kye Posted April 26, 2021 Author Share Posted April 26, 2021 On 4/25/2021 at 2:48 PM, stephen said: Walter's master class was epic ! Knew that it is a rare opportunity to get knowledge from a Company3 senior colorist for an incredible price ! But he went far beyond my expectations. 4.5 hours that changed my video editing and color grading world for ever 🙂 The stream was in the middle of the night for me, but I just watched the recording of the session earlier today and I have to agree - it was spectacular. For those that couldn't attend, here are some of the things I learned from the class: The challenge isn't to grade a shot with 40 nodes, it's delivering the same look over a 3000 shot feature or (even worse) a series that is shot over time, and also doing it within the time/budget that the production has allocated On top of that, what if you're going in the wrong direction and the director doesn't like it? How long did you just waste, and how can you effectively change the grade without breaking all the qualifiers, etc..? Start with an overall adjustment across the whole project, this should be based on the look that the DP wants for the project, and if you've handled the colour spaces correctly, it should correctly expose all the shots on the output that the DP exposed correctly on capture - for many projects that are shot very well this might be all that is required From there you can apply scene-specific adjustments such as warming or cooling scenes so they're coherent with the emotional arc of the story From there you should only be adjusting tiny things on a per-shot basis such as small changes in exposure (eg due to changing lighting conditions) or tweaking distracting elements etc This should mean you can show the complete film to the director with that rough grade and get feedback, with room to change the overall look, the look of various scenes, and then have time left over for incorporating VFX and troubleshooting any difficult sections that need more attention, and mastering for SDR/HDR etc. Interestingly, if you build the global look starting with a CST to transform from the camera colour space/gamma into something standard (such as ARRI LogC or Cineon) and build your look on that, then you can take that same overall node tree and apply it to a different project shot on a different camera and by simply adjusting the CST to convert from the new colour space for the new project then you can quickly use a look between projects. Walter did this live several times and in literally a couple of minutes had a very solid looking grade on a completely different project. He also took great joy in roasting various YT colourists, LUT peddlers, and those that shout at the internet from the very shallow end of the pool, so I found the class hugely entertaining. For members of Lowepost, he also did a short workflow explanation here: https://lowepost.com/insider/colorgrading/hollywood-colorist-walter-csi-about-his-color-grading-process-r48/ Did anyone else watch his masterclass? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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