[Joseph Owens]

[Hector berrebi] “how a Samurai feels when asked to fight with a machete. “

Letter-opener.

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

[Glenn Sakatch] “in order to learn what they are doing.”

The standard response to that is that *they* cannot be creatively constrained by technicalities and “not their job” to deal with consequences, intended or not. If it doesn’t work in your environment, not my problem, yours to fix.

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

May or may not be helpful…

As far as technical involvement goes, the earliest stage of involvement for me is a pre-production meeting with department principals — producers, post supervisor (if there is one), director of photography, supervising editor, VFX coordinator, floor director, audio engineer and whoever else might be involved in planning the media stream.

At that stage, deliverables and responsibilities are at least discussed and timetables determined. Normally, I am not involved in editorial unless specific issues arise with unconventional elements which may not be well-managed by hand-offs among various departments.

Eventually a locked (!?) approval master timeline arrives at color (with managed media, of course). The cut is reconciled – there is normally a spotting session to “keyframe” specific treatments or looks for various shots or scenes — problem areas are identified for VFX cleanup or export – if that hasn’t already occurred at the edit stage and is already out for work. Occasionally plate work (greenscreens or other composites) whether they arrive as separate elements or completed-with-mattes will need to be re-conformed back into the timeline. This is normally about as much editorial as I am happily willing to tolerate. Making other revisions at this point with a larger production is a quick way to throw the entire process into turmoil, as there are usually at least three images of a master timeline being processed – back in master editorial, *here* in grade, and also in audio mixing. So you can see it would be pretty easy to get out of sync or drop elements.

There is a branch here, where I either return the graded timeline to editorial for online or the online stays with me. External online would be where titling and perhaps audio layback would occur. Depending on that capability, the rest of the deliverable might rest with them. If the online stays with my company, I might get a master (titled) timeline to carrry forward, including audio elements (master mixes in stereo/surround plus stems and described video), at which point I start assembling texted and textless master deliverables. I also accept captioning work, whether it is a transcription that requires timestamp/caption authoring or (my favourite) either an Excel time-coded file compatible withMacCaption or a completed .scc, .mcc, or .cca file.
At that point, nearly done… work through the broadcaster or distributor contract and make either: tapes (extremely rare now) ProRes or DnX mezzanine masters (XDCam Op1a mpg most often requested) with audio hierarchy as requested, hard drives with playable assets and *EXTRAS* folder (captions, stems, textless, cue sheet documents – sometimes XML formatted by request). Some broadcasters still want DVDs with time code burns. It is pretty much a default now for producers to want Vimeo-compatible H.264 versions — this is getting a bit tricky with federal regulators, depending on whether the need for exactly the same version to stream as to be aired. Frankly, a 23.98 master will be better quality, and can still be “sub-titled”, not necessarily Closed-Captioned, even if the net result is the same, but technically they are different renditions. Tough call. Still means captions or subtitles need to exist and either as imbedded 708 or a sidecar like WebVTT. There might be a DCP. There might also be a BluRay.

Then we start thinking about International distribution, which for the purposes of Universality (and sorry, America) that means either 23.98 or 25PAL. So we work back through the master timeline(s) because an international distribution usually means an extended cut. At that point the whole process essentially re-sets to color grade and then start re-proceeding. Except this time, there will be two or three running-lengths depending on the frame-base. For the best, rejection-free QA performance, 23.98 –> 25 will be executed as 23.98@25, which means the runtime will be shorter by 4% and all the audio (master mixes, stems) will have to be re-clocked. Re-master. Ship.

If at any point, somebody needs to correct the spelling of the third assistant craft services person’s odd name (which really is Dwan Sohmners), that is an entirely different matter and billing procedure.

Speaking of which, accounting practices should probably play a role in all this… don’t really have any good suggestions for that. Other than cross your fingers that you will actually eventually get paid.

That’s pretty much it. Pretty straightforward, every day.

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

[Owen Harvey] “can I get the clip to run at ‘normal’ speed (dropping every other frame)?”

I haven’t actually tried this… can you run an experiment to re-define the fps metadata attached to your media to switch it from 50 to 25?

