Need Advice On Replacing Sky’s

[William Edwards]

Try not to make a dramatic change, keep it simple. Sounds like they should have used a filter. Hard to say any ways of making it go faster, I’m sure each scene is different. Don’t you think there’s limitations to what can be done in the time allotted?

[Joseph Owens]

[Dave Williams] “Has anyone been able to do a key on a totally washed out sky, add some color and have it look realistic?”
Yes, these days its an expectation.

The technique is usually a combination of Luminance-qualified secondary, erode/blur plus a power window to put some shape into the sky gradation. This gets a little tricky for material that is less than 10-bit, as banding will set in fairly quickly. You should save this operation as a node tree that you can append to a current grade, but also be prepared to do some tracking. Try not to do custom shapes, but mostly rely on the luminance qualification to provide a basic “shape” that you can feather, then shape with a boolean window operation.

Look at a natural sky and for the most part, you will see that horizon lines are less saturated than higher azimuths.

Otherwise 24 working hours for a 1200 event timeline doesn’t sound that unreasonable for a seasoned colorist. That’s what we used to get allotted for feature length intermediate transfers, including notching, film transport, viewing and loading/unloading reels.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Andrew Sableton]

Yeah 24 working hrs is a lot of time….. I do 1300 shot TV shows in 8-10 hrs quite often….

Hue vs Hue and Hue vs Sat curves can sometimes work well for a quick isolation / manipulation of sky, in combination with pushing a bit of blue into the gain…. but all depends on a lot of specific properties of the shot and what you are trying to achieve….

AS