Category: Post-Production
DV Magazine has a nice article titled DV 101: How to Talk to A Colorist:
“[T]he first session with a real colorist can be a bit intimidating for the novice filmmaker. Understanding the basics of what is possible and what the colorist is doing to manipulate the image will help alleviate some of the trepidations you might have going in for your first session.”
After going through some basic terminology and example grades the author, Jay Holben, offers up this stellar piece of advice,
“It’s a good idea to start with a defining shot for a particular sequence… but the most important shot for the scene is the close-up of the actress that happened to be the 10th shot for the day. It’s a good idea to start with that 10th shot, establish the look that you want for the sequence on that hero shot and then have the colorist go back and match the rest of the sequence to that key shot.”
Sage advice. The whole article is a good read for anyone new to color correction.
Hat Tip: Ted Langdell via Telecine Internet Group email list
- pi
I’ve been a long time owner of the Magic Bullet filters. Originally – back in 2002 – I bought it to emulate the 24p “Look” for a job. Even then, I’ve never been enamored with post-processing 29.97fps to 24p. I’ve found most filmmakers use it as a crutch. As if it were some sort of… magic bullet. I’d much rather filmmakers forget about frame rate and focus more on framing, lighting, and exposure. Those elements get you far more production value than simply emulating 24p.
But times, they are a-changing. True 24p cameras are affordable and available. With some forethought these cameras mitigate much of the need for 24p emulation (yay!).
Far more in demand is the ability to create the ever elusive “Look”. Whether for a flashback, dream sequence, historical recreation, emotional impact, stock emulation, or mimicking an in-camera technique (diffusion) – coming up with some “Look” (always – one which nobody has ever seen before) is a frequent request. The Magic Bullet Looks subset of filters has always been a stand-by of mine – though, unfortunately, it stands-by a bit more than I would have preferred.
Why? It suffered from having to work within the Final Cut Pro (or After Effect) filter User Interface.
The Looks Suite consisted of long run-on lists of numerical entry boxes and sliders. It’s like trying to color correct with the 3 Way Color Corrector’s numerical rather than graphical interface; it’s powerful, but it gets old fast…
..and that sums up how I’ve long felt about the older Magic Bullet Editors package. Powerful, but it gets old fast.
In mid-October Red Giant Software released Magic Bullet Looks. It’s an upgrade for Magic Bullet Editors – and my first impression was, “Wow. Sexy”.
My second impression: This is easily the best-looking, best-feeling interface I’ve seen… anywhere. It’s fast. It’s responsive. And best of all – the 100+ Look presets all update to show you a preview using the current frame you’ve got loaded! What a time-saver.
The point of the presets isn’t to just apply it and move on (you know who you are) – but to use it as a starting point. With the new Magic Bullet Looks, if a client asks for a contrasty diffuse look – I can open the presets tab, reveal the Diffusion presets, and by looking at the small thumbnail pick the preset that seems to get me closest to the desired look. Once applied, I can start tweaking until I dial-in a pleasing result.
In comparison, the ColorFX room in Apple’s Color makes much of the same promise as Looks. It has a bunch of prebuilt presets. But the thumbnails provide zero insight into how any particular preset might react with the current image (unless my image is a low-angle shot of the Golden Gate B
ridge). Either I’ve got to go through and apply every preset to find my jumping-off point, or I’ll just start from scratch.
I offer this up as my highest praise: In many respects, I wish Looks was the ColorFX room in Color. The nodal approach that Color uses to creating a look is very powerful but very unintuitive. To be fair, Looks doesn’t have the kind of repair (RGB split), grain management, and math tools of the ColorFX room. But the Color interface doesn’t try to help me along as Looks does. MB Looks has a nifty help feature that describes every filter I can apply as I hover my mouse over the filter. Unfortunately, the help text is unhelpfully located at the polar opposite end of the screen from where my mouse is hovering. The font size of the help text also assumes I’ve got my 20-something set of eyeballs. Us “experienced” folk need a little more help than that, please.
