It’s time for a new Vectorscope graticule. The graticule, (sometimes called a reticle), is the overlay that presents targets, reference lines, crosshairs, and other guides to help when interpreting the trace or graph of a Vectorscope’s analysis. Older hardware-based Vectorscopes had the graticule silkscreened on a plastic overlay, so it was fixed and unchanging. I’ve used several different hardware and software-based Vectorscopes over the years. Speaking as a colorist and not a broadcast engineer, they’re useful for comparing saturation levels between clips,…
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I know; it’s not the most clever title. However, once I fully understood the implications of how flags and marks work in Resolve 9, I discovered a practical use for flags that hadn’t previously occurred to me. To clarify, I wrote in the Resolve manual that flags are intended to highlight a whole clip, while markers let you highlight individual frames within a clip. This is true; you can only apply one flag of a particular color to a clip,…
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If you read this blog and follow me on Twitter, chances are you’re a creative person. Chances are, even if you do client work most of the year, the “real” reason you’re in your particular line of postproduction or production work is that you want to do creative projects of your own, whether it’s writing, acting, filmmaking, animating, game design, whatever. It’s so easy to lose oneself in the day-to-day need to do the work to pay the bills that…
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Here it is, the Final Contest Update Here are the results of my #siebenthecat contest on Twitter: Sieben weighs 14.8 lbs. Consequently, @bellafaccie and @camera_stooge are the winners, guessing 14.9 and 14.5 lbs respectively! (please use the contact page to email me your addresses) Thanks so much to everyone for participating, it was fun. As a consolation prize to all 43 entrants of #siebenthecat, I got Ripple Training to offer 30% off of my Resolve 9 title before Jan 5th…
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It took a little while for the dust to settle, but I wanted to share a little more about the narrative shoot I directed a couple of weeks ago. It’s been five years since my last narrative project has been in front of audiences on the film festival circuit, the feature “Four Weeks, Four Hours.” In that time, I’ve been hard at work developing other projects, none of which got to the point where I was behind the camera. Given…
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The Holiday Season is upon us once again, so merry merry, everyone. It’s certainly been an eventful year for me, and judging from the folks I keep track of on Twitter, it seems to have been so for a lot of folks. To commemorate this year’s activities, I thought it would be fun to run another contest, this time offering one of two free Ripple Training USB memory sticks with my brand new DaVinci Resolve 9 Core Training on it (as…
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It saddens me to post in response to such a horrific occurrence as the mass shooting in Connecticut. However, this occurrence brings up issues of national importance that we all should be contemplating, so I thought it would be worth writing out my contribution to the discourse here. I just directed a short that has a gun; a tranquilizer-dart-shooting air pistol, but a gun nonetheless. As we were shooting the scene the weekend before this tragedy, there was some discussion…
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Those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter have undoubtedly been noting my now constant stream of preproduction tweets, so I figured it was time to stop being such a tease and share a bit of what’s going on. I’m producing and directing a short subject I’ve written called “The Place Where You Live.” I’m not going to spoil the plot, as you’ll have an opportunity to see it soon enough, but here’s a clue… The headshot shows our lead,…
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Lest you later accuse me of false advertising, I’m admitting right now that I’m not going to tell you what you should buy. Rather, I’ll deliver an epistemological monologue about choosing monitors that may accidentally be helpful to you. I welcome comment, especially from those of you who are genuine color scientists. Just please be nice to each other. I’m talking color critical displays, and gird your loins, because this post is a long one. Before We Begin Okay. I…
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No matter who the client, or what the project, sooner or later you’re going to be asked “can you split the difference?” between your interpretation of what the client wanted, and what they discovered they really wanted once they saw what you were up to. This will make you quietly, politely crazy, and is one of the reasons you need to cultivate a great reservoir of equanimity to do this job. At the end of the day your client’s needs…
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Ron Dawson at Dare Dreamer magazine conducted a really fun interview with me, the result of which is an eighty-six minute episode of the “Crossing the 180” podcast. We talk about the utility of film school, filmmaking and creativity, and of course, color correction. It’s a wider-ranging conversation then I usually get to participate in, and you might find it interesting. Download it here. Or subscribe to the “Crossing the 180” podcast here.
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This year’s IBC conference was a busy one, and since I was neither speaking or teaching this time around, I had a lot of time to check out what the current state of grading software was among most companies. There’s never enough time to see everything, but I got a good overview of most of the things that interested me. I’ve been asked by a few people what, in my opinion, the “theme” of this year’s IBC was. For me,…
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So, Resolve 9 has finally been made public after much anticipation since its unveiling at NAB. Many of the new features have already been shown and discussed, but there are even more features being shipped then have been talked about previously, and I thought it’d be nice to highlight six seven of those in this post. (The lead engineer reminded me of, how could I have forgotten, the updated video scopes, which are so pretty I had to add a screenshot.)…
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Sigh. I wasn’t going to chime in on this ongoing conversation, as frankly I don’t know that I have anything meaningful to add, and there’s nothing worse then baseless speculation about Apple. However, friend and colleague Patrick Inhofer noticed a blog entry of mine dating from the summer of 2010, fully two years ago this month, in which I foolishly elected to weigh in on the topic in response to Apple’s second to last, somewhat weak refresh of the Mac…
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Steve Hullfish was nice enough to send along the new second edition of his “The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction” for me to peruse, which was most generous. I’d bought his first edition on my own dime and enjoyed it thoroughly, and we’re all lucky that his publisher (Focal Press) has seen fit to give him the opportunity to update this book, and add even more breadth and depth to the information within. Steve has been writing about…