Masterclass/training for color grading recommendations?

[Clay Adams]

Hello,

First time poster.

Does anyone know of a good online training curriculum (paid) for industry level color grading?

Or does anyone on Lowepost offer one-on-one type training as a side gig?

.... a download link to the Company 3 "magic lut" would suffice as well..... that exists right?...

Thanks in advance!

Clay

 

[Nico Wieseneder]

Hi Clay and welcome to the forum!
Here on Lowepost you'll find a lot of great articles and tutorials. Furthermore I really recommend to read the articles more than once over a certain time span. I get some things out of the same article let's say 6 months later than the first time I read it just because my knowledge wasn't there to discern the additional information. 

Also check out mixinglight.com and colour.training for great online professional learning resources.

And if you get your hands on the CO3 magic lut feel free to share with me 😄 

[Anton Meleshkevich]

I agree with @Nico Wieseneder .
The most useful information about color grading I've ever seen is here: https://lowepost.com/color-grading/case-studies/ But before reading all these awesome articles you should read about printer lights and all other basic color grading things. 

As well as reading all posts on color grading forums from colorists like @Walter Volpatto, @Tom Poole @Marc Wielage and many many others.

 

Quote

Company 3 "magic lut"

This LUT is called "Great DP and art direction" 😎

Edited August 6, 2019 by Anton Meleshkevich

[Marc Wielage]

22 minutes ago, Anton Meleshkevich said:

This LUT is called "Great DP and art direction" 😎

No, the CO3 colorists are world-class people who do impeccable work. They pretty much set the gold standard for the business. (As do the Steve Scott's who use Lustre, Maxine Gervas and Yvan Lucas on Baselight, and so on.) These people contribute greatly to the ultimate look of the picture, and they also have the ability to work calmly with clients and solve problems, which is an exceptionally difficult skill to cultivate over time. LUTs are at or near the bottom of the list. Great lighting, great lenses, and great exposure all help considerably.

[Anton Meleshkevich]

@Marc Wielage I meant exactly the same. There are no secret LUTs. Just great colorists working with great footage.

[Anton Meleshkevich]

@Marc Wielage Actually I'd really like to know how deep you (or other colorists) go into problem solving with total rotoscoping and relighting. I may be wrong, but I always thought more experienced colorists do less. For example I can't get a great look only using wheels (actually I doubt I can get it at all). But more talented guys can. I think this is also because of different quality level of footage. I mean clients, who just start to shoot films, can't afford to color grade at CO3. But they can afford to hire me. So A list colorists work mainly with A list cinematograghers. But if I'm wrong, please tell me 

[Marc Wielage]

16 minutes ago, Anton Meleshkevich said:

@Marc Wielage Actually I'd really like to know how deep you (or other colorists) go into problem solving with total rotoscoping and relighting.

It depends! There's a terrific podcast interview with the great Bob Richardson on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that came out last week, and he spends 10 minutes talking about Yvan Lucas' excellent color-correction. One thing that Tarantino insisted on was: no power windows. I can't imagine doing a movie without them nowadays, but Richardson and Lucas clearly figured out a way to solve the problem, and quite a bit of what you see was just "lit that way" right on the set. It's brilliant work.

Podcast link:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/once-a-time-hollywood-dp-featured-thrs-behind-screen-1226416

I mainly use windows to knock down the background and add shadows and depth to the image, but everybody works differently. When you're under a tight schedule, you're not going to have time to digitally relight every shot (ala Steve Scott's excellent work on The Revenant). Even at my end of the post sewer, I still will use a window here and there to pop up a face or flag off a harsh background, just because I can. I sleep better at nights that way. When there's absolutely no time and money, we wince and let it go. There are certainly limits to how far you can push things, even with raw camera files and/or original negative. We stand on the DP's shoulders, and unless they do their job, we can't really do ours.

Edited August 6, 2019 by Marc Wielage

[Anton Meleshkevich]

Thank you for your answer and for the link, Marc!

