Color: grading, (basic correction), and matching - best practice

in other words, i already got the eggs..... now it's time to cook em.

I don't have to change the eggs cause the hens that laid them did a good job.

sorry, have to explain more.....

when I said this....

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I don't use white black and midtone automatic stuff cause it sucks. I use control surface for y value only ( sometimes curves and other stuff but it's just a natural progression.... like cooking eggs in morning.... you do what you have to do to make good eggs ).

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what I mean is that the source I work with is already the correct color using film standards ( 56k for daylight and 32k for tungsten )... and color correcting gels on lights etc.... I don't work with stuff that is not already the right color in terms of white balance being not white.

Dear San, Thank you for comprehensive response to everyone. It happens less often than you may think.

I liked Neils latest response and he hit on some real challenges with potential solutions, etc.

Basically, though, it boils down to 'what are you doing' so it can be put in our brains what you can most benefit from.

I personally don't consider color correction the same way as most I've met here.

Levels ( lift gamma gain ) are just levels, not color.

I don't use white black and midtone automatic stuff cause it sucks. I use control surface for y value only ( sometimes curves and other stuff but it's just a natural progression.... like cooking eggs in morning.... you do what you have to do to make good eggs ).

so far we've spoken about color ( which is wishy washy due to the business of making stuff with teams of people ). there is also sound.

everything on the sample xmas thing is sound fx...from stock sounds... except "santa" yell by kid, and ' yay snoopy' from same kid probably.

motor boad engine, bar restaurant background noise, birds flying around, all sound fx.

tell your stories with both aesthetics of visuals in mind, but also sound. Sound is half the movie.

Simplest explanation of the steps and the order of them is ... it works best for production speed work. Neutralizing and matching steps are there to get a unified timeline. That's the first and by far most important job of a colorist. Get that unified timeline, everything else is added value.

Don't get the unified timeline, so that the change from one shot to the next is 'obvious', the colorist has failed. No matter how tight their skin tones in some clips or their 'show' look. Total fail.

But trying to shot-match from the original state of most clips is slow slogging. And it's easy to get different images in different parts of the grade from the trouble of visual fatigue.

So ... neutralize first. This is a massive help to getting a consistent 'view' through the entire grade. You can touch a lot of clips in a hurry, doing only what is spefically needed. And you can bulk neutralize a lot of clips from each camera once you see how to do that.

Especially as in one scene, you may have three cameras involved, but only one or two takes each. So you can neutralize all the clips from each take at the least in one batch operation. There  are some things you can apply to all shots from X camera that may help bring the various cams closer together also. Bulk operations speed the job and help with consistency.

Shot-matching of neutralized clips is vastly faster, easier, and better. It takes a ton of skill and experience both with scopes and eyeballs to go from original import view to shot-matching in one step.

I know that very experienced colorists may look at a job, and go direct from their bulk work to matching. But they know  their bulk operations did a LOT of the neutralization process and further they've got the skills and chops and nearly always the advanced control surface to do the rest of the neutralization/matching in one pass.

And to restate the necessary: the unified timeline is THE main goal when you start any project. Get that before going on to anything else.

So ... unified timeline from neutralization/matching achieved, now is the time to check how much time is left before deadline or budget max is hit, and choose which clips to do shot-fixing.

I asked a group of colorists at NAB how often they fixed every problem shot in a show. I got a mix of blank stares and hilarious laughter. The blank stares were of course because it seemed such a dumbe question. Who ever gets every possible fix fixed?

One guy said ... well, he'd actually fixed everything a couple times (in his 15+ years in the trade). Which got a snarky reply of "aren't you special" and snickers.

Typically there are more problem shots than time to fix them, and that is the most negotiable part of The Job.

The show look is applied last, most often. Even if, as happens today, it's designed before the first scene is shot, and everything is tested "under" the show look. I've heard several of the major colorists who have designed stunning looks for a show that were used as LUTs in-cam. But the media did NOT have those LUTs applied in the camera, they were just in-cam to use while shooting.

And their grade had the ability to turn the nodes that held "the Look" on/off instantly.

They still essentially neutralized, matched, fixed, and applied the look. Now, "neutral" was defined in a specific way to 1) be quickly doable 2) be reliable and 3) fit under the show look. You always define "neutral" for the job at hand.

Learning to use the scopes is crucial. The Mark I Eyeball is a great relative instrument, but is horrible at absolutes. So Chris had some good starting values for using the scopes. I always have Waveform (YC no chroma) in upper left, Vectorscope YUV upper right, and Parade RGB across the bottom of the scopes panel.

For scopes work, the left side 0-100 scale is more meaningful to work with than the right-side levels scale of 0-255/0-1064 for 8 or ten-bit work. The left side gives you a constant relative location in the image. That's what you need, really. There are times the histogram is useful but I rarely have it 'up'. Some always have it.

I do have it when I use an outboard scopes program, but then, that's got a ton of things.

It takes a lot of experience to get good and fast at color. To really get going with it pretty much requires having a control surface so that your hands get muscle memory and your eyes and concentration stay on the screens ... constantly going from scopes to the transmit image without ever needing to look at the UI to choose the next tool.

