Using this Book and the DVD Materials
The Tutorial Clips on the DVD
The materials on the DVD are designed to let you follow along with the colorists. Some of the footage is standard definition. None of it is “log” footage (with the extra latitude in correction that is offered). Some of it is HD. All of it has been transcoded to ProRes LT. For most people, this will be relatively easy to use straight out of the box. For others, it may require downloading the proper QuickTime Codecs for use on a PC or on a Mac that doesn’t have ProRes codecs loaded on it. ProRes—at least for now—won’t work on a PC as an output format, but you can download and install the decoder that lets you see and use and transcode the files that are on the book’s DVD using your PC.
For Mac or PC users who find they are unable to open the files on the DVD, please go to:
Search for “ProRes QuickTime Decoder for Mac” or “ProRes Quick-Time Decoder for PC.” Download and install as normal with most apps. This will allow you to see and use the files in your software. You shouldn’t have to go through this step if you can simply see the footage on your computer when you click on it or try to load it.
I realize that standard definition is pretty passé by 2011, but when I started this project, this was the footage I used, and the wealth of information gleaned from these colorists was just too great to throw away. The point is not the quality of the footage but to see the ideas and methods of attack that the colorists used.
Obviously, HD 10- or 12-bit log footage gives you a lot more room to dig into the footage—the highlights, the shadows, the saturation—but having the limitations of working from an SD, 8-bit, compressed image should sharpen your skills. Please feel free to explore the ideas presented within the pages with footage that’s your own. In the end, the footage on the DVD is just a starter. You really want to be trying these techniques and concepts on your own footage and everybody works on different types of footage. Working with the type of footage you usually see is the best idea. This book is aimed at a broad audience using different software and hardware. This book is not meant to show specific button presses for specific software, though you will get plenty of that.
Because of the broad appeal and scope of the book, I cannot discuss the dozens of color correction applications in depth. When I wrote the book initially, the assumption was that many readers would have Apple Color. Now, Apple Color has been EOL’d (end-of-lifed) by Apple, but it’s still going to be a popular choice for a few years. For this edition of the book, I’m assuming that the majority of the readers will be using the light or paid version of DaVinci Resolve, though there will still be references to using Avid Symphony, Final Cut Pro (7 and X), After Effects, and Apple Color.
I’d like to explain quickly how to get the footage ready to use in two different applications on a Mac—Apple Color and DaVinci Resolve.
Using Tutorial Footage in Apple Color
1. Insert the DVD into your Mac, locate it on the Desktop, and open the disk.
2. On the disk are several folders. Drag or copy the footage labeled “DVD Tutorial Footage” onto your RAID or internal drive. A RAID is the best option for throughput of the video footage. You can also drag the other folders on the disk onto your RAID or internal, but they are not going to be used for color correction. Remember where you put the folder of tutorial footage and what you named it.
3. Launch Apple Color.
4. If you have a control surface, select it.
5. In the Projects Dialog box, click the New Project button.
6. In the New Project Dialog box, type a name such as “TUTORIALS” and click the Save button.
7. Color should launch into the Setup room with the Shots tab selected.
8. Hit the small icon of the red up arrow over a folder until you see the names of your drives on your computer or have some bearing on where in the file structure of your drives you are (Figure 0.1).
9. Double-click the drive—each drive is represented by the icon of a folder—to find the spot where you put the tutorial images.
10. Scroll through the drive using the small scroll bar next to the Modified Date to find your “DVD Tutorial Footage” folder, or whatever you renamed it to.
11. Double click on the “DVD Tutorial Footage” folder and you will see thumbnails of the footage in the folder (Figure 0.2).
12. If you wanted to, you could import each individual shot. Instead, click on the icon in the top left corner of the red up arrow over folder (Figure 0.3) and select the folder of tutorial footage, probably called “DVD Tutorial Footage.” Then click on the small button at the bottom right of the tab that says “Import Dir.” (Figure 0.4). This will populate your Shots tab and your timeline with all of the shots on the DVD.