Going to listen it tomorrow while  rotoscoping direct sun light on trees to get rid of it and match shots time of the day

I never listen to music while grading. Either original sound of a project or some podcasts.

Edited August 6, 2019 by Anton Meleshkevich

[Marc Wielage]

21 minutes ago, Anton Meleshkevich said:

I never listen to music while grading. Either original sound of a project or some podcasts.

Oh my god, I'd be dead if I couldn't listen to music while color-correcting. I've been doing that since the very beginning (provided we don't have sync sound). I always let the client choose the music when possible. Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music are godsends -- and if the client thinks it's too distracting, we have "the sound of silence." But it actually goes faster with some quiet background tunes.

[Jaemie Manners]

My goodness. If I had no music playing I'd going the way of Marc.

Nothing makes the sessions go slower than silence 😢

[Marc Wielage]

Jesus, if it's absolute silence, it's deadly. On the other hand, there are those people who get distracted by music. Jan De Bont did not want to hear anything in the background when I did one of the home video versions of Die Hard in the 1990s. He was not a cheerful man -- but his cinematography was spectacular. Ultimately, he liked the work, and that's all I care about.

[Rakesh Malik]

On 8/5/2019 at 8:21 PM, Marc Wielage said:

It depends! There's a terrific podcast interview with the great Bob Richardson on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that came out last week, and he spends 10 minutes talking about Yvan Lucas' excellent color-correction. One thing that Tarantino insisted on was: no power windows. I can't imagine doing a movie without them nowadays, but Richardson and Lucas clearly figured out a way to solve the problem, and quite a bit of what you see was just "lit that way" right on the set. It's brilliant work.

 

Doing my own color is one of the things that's made me a better cinematographer. It meant that whenever I screwed something up on set, I was the one who had to fix it in post... so I had front row seats on finding (and fixing) my own blunders... so on subsequent shoots I'd remember those blunders and avoid them.

Nowadays I use power windows a LOT less than I used to, because I learned to sculpt and control light a lot more on set because having basically screwed myself, I knew what to look for the next time around.

Of course there are always new ways to screw things up, and when you end up shooting one scene in two parts split two months apart (we needed the waterfall to change its volume drastically during the scene, so...) or when you film one of the actors 80 miles away and in completely different light (the elk didn't get the call sheet) and have to match those it's still work, but for me lately that sort of extra work is a lot more common than, "Ah crap, I should have flagged the light off of that wall back there." 

I honestly think I've learned more about cinematography by studying color grading and editing than I have from any cinematography oriented class/seminar/etc I've taken.

 

[Marc Wielage]

2 hours ago, Rakesh Malik said:

Nowadays I use power windows a LOT less than I used to, because I learned to sculpt and control light a lot more on set because having basically screwed myself, I knew what to look for the next time around.

Bear in mind that Richardson was working on a $100 million dollar movie, so he had the time and budget to have his crew go in and fix a lot of lighting issues on set. In the real world, I think power windows and masks and keys and all that are still very necessary. To me, Tarantino's approach is unnecessarily dogmatic (ala Dogma 95), and the trick to me is make all the VFX and color work completely invisible. If you can't tell there was ever a window there, then it works. The moment you can see evidence of it, then the illusion is shattered. 

On the other hand: I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a brilliant film, it looks great, it's very entertaining, and I've paid to see it twice. I can't offer any higher praise of a movie than that. Tarantino has earned the right to have strong opinions on where and how he does things, and that extends to post.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Marc Wielage

[Rakesh Malik]

I didn't mean to imply that I have something against using power windows, just that I don't use them as much as I used to. But I think I was using them a lot because of the fact that my lighting wasn't great. so rather than using power windows to enhance the images, I was using them to FIX the images.

Not allowing them at all sounds excessive to me too, but not relying on them to fix my blunders has been liberating. Now I have more time to be creative rather than spending most of my time in the color suite fixing things.

I'm looking forward to seeing One Upon a Time in Hollywood... when I manage to free up some time to go to the theater