Most colorists have not only that control surface, but button boxes ... either X-keys or more probably Streamdecks. And yes, I mean PLURAL. A lot of the setups I've seen have a control surface with two Streamdecks on each side. This way they have nearly everything they might touch in the UI set to a button on the Streamdecks. And they often have multiple levels to each Streamdeck!

Yea, that's a lot of muscle memory to build up. But ... if you want to learn how to roll with the pros, that's how those pros roll. And they will get more done in any amount of time than you'd believe possible. Because they will do insanely tiny targeted work that thee & me simply wouldn't have the time to get to if we want to get the job done in the next 12 month period.

And we likely couldn't even see or know how to do that tickly little bit either!

Neil

You are lucky in the sense that all people all over the world struggle with this general issue so there's no shortage of suggestions.

I would start my own little stupid response with a question. What are you doing NOW. You can think about how that works into what you do later when the time comes ( I'll explain ).

Lets say you have a laptop with a 17" screen and work on that platform only for web distribution.

Some people have calibrated editing platforms with more expensive and complicated monitor/video setups. Laptops are basically good for real basic stuff and it's fast cause you don't have to turn on a giant table full of equipment to do something simple.

Anyway, are you doing tv ads, documentaries, games, long form movies or what ???

This way we can narrow down the basics that you will learn about as you work on stuff your own, in  your own space ( your own platforms etc. ).

Forget about using words like 'master'... it's just your timeline and source material and 'master' just tries to make it sound important. So dump that word ( take it out of your dictionary ).

This stuff is complicated enough without making ourselves sound like secret rocket scientists and brain surgeons.

So, what are you DOING.

My advice if you are just starting out is to keep it simple on the source end ( shoot your own stuff with full knowledge of iso, f stops, color temp, codec and wrappers, etc. ) if you can.

This can include shooting color charts with correct lighting to give you the basics for quick fundamental match for that particular reel of film. If the DP adds filters, smoke in room to make beams of light stream into windows of intereriors, etc.... then you will see it nicely if you matched to the color chart ( before he added smoke and filters ).

It would be really stupid to try and edit stuff you can't even see on your monitor(s), so contrary to super smart color pro people here, I suggest you do the level adjustments BEFORE you start editing seriously.... you already are dropping clips into timeline to mimic your intended product ( sc 1 comes before sc 2, for example ).... but do a fast level adjustment if you have to when you drop them onto timeline. Can always change later, and then get into grading at END....as suggested in other posts.

Start with short projects so you get what works for YOU down pat.... and then you'll have a good starting point.

This sample is about a song length long ( 2 min ? ).... shot by someone else and sent to me as sony s log 4k, and trust me.... I had to adjust every single clip for levels ( day and night shots) before adding any fades and so on....I never did do grading ( changing colors ) except on tilt up to sky in beginning.

https://vimeo.com/381202689

good luck and thanks for making stuff so I can someday enjoy looking at it and so on.

🙂

Color work in general is best left towards the end, when the timeline is pretty much as near "lock" as it's going to get. And understand, the hardest and most crucial part of The Job is getting the media morass into a unified show ... a smooth visual flow down the timeline. Making it look like something ... what most people call grading ... comes last.

The first step in most full colorist training is getting the clips "neutralized"  Meaning no color casts in highlights or shadows, no clipped whites nor crushed blacks, and the tonal contrast fairly close to looking 'normal' so the viewer can see into both shadows and highlights. Not perfect, but decently close.

Why? Because it's one Hades of a lot easier to do matching on neutral shots than anything else. And it is the easiest and best way to get a consistent show beginning to end.

THEN you do the shot-matching. Making the shot-to-shot movement down the line flow.

Then comes shot-fixing, taking the worst clips needing special work like HSL secondary or whatever and fixing those.

THEN comes applying a grade to scenes or the whole show. As once everything is matching and fixed, it is finally possible to apply a single look to the media and get it to work without endless (and I do mean endless!) futzing with every clip.

My Adobe MAX program, S565 ... Thinking Like a Colorist: Color Correction in Premiere Pro covers this basic process. And I include links to a lot of extra material. Coming up in a couple weeks!

Neil

usually you don't grade until you've cut or you're wasting time(unless you know for

sure you're going to use all clips)

There's two general ways.
1.create hero master shot and grade all clips to that.
2. or create a technical standard for color neutralizing in IRE that all match to, then

grade look later.

Technically the correct order for color neutralizing is:
1. black point
2. white point
3. gamma (set mid-tones to 48 IRE)

Tutorial trick for IRE gamma exposure (a little old, but the basics are still there)
drive.google.com/file/d/1OTuM0LRmVdknRZCGFrAKq-P7-E3dUHQk/view?usp=sharing
18% preset used in tutorial
drive.google.com/file/d/11KjPFLpC6cu6P5_v4-cW4X_ciCLmPgCF/view?usp=sharing

4. saturation (set to 50% YUV and 90% HSL scopes)
5. white balance. use RGB parade or histogram to line up RGB black and white.
use HSL scopes to get neutral midtones.

6a. match all shots to a chart or pure scopes (blacks 7.5 to whites 90 ire when doing

pure scope matching because it gives you room for contrast later if you want)

6b. skin tone line
7. grade to a look
8. effects - grain, halation, vignettes
9. burn all 32bpc effects into 16bpc master