Fig. 0.1
Fig. 0.2
Fig. 0.3
Fig. 0.4
13. Because there is a mix of HD and SD sources, go to the Project Settings tab in the Setup room and set your Resolution Preset to 1920×1080 HD. This will call up a dialog box that asks if you would like to automatically scale all of your clips to the new resolution. Click on the “yes” button (Figure 0.5). Or you can go to the Geometry room and individually scale and change the aspect ratio on every shot.
14. With your timeline filled with all of the shots on the DVD, you can now quickly navigate through the timeline when you get to any chapter or example that you want to attempt yourself.
15. Click Command-S to Save your project or go to the File menu and choose Save.
Fig. 0.5
Using Tutorial Footage in DaVinci Resolve
1. Insert the DVD into your Mac, locate it on the Desktop, and open the disk.
2. On the disk are several folders. Drag or copy the footage labeled “DVD Tutorial Footage” onto your RAID or internal drive. A RAID is the best option for throughput of the video footage. You can also drag the other folders on the disk onto your RAID or internal, but they are not going to be used for color correction. Remember where you put the folder of tutorial footage and what you named it.
3. Launch DaVinci Resolve.
4. If you haven’t created a user for yourself, in the User Login Screen, click on Admin and click the “+” button at the bottom left side. Sign in as the Administrator and a New User Dialog will come up. Create a username and password (you don’t need to enter anything for the password if you want to make it easy to log in). You should not do work as the Admin user. Either sign in as the Guest user or create your own account (Figure 0.6).
5. Double-click your new user to continue.
6. Resolve should open to the Config Screen.
7. Switch to the Browse screen using the buttons at the bottom of the screen (Figure 0.7). Note that the navigation to get to the Conform and Color screens as well as the others are located here.
8. If you’ve used Resolve before and configured it properly, your RAID drive and possibly some other storage options will be available at the top left in the Media Storage Area. Look in the drive where you saved the Tutorial folder (hopefully in your RAID) by clicking the small “+” button next to the name of the drive (Figure 0.8).
Fig. 0.6
Fig. 0.7
Fig. 0.8
9. If you’ve never configured the preferences in Resolve to allow it to see your drives, you need to do that first. Click on the top menu, next to the Apple menu choice that says “DaVinci Resolve,” and select the Preferences option (Command-,). This launches the DaVinci Resolve Preferences dialog box. Using the “+” button on the left (Figure 0.9), you can add volumes that you want Resolve to look in for media and to use for rendering and other things. This is similar to the Scratch disk in Final Cut Pro. With your drive or drives added here, relaunch Resolve and follow steps 8 and 10.
Fig. 0.9
10. Once you’ve found the drive where you put the tutorial footage, you can simply drag through the list to find the folder, or you can start typing the name and the list will automatically scroll down to it and highlight it.
11. Highlight the folder with the footage. Left-click (or control-click) to call up the contextual menu) and select “Add Folder Into Media Pool.”
12. Resolve can not see folders inside of folders, and because of the way the Artbeats footage is licensed, it needs to be in its own folder, labeled “Artbeats.” You will also have to navigate to the Artbeats folder inside of the Tutorials Footage folder (or whatever you renamed it) and left-click the Artbeats footage folder to select “Add Folder into Media Pool.”
13. With all of the footage added to the Resolve’s Media Pool, switch to the Conform Screen using the buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Fig. 0.10
14. In the Timeline Management section of the screen, click the “+” button to the left side of the screen just about perfectly in the middle vertically (Figure 0.10).
15. This opens a New Session Options dialog box. Click OK. The first session is always called the “Master Session,” so you can’t change that at the moment. This will populate the Conform EDL section of the screen and populate the Master Timeline with all of the shots.