Another shortcoming of Looks is that as I’m working on a Look, I can’t see it output to my external monitor. I’m finding color decisions I make within Looks have to be tweaked once I press the “Apply” button and my monitor updates to show me what’s really happening with the image. I don’t think I can blame the Red Giant folks, I believe this is a limitation of the Final Cut plug-in architecture. Color Finesse suffers from the same problem when used as an FCP plug-in.
Lastly, it’s clear that much thought went into assisting us in designing a look. Looks uses a Subject / Matte Box / Lens / Camera / Post metaphor, guiding a filmmaker in deciding what effects to apply in what order.
For a more general audience I think this is fine. But I would like to be able to toggle into a PowerUser mode that doesn’t restrict me from placing filters that exclusively belong to the Camera elsewhere in the chain. At times, I felt more restricted that I should have been. I understand the metaphor / paradigm that Looks is using and that much of its target audience is actually freed by following this logical workflow. Still, I’d like the opportunity to be freed from the shackles of reality when creating unreal or hyper-real looks.
Overall, Looks is a fantastic product. There are a dozen nice little interface elements I haven’t mentioned that really speed up user interaction. It’s an amazing upgrade for anyone who owns the previous version of Magic Bullet Looks. And if you find yourself constantly trying to implement specialty looks, it’s worth the full purchase price. I hope Apple’s Pro Apps team takes a close look at this software… while it’s missing some of the power features I’d like to see (flexible re-ordering of filters), it has a certain “fun-factor” missing from much of today’s professional apps. And the rendered results look great.
Be sure to check out the blog of the creator of Magic Bullet Looks. There’s a secret feature that I haven’t gotten into that’s very nifty.
You can download a demo here.
- pi
Whatever your business, I believe there’s huge upside to specialization. Not only does it allow you to become really good at something – it increases your value and helps you differentiate from your competition.
But don’t take my word for it…
One of the students in the last Color Correction Workshop I helped teach emailed me the other day. Here’s the last line in his email:
Btw, I did a CC job last week on a tv spot…the skill has allowed me to charge an extra $15 per hour.
Yay!
Woo Hoo! Go Harold!
Yes I’m training my competition. As did the editors who trained me 18 years ago… I do this in honor of them.
- pi
At the end of one my favorite movies, The Hunt for Red October, an American hunter-sub performs an emergency maneuver that has it popping out of the water like a giant whale. One of the rescued Soviet sailors screams, “The Captain has scared the Americans out of the water!!!”
That scene reminds me of Avid’s recent announcement that they won’t be on the show floor at NAB. This announcement was made a few weeks ago and sent huge waves through various online forums as everyone chimed in on what they thought of it. I don’t concern myself too much with Avid anymore, as their price point for the software I want isn’t at a price I’m willing to pay. But I was once a Symphony guy, the Avid vs Final Cut article is the most popular pages on this website, and the Symphony is an NLE I directly compete with, so I started reading the commentary around the net.
The most thoughtful comes from Frank Capria at Capria.tv. He has some good insights into what Avid hopes to gain out of this strategy. He believes theirs a risky strategy and details some of the shoals they need to avoid. I add: It’s not like NAB is going the way of the Consumer Electronics Show where many companies feel they can’t get their message out anymore. NAB is very relevant and good products do get their message out from that platform. If Avid is bailing on NAB, then something is not right at Avid – and they now admit it.
What I haven’t read is a good reason Avid’s been forced into this realization. I don’t think it’s the pressure from Final Cut…
My last NAB was two years ago – and Adobe unveiled the start of their Studio package. And honestly, it was a very very strong showing. The audio editing tools surpassed Soundtrack Pro, Premiere (today) is only a rev or two away from seriously being able to replace Final Cut. Their DVD solution is said to be top-notch. And of course, After Effects and Photoshop are the winners in each of their classes.
When you plot out from NAB 2005 to October 2007, Adobe has continued to execute – adopting Apple’s “Studio” concept to help lock-in users, Apple continues to improve its Pro Tools division, most notably with the acquisition of Color. With Adobe and Apple poised to take direct aim at each other at the sub-$3000 NLE market, Avid’s failure to execute in integrating apps it has acquired doesn’t bode well for them.
