I was pleased to be in Montreal, presenting to the Final Cut MTL group’s PostNAB 2012 gathering, and they’ve released the video of my Resolve 9 preview on YouTube. If you’re a current Resolve user, you have a lot to look forward to. If you’re not, but you’re thinking of getting started, the next version will make it a much more enjoyable experience. Alas, I only had so long to present, but there are plenty of other new features to…
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Folks who’ve been reading this blog for a while will know that I’ve been following Tangent’s development of the Element color correction control surface for a long while. They’ve now been shipping the Element for some time, and it’s been so unexpectedly popular that they’ve had some trouble keeping up with orders, which is a nice problem for Tangent to have, and I congratulate them. At NAB, I met up with the principals, and they were good enough to provide…
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The following is a reply I posted originally on Creative Cow’s DaVinci forum regarding the little line in the Vectorscope that serves either as an in-phase indicator for signal alignment, or an approximate guideline for the angle at which human skin tone may fall in a neutrally graded shot. It was brought up that, since the original engineering purpose of this indicator was for image alignment, and had nothing in fact to do with skin tones, and since in-phase and…
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I received some fantastic news this week from my collaborator, illustrator Ryan Beckwith, regarding our long-term project, Starship Detritus. He’s been laboring for months on the art for our pilot episode of this animated science-fiction series. This being a side-gig for both of us, his work as a commercial storyboard artist kept interrupting (damn you for being so successful, Ryan!), but getting the news that he’s finished is the biggest leap forward since I finished writing all 13 episodes of the…
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A few months ago I graded three web spots for the Mayo clinic at Minneapolis’ Splice Here, for whom I’ve been doing some freelance grading. They posted the full spot on a page highlighting some of my work. It’s a fun high-style grade that splits the top and bottom halves of image tonality for separate rebalancing, employs selective desaturation using the hue curves, adds some subtle glow via luma keying, and includes some individual work on skin tones to…
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I’ve been mulling over the topic of piracy and media consumption for several years. As a writer in the middle of developing a project with a web component, it’s of great interest to me whether or not it’s possible to make money creating a video series of ambition primarily for a digital download audience. Lately, there’s been a lot of back and forth about the rights of the individual versus the rights of copyright holders, consumer convenience, dumb-ass big media…
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And Mark Spencer and Steve Martin do their level best to keep me going in this hour and a half interview on MacBreak Live, wherein I discuss how I got started with color correction in the first place, why I like using Resolve, control surfaces, monitors, grading for the web, how I organize grades, how to move projects from Final Cut Pro X to Resolve, why experience matters, and what I think distinguishes colorists who take the craft seriously. It was…
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For a variety of reasons, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to give Filmlight’s new Baselight plugin for Final Cut Pro 7 a whirl. Baselight has long been one of the industry’s premiere grading applications, used on projects both large and small, and among professional colorists I’ve always heard it spoken of glowingly. When announced at last year’s NAB conference, everyone’s amazement that a high-end company like Filmlight would bring their technology to the Mac as, of all things, a…
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For some reason, everything always happens while I’m traveling. After a long delay due to many unexpected happenings last fall, I’m happy to announce that my first video training title for DaVinci Resolve is now available from Ripple Training. It’s a seven hour overview covering every aspect of Resolve functionality, from project import, through the myriad grading tools Resolve provides, and finishing with Resolve’s flexible methods for outputting your project. While I started out intending to do a “quick rundown”…
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I’m on the road at the moment, and up to my eyeballs in work and activities. However, as I’ve been catching glimpses of the news and chatting with friends and colleagues, it’s been impossible not to feel barraged by an inexplicable wave of state and federal legislation around the country, both attempted and successful, seeking to regulate various activities of women involving reproduction, health access, and child rearing. Invariably these regulatory measures are either restrictive or punitive. I’m not going…
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Much is said about how color grading effects the emotions of a scene. However, I wanted to take a look at when emotions in a scene affect correction choices you make. This is something that’s come up for me in documentary productions, but the topic also applies to any situation where people, be they interview subjects or performers, get emotionally worked up during a scene. In general, it’s often tempting to try and normalize human skin tones the same way…
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A thought for the day, as it’s come up a few times in conversation. “Shooting flat” really means “capturing image data flatly,” it doesn’t mean flat lighting. Please, I beg of you, light the set, paint with shadows, and use a deliberate iris setting for specific intention. The “flat” or “log” data capture setting of your camera will then protect as much as that particular camera is capable of in the highlights and shadows, so we can have more fun…
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Production company Three Volts approached me to do some grading for a Park Nicollet spot they were doing. It’s a graphically treated spot (effects by Minneapolis-based Design Guys), but I was brought in to do specific work on the skin tones throughout. The nature of the spot made the skin tones pretty easy to isolate for hue and saturation adjustment, but additional work involved whitening teeth, some subtle complexion smoothing, and contrast tweaking to match the graphics. Interestingly, KARE 11…
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Last year I was the lead colorist for director Yan Vizenberg’s first feature, Cargo. The premiere was this last fall, and it was glowingly reviewed in both the New York Times and Hollywood Reporter, but I only recently noticed the new trailer. This was the first film I’ve worked on with a second colorist. Due to scheduling constraints, I brought friend and colleague Patrick Inhofer on to work with me on the piece. After I spent a week with the…
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On many, many occasions I’ve heard “It’s just for the web, so it doesn’t really need to be color corrected, right?” It’s a misconception that color correction, or color grading, whichever you want to call it, is primarily about fixing problems and dealing with broadcast safe issues. Thus if your video is well shot, and destined for the web where broadcast legality does not matter, you can skip it. The truth is, while fixing problems is a significant part of…