16. You can scroll through the shots in the Master Timeline and play them in the Timeline Viewer. To start correcting them, you need to switch to the Color Screen at the bottom of the screen. Scroll through the timeline to switch between shots and follow along with the tutorials in the book.
17. Save the project using File > Save or Command-S. Name your saved project.
Other DVD Resources
The folder “CC_Session_text” contains text files (Word documents) of the complete transcribed color correction sessions and interviews with each of the colorists. The book uses only about a tenth of the complete information from the colorists. These text documents are not illustrated. But there are definitely examples of color grades and sections of interviews that are very interesting in these documents that are not used anywhere in the book. Happy reading. Please understand that these are my transcripts of what was said, so any spelling or grammatical errors or typos are clearly mine. Blame me, not them for any errors. I did not faithfully proofread the raw transcriptions (some of which were done by my students or outside transcription firms unfamiliar with the terms and lingo of postproduction). I corrected only the parts that were included in the book.
I already wrote a book that is more technical in nature that discusses things like waveform and vectorscopes and gives detailed discussions on how to set up a proper viewing environment and calibrate your monitor (Color Correction for Video, 2nd edition, Focal Press).
Viewing Environment and Monitor Setup
To sum up the advice on viewing environment, you should grade in a room—or at least with your monitors against a wall—that is flat gray. Achieving perfect flat reflective response from paint is not easy, but try for a paint that is a nice 18 percent neutral gray. Do not have any brightly colored elements within your viewing radius, like a movie poster. Light the space with indirect D65 “daylight” lights. As a cheap solution, I use OTT lights (www.ottlite.com) in overhead cans. If you can splash a D65 source light on the wall behind your monitor, that’s great.
As for setting up your monitors, that usually takes some specialized equipment and talent. There’s a story that at Industrial Light & Magic or Pixar there was a lady who went around calibrating all of the monitors, and as soon as she finished the last monitor, she would go back around (months later) and start all over again. With today’s LED, OLED, and plasma monitors, they “drift” much slower than the CRTs of old that needed basically weekly maintenance. So if you can get a professional to come in and set you up once, you should be fine for several years.
If you don’t have the money for an engineer, then you’ll need some combination of a color calibration device, like the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter (less than $200) or even their high-end Hubble (about $5,000). This will help you get the proper color on your computer displays, because the software in the computer can be connected to the colorimeter for feedback, but for your video monitors or projector, you will also need a way to feed the data from the colorimeter back to the monitor to be adjusted. It’s possible to have that occur inside of your video card that feeds the monitor. With some monitors, they have methods of creating and displaying the changes in a LUT within the monitor and some monitors (consumer monitors generally) will need an external box that accepts the information from the loop created by the colorimeter and translates it into corrections on the monitor. Give a call to X-Rite and explain the specific pieces of gear you’re trying to calibrate. There are too many permutations of equipment for me to lead a productive discussion on these pages.
I would love to give you detailed descriptions of how to use LUTs (look-up tables) and the tricks for navigating between compressed, 8-bit Canon DSLR footage and uncompressed, RAW, or log images from high-end cameras. However, a discussion of how to prepare a session for a digital intermediate would easily fill a book on its own. This is not that book.
Dealing with LUTs and the complexities of developing color management workflows for feature films or even primetime TV shows is the work of highly specialized consultants, color scientists and engineers. I have a book written by two Kodak color scientists that is bigger than this book and all it discusses is color management. (See the end of the last chapter for a bibliography.) Also, the tools and workflows for color management are changing almost daily. Each manufacturer comes up with new products and changes the names of their existing products. How many iterations and new releases of RED camera hardware like the REDrocket and REDcine cards and transcoding hardware and software have there been lately? New cameras with new sensors and new ways of recording the image in better and better ways come out almost monthly. I have no desire to keep up with Moore’s Law when it comes to technology.
I do not deny that these are important issues. The proper color environment makes a difference in the way you see the image on your screen and the way your eyes fatigue and adjust as you work throughout the day.