But the story doesn’t end there – at the high end, Avid has mismanged the DS and Symphony offerings. They confused many of their customers and never quite differentiated those platforms enough. But at least they had more breathing room. In the $60,000 – $80,000 NLE market they have a proven, turnkey toolset and not much competition – but AutoDesk is changing that…
I was recently involved with a FCP + Smoke/Flame integration demo at a local reseller. I spent 10 minutes of a demo modifying a timeline with effects and text within FCP. Using the same media, the Smoke was able to import that timeline (via XML) and ingest the media and play it back on its drives. The rest of the Smoke demo was very impressive – it’s come a long way since I last saw it in v3. And it’s a Symphony killer – at least in terms of feature set. (It’s also very complex, deep machine that is a tougher transition for the Symphony editor to make than the transition to Final Cut – slowing its adoption rate and giving Avid some time.)
But with a basic turnkey Smoke system running on Linux for $90,000 (compared to that system costing $180,000 five years ago) and impressive media sharing capabilities in an FCP shop, the top end of Avid’s market is starting to get squeezed as well.
It seems to me that Avid’s NAB strategy this year akin to them stopping living life like the Red October and deciding to become the American hunter sub getting scared out of the water. They’re about to get torpedo’ed and they need to differentiate. Fast. The process needs to start last week. And it did, with their announcement
For Avid, the only thing worse than not being at NAB is being at NAB and looking like they have nothing new to offer – for the third straight year in a row.
- pi
Hate Mail!
I finally got one, sent from the Contact form on this website. The sender was complaining about finding “another editor claiming to be a colorist” and mentioned something about the real-time nature of his color-correction hardware and how he charges “$1000 per hour” (sniff, sniff).
On the one hand, I love the fact that I got hate mail from a “professional colorist”. It means the software is starting to make the hardware-based folks nervous enough to start Googling us. And that means our tools are getting powerful. Though not quite there yet – as evidenced by his ‘real-time’ comment and another comment he made that Apple Color’s “secondary tools are crappy”. Gee, I guess he cracked open a copy to check it out (though I’d counter than Color’s secondary tools are far less crappy than FCP’s non-existant secondaries – we’re moving in the right direction).
On the other hand, I’m annoyed by My First Hate Mail. Where did My First Hater get the idea I claim to be a Colorist? Certainly this website makes it clear, my finishing skills are broader than just color correction – but color correction is my specialty. I have grown tremendously in that skill set over the past 7 years. I read everything I can get my hands on and then I do it… over and over and over and over and over again.
Yes, I enjoy color correcting 1200 shots in a few days. Tweaking contrast, balancing tones. Yes, there isn’t a single show I’ve worked on that 6 months later I don’t look at and say, “I could do that better today.” But heck, if there’s *any* professional working today who thinks all their work is perfect and they have nothing new to learn – they’re on a professional decline or delusional or both. They’ve definitely stopped growing.
Color correction – and Final Touch (now Color) – rejuvenated my enthusiasm for my career. I originally renamed and refocused my company to specialize in Finishing and Color Correction for very pragmatic reasons (easier to differentiate myself from every other FCP owner working in his mother’s basement). 18 months later I discover I love this focus far more than I thought possible. It blends my dormant Director of Photography gene with my Editor gene and gives balance and indulgence to each.
In the end, the writer of My First Hate Mail and myself have this in common: We both make pictures look better. And, ultimately, who decides if our pictures indeed look better and our services worth paying our asking rates? Our clients.
I’ll let My First Hater claim the mantel of “Colorist”. I’m on the road to Craftsmanship. I’ll continue to grow, learn, and occasionally teach. I’ll keep trying to base my business on my Skills. I just hope My First Hater does the same or he’ll get Moore’s Law’ed out of the business. When today’s iMac can handle 1080p, how much longer before it can run his DaVinci? In Real-Time? Something to think about…
- pi
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