In the past, it was always better to establish a sequence at the predominant source media framerate. At the root process, almost all grade software was developed with sequential files in mind; hence, independent of framerate. So once the media is ingested, it is essentially treated as a sequence. This can lead to major issues with identifying trim points and time remaps if there is a discrepancy, of course. Take any 120 frames… how long it lasts depends on how fast you run them. Four seconds in NTSC… almost five in PAL or Cinema… If you set it up at 50P, you know how that goes.

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

[Marc Wielage] “The problems occur when the lighting doesn’t match at all”
[Marc Wielage] “there’s all kinds of looks floating around out there, particularly the trend for very “steely” blue looks or the teal/orange look. “

Typical situation is a producer/director trying to squeeze more pages into the day, jumping straight to ‘cut/print/check the gate/moving on’… the crew turns the set around, and then…. they try to squeeze in one more pickup shot that should have occurred when the light/key/fill, everything, was from the other side. So now actor A’s left side is lit, when its the reverse on the prior axis. Its why I wish there was a Z-axis 3-D shadow/modelling algorithm that let us re-float synthetic lighting into a setup. You can sorta kinda do that in Fusion or some other -out-of-the-app VFX, but really, its the ability to re-hang a rim or key that I want. Fill we can do, but I want to be able to define it in the subject.

Remember “green blacks?”

jPO, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

[Marc Wielage] “the tough part was keeping it consistent shot to shot and scene to scene”

For a long time, that has been the key to how a cinematographic colorist differentiates from somebody (anybody) who thinks its about making one frame look great. I’d be on the Pro Golf tour if every swing was like that one time I hit a hole-in-one from 120 yards. Only Kim Jong-IL can hit a perfect 18 every time. Or somebody else who is even better “greater” than him.

😛

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

[Shane Ross] “The interface in Resolve is NOT COLOR ACCURATE! Sorry, I seem to say this every day”

I see this as a symptom of a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the differences between graphics, photography and motion picture cinematography. They are all related but have differing characteristics.

As a rule, graphics and photography are scene-referenced and don’t really have a specific colorspace other than the general sRGB gamut that just defines a range of 0-255 values (8-bit) that have become a nominative Photoshop way of describing a pixel. “Calibrating” a monitor generally means something different to a person running a graphics program than it does to a colorist. Frankly a no-brainer “white balance” doesn’t cut it — its just the tip of the iceberg. Display referenced means that you calibrate your media to how you intend to exhibit it inside the designated colorspace— and it is up to the viewer to conform to that, as it is up to the colorist to provide a consistent display appropriate to its release. That means accurate reproduction in gamut, colorspace, value range, whitepoint, contrast and so on.

This is taken care of by isolating the display image from the Operating System. BlackMagic’s solution and the only one it can control is to manage the screen values through their Desktop Video application supervising the output of a separate device like a DeckLink card or MiniMonitor outboard interface. You still need to configure that (whether its the almost ubiquitous 709-space or stepping around in P3 or 2020 or HDR or whatever) in the Resolve interface . That is what display-reference is all about. If you think that whatever the screen shows you is the gospel truth, that is the quickest route to disaster imaginable.

The UI preview is ultimately for placing windows, vignettes, masks, tracking points… graphics positioning… grade reference is the last thing you would want to try to attempt. That would require a very careful alignment with a very good photosensitometer and would require pretty much constant vigilance to maintain. If you are capable of doing that, its hard to imagine that with the direct experience of going through that exercise that it would continue to represent a viable option — once one has figured out for oneself that it is a fool’s game and spending the time and money on interventions is a waste of energy when just doing it right the first time makes it look like you know what you’re doing.

Imagine yourself the passenger on an airliner descending through the clouds and the pilot is saying, ah well, my altimeter is not really set right, and I’m pretty sure my DG has precessed… but I think the runway is somewhere around here, so I’m just gonna land. It’ll prb’ly work out all right… right?

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

Just a friendly warning that you should expect the Getty Images lawyers to sue the hell out of you any minute now. There are no humans involved — they have troll bots looking for infringements. There is one famous case where they threatened the original photographer for using her own image.

Marc’s approach sounds nice… You could also create a solid color on a higher layer and mix it down with opacity, and then again, desaturating and then pushing the mids brown/sepia will retain a black/wqhite balance, if that’s important to you.

jPo, CSI

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

[Joseph Owens]

What resolution UI are you trying to work with?

jPo

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

[Joseph Owens]

[david zimmerman] “calibrated Apple Thunderbolt.”

Calibrated to what and how?

jPo, CSI

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