LUTs are a very interesting subject; they help a colorist grade on a specific monitor while seeing a representation of the way the image will look on a different projector, film, or color space. Or a LUT can instantly take a RAW or log image and apply a grade to it automatically. Entire corporations are devoted to handling these technical issues. But the line has to be drawn somewhere, or this would become a 10,000-page color encyclopedia.
The point of this book is to show the art and technique of colorists. I want to show you how these colorists think and what their eyes see when they look at an image. Although many of these colorists know and understand the complex issues of color management and the engineering work that goes into their suites, most of them do not even think about these issues as they grade from day to day. They focus on the work. The craft. The art.
Thoughts on “Tech” and “Color Science”
Another of the very complex issues surrounding color correction at a high level (the level of digital intermediates for feature films) is color space. There are many difference color spaces. These color spaces are regularly “invented” as they’re basically just mathematical descriptions of how you store, transform, and display a set of colors. This is mathematics at a high level. To me, not so interesting. Is it important? Yes, especially at the feature film level. But, it is also relatively controversial. Almost every high-end color correction and post house has a different recipe and a different preference for color spaces.
I have participated in discussions and arguments of these various color spaces and the discussions quickly get complicated and no clear winner ever emerges. Many post houses have developed their own specific methods and insist that their method is the only one that really works. However, every other post house feels the same way. Trying to either mediate those arguments or choose the best one or two to illustrate in the book seems fraught with peril.
For me to get in to the relative merits of P3, Rec709, sRGB, YCbCr, ACES, XYZ, and the myriad methods for transforming them would also be a book unto itself. Take a look at any scholarly paper that you can Google on color space and your eyes will gloss over before you get three paragraphs in.
I worked with one of the major players on integrating the ACES/IIF color workflows into feature films for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as they tried to implement this standard, and there were probably a hundred of the top color scientists working for years to figure out what all of the ramifications and permutations were of specific color space schemes and transforms.
That kind of knowledge is not condensable into a 5,000-word chapter. Here is the reason why understanding these spaces is critical, however: each of these spaces defines where gamma is set (i.e., 2.2, 2.4, 2.6); what the white reference is (i.e., D50, D60, D65); the purpose of the color space (i.e., capture, storage, transform, display); and the range or gamut of colors that can be faithfully reproduced. If your computer is sending out an image from one color space and your monitor is monitoring in another color space and your final output is in still a different color space, then the image you are trying to grade will really look nothing like the image that will be output at the end. If this freaks you out, simply do a test. Output a chip chart from your system and see what it looks like on your final output—whether that’s the Web, video, film, or digital cinema.
How all of these color spaces work with each other and which ones are best—or at least acceptable—is a matter of contentious debate among some. The standards of the color spaces are set, but with new color space definitions and new “best practices” changing on a monthly basis, it’s not something that can easily be discussed and certainly not something that can be definitively stated in the context of a book that would be out of date before it was ever published.
Waveform Tutorial Videos
Using waveforms and vectorscopes in color grading is a personal passion of mine. I discuss that subject in some depth in the early chapters. As usual, there are some tools that are better than others. I advocate for the use of external scopes, like Tektronix. Some people can’t afford those at the beginning of their career. The internal scopes are a reasonable facsimile of external scopes. The main things they are missing are customizability (easy zooms, repositions, and one-touch presets), and resolution (both input resolution and display resolution). Other than that, the accuracy is not too far off generally. So feel free to use the internal scopes, especially during training.
For more on scopes and how they’re used, Tektronix was gracious enough to allow me to include a series of tutorials that I created for them on the DVD. Please note that these were designed for use specifically by and for Tektronix scopes, but the general principles apply to all scopes. As full disclosure, I was paid by Tektronix to produce this series of videos. I felt that including them would add value to the book. I hope you agree.
The videos are in mp4 format, and should be easily viewed on most computers, iPads, and iPods. None of the content on the DVD for the book is suitable or playable for standalone DVD players.