Not a week passes without my getting an email that is some variation on the following: I’m setting up a new computer for color correction, but I don’t know which monitor to buy for grading, and your book recommends broadcast displays that are out of my price range. Sometimes folks are asking for recommendations of affordable color-critical monitors because they’re trying to set up a budget suite. Other times the request is for a learning workstation that’s good for getting…
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I’ve been grading Persona Films’ debut feature, Cargo, and I originally thought I’d see how well it would work to load the entire 86 minute timeline into DaVinci Resolve at one go. A classic case of user error. Having been shot on RED, I conformed the project to the original R3D media, and I took the shortcut of adding all the media from the shoot to the media pool, thinking it’d make conforming a snap. That was a bad idea.…
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While having dinner with fellow colorist Joe Owens in December, we got to talking about the grunts and interjections that sometimes pass for communication in the suite. When not in a rush for time, I generally ask a client “so how do you like it?” before moving out of a scene or a shot that I’ve just graded. However, I’m listening to the tone of the reply as much as the words. If a client says, “Great!” then I’m done…
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Here’s a small but useful tip I put up on Twitter, but given how ephemeral Twitter is, I thought I’d elaborate here. It’s about highlighting keys in DaVinci Resolve. As of Resolve 7.1, there are two keyboard shortcuts for showing a highlight with which to evaluate the isolation you’re doing with either an HSL Qualifier (a key) or with a Power Window (shape), or even to view the interaction of the two. Shift-H for a regular highlight, and Control-H for…
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Thanks to colleague Warren Eagles, who sent me a picture of Korean colorist and author (of a Korean-language book on Apple Color) Wonju Park, whom I’m told likes The Handbook. All I can say is, awesome! If you happen to read this, thank you Wonju. I’d follow you on Twitter, but alas my Korean is nonexistant, and attempts at automatic translation were humorously tragic. I hope we cross paths someday!
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My wife is an actress and member of SAG, so every year around this time she gets a handful of SAG screening discs. For those of you who know, this is not quite as exciting as it sounds. You see, these discs are watermarked—to prevent piratical distribution—with sentences of text that appear over the picture every fifth scene or so reminding you it’s a screener. So the excitement of “free movies!” is moderated by the downfall of getting kicked out…
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I got a question from a friend of mine, and I thought it might be worth sharing my answer with a wider audience. He asks: “What’s the short answer for why new 120hz screens make films look like video? I don’t know if you have had a chance to observe this yet, but it will effect you because it makes everything look like the ‘behind the scenes’ footage on a dvd, or raw dailies. People seem to love it.” Well,…
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Those who know me can attest that 2010 has been a year of significant change. One project in long-term development declined, other long-term projects ongoing, contracts altered, my video suite moved, months in seclusion writing my book, some fantastic travel, and new interesting projects emerging. Of course, as any freelancer will tell you, this is par for the course, but even so, this year has felt like a sea change in the way I go about my business. It’s probably…
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Whatever your religious persuasion (despite an alignment with secular humanism, I’m a Merry Christmas wisher myself), I did want to wish everyone happiness however you observe this time of the year. Frankly, it’s my belief that any holiday that discourages people from being assholes for at least a week or two deserves a shout out. In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share a documentary short that my wife, the actress/stylist/filmmaker Kaylynn Raschke, produced and directed a few…
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Well, maybe not right this minute, but thanks to Patrick Inhofer and Tao of Color, you can if you click the following link to his blog: Link! I was pleased to sit down with Patrick a few weeks ago, with the result being a three part interview series (nobody ever accused me of running short). The first two parts are up now, with the third yet to come. We talked about a wide-ranging series of things, and it was interesting.…
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Since I’m going on vacation later this week, I wanted to post one last article for the year, and I wanted to make it a good one. Grouping is one of DaVinci Resolve’s more powerful features. However, keeping control over changes you’re rippling among shots within a group can be a bit confusing. In this post, I’m going to try and sort out the dos and donts surrounding grouping and rippling on Wave-equipped Resolve setups (if you’ve got the full-blown…
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Update–While it’s been many years since I’ve written this article, this remains the single most-read thing on my site. I chalk it up to every new generation of clients having to contend with the same learning curve, as they try to figure out how to get the best out of their artistic collaborators. Communication is the key to pretty much everything in our industry, and this is no different. Funnily enough, as I’ve been writing this I’ve had three conversations…
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Yes, I got a haircut (if you’re used to my Twitter picture, I do need to update it). I was in Barnes & Noble to buy a Blu-Ray copy of “Stardust,” a movie I quite like and wanted to watch with my wife and her family (visiting for Thanksgiving week). Honestly, I had no intention of feeding my writer’s ego going in, but it did occur to me to check whether my book was being stocked (one never knows). Fortunately…
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When you write a book, the publisher stipulates that you get a certain number of author copies, delivered straight from the printer. Well, the FedEx guy dropped off my two boxes of books this week, followed almost immediately by Amazon declaring the book’s availability. After seven months of intensive writing, research, experimentation, and editing, my new book on color correction is on shelves now! To see the scope of it, click here for a downloadable table of contents in PDF…
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Continuing where part I left off, it’s time to look at how we can combine the mattes that are output by several nodes using the Key Mixer node. It’s a long one. Before getting started, let’s get a bit of terminology out of the way, first. When I talk about a matte, what I’m referring to is a grayscale channel that’s used to define which areas get corrected, and which areas don’t. However, using the terminology of DaVinci Resolve’s UI,…