. To be clear I'm going to talk about how to work with RED footage so you can leverage RED RAW information in Color, if you don't need to work with the RAW data or work at 4k resolution then there are other options. Let's get started

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The always useful saturation key

Recently I've been grading shows that have a lot recreation scenes that are very stylized and often very very saturated. While I think super saturated footage for this kind of look works there is technical problem that you'll face a lot - how to make a clip legal with out sucking out all of the saturation. While there are a variety of techniques to do this (such as the secondary sat curve) one of my favorite ways is to use a saturation key. Here is how it works.

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