Hollywood Colorist Walter (CSI) about his color grading process

Thank you so much Walter for sharing your hard-earned wisdom and experience. This is incredibly valuable.

I think you usually work with a timeline set to Ari LogC so that the tools behave closely to how they behave with Cineon log film scans..?  Where do you do the color space transform for clips that are not in Ari LocC (other camera types, VFX shots etc)? In a pre-group node perhaps? And the final color space transform is on a timeline node probably?

Walter is such an inspiration and an incredibly talented colorist. Thanks so much for this insight! 🙏

A big thank you Walter and Lowepost, this is big!  🙏

Amazing. a big thanks to Walter and Lowepost for both, the video and the node tree.

Thank you so much for your insight Walter! That was very informative!! You said that you never have to key skin if you've done the balance and scene node right. Can you please expand a bit on this? 

I am learning color grading and I thought when pushing a look far it's often the habit to key skin.

Many thanks!

44 minutes ago, Walter Volpatto said:

Either as DCTL on the media page (preferred) or  it depends.

if the shot is already in a LOG like i usually put it on the first node, a OFX color transform will act before the primaries in a node (order of operations) therefore your correction will still be in LogC.

if the shot needs some hard transform, i might put it in the second node, (repurposing) so i can color some in the original space and then transform it.

Ah that makes sense. Thanks Walter!

Really informative...thanks Walter.

Thank you Walter and Lowerpost. I liked the way you argument for the different node structure.