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Grading a feature – how much time is “normal” ?
The question is simpel, yet the answer may be complicated.
How long should be spent on a feature film? Minimum? And how long does it take to do it? I’m asking for experience here more than anything else.
I’ve done two 70-90 minute projects couple of years ago in Color, but those were amateur stuff with low budget and a “You got all the time in the world” kind of deadline.
I’d like to know from experience or some sort of guideline on how much time I should expect to spend on grading a feature film.
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10 Replies
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Are you also handling the conform?
twitter.com/illyalaney
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Most likely, I’ll be getting a FCP project file with Prores or R3D files needed for the sequence. Possibly all source material in case of a re-edit.
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Can you just charge hourly and roll with it? 🙂
I’ve seen very different figures with feature stuff. I’ve seen people take 90 hours for example.
You could take the time it takes you to grade a short form narrative and scale that. That will probably give you a safe estimate, since once you break a feature down in reels it looks no different than 4-6 20 minute shorts
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Ola, good question, I’ve found that the more experienced colorists I talk with on this subject are all over the map in their responses, every job is so different for people its hard to quantify averages. Here’s my experience though: and take my answer with a grain of salt as the 6 features I’ve done have all been low budget/indie films, no studio releases or super tight deadlines here but, I’ve always used 40 hours as a minimum for films that need just a basic color correction (such as docs and features that pretty much have the “look” already baked in). I can get through a decently thorough first pass of a 90 minutes film in about 3 days (24-30 hours of work), and then have about 10-16 hours to go back through the film and start adding more power windows and fine tune grades on a 2nd and 3rd pass etc.
The two projects that I did “longer” grades on were actually 2 week grades with 80 hours worth of work total roughly. The films required heavy “looks” that differed greatly from the raw materials and involved a lot of “supervised” work in the 2nd week with the DP/Director to fine tune things. (they also involved R3D conforms which are truly a pain in the @55 if there’s tons of VFX work, the conforming process is definately a concern for time management when bidding out these jobs)
Ultimately (and I know these are obvious), it depends on the system you’re using (obvioulsy apple color is a killer on time), how familiar you are with it, whether the session is supervised, how many cuts/shots, format, etc.
Would love to hear other’s experience on this!
Chris Hall
Colorist – Basher Films
Pasadena, CA -
Hmmm… It’s about the same to ask “How long would take to shoot a feature?”
It really depends, material exposure/lighting condition, length of the feature, how many shots, what kind of look the Director/DP wants, etc.
Generaly you can count 200-300 shots per day (8 hours) for an experienced colorist.
Oh, also materials from digital camera will take more time than film stocks.
Hope that helps.
mark
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Thanks guys.
That’s what I’ve said too when potential clients ask “how much time do you need to grade a 75 minute film?”. So far I’ve said “about…” and given a number of given weeks, with 8 hours a day, five days a week.
That would include everything from loading all source material to my RAID, to prepping the timeline and doing the actual grading process, rendering and checking against the offline to see if everything is in sync.
Some have been worried that “that’s an awful long period”, others have been welcoming about the time spent, and would possibly want to spend more time “just in case”. This is for commercials and music videos though, with a lot less going on.
My most demanding job so far was to grade 570+ scenes in 8 hours. That included downloading 10GB of material, slicing it up with Scene cut detection and all that.. But I did it. And I would like to relax a tad more when I’m doing “fine arts” with a feature film.
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Rule of thumb!
Ask the client how much they’ve budgeted for the final grade,
Instantly divide it in half, then
Divide that by your hourly rate to find how much time you
DONT have, then double that for a real world expectation
The final result will = not enough time and not enough money with clients expectations way beyond both.So about 1 day per 30 mins 2D and 2 days per 30 mins 3D, plus another 3-4 of your own time for pride and joy!
Enjoy!
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My standard number for a fiction feature film is 100 hours of pure grading (no including conform, confcheck, title insertion, etc.). Minimum for a fiction feature is about 40-50 hours if you just want something simple (balancing and matching, small adjustments).
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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor -
That’s pretty much THE statement of last year Wozzer !
-chrispy
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yeah, “do no harm”.
By now, I’ve been involved in about 40-50 feature length projects, which really do have different expectations, but not mechanics, as compared with series, commercial, doc, etc. In the days when we were grading intermediate prints straight from telecine to video (which were supposed to be already timed for composite print) we got about 20 hours (total billable time) allocated to load, mark, grade and export the thing — usually 5 or 6 lab rolls. You learn to economize your effort.
With digital originals in the past 5 years, I’m finding that that’s about enough to get 90% through a good first pass (first ‘answer’ if you like), and then spend about half that amount again fine-tuning the absolute color continuity.
You can blow a major amount of time just playing it over and over if you’re working with someone else who needs to keep seeing it playing. We used to calculate the time to do things by the number of people in the room — but not just 2x or 3x, but raised to the power of that #, like squared, cubed, etc.
jPo
You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?
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