Mark Mulcaster

Hi everyone, I have a project coming up later next year, its a feature length documentary that looks like is going to have a theatrical release. We're currently quoting for the post and the producers have asked that we include time to do the theatrical grade pass as well. As a "TV" colourist ie i work for a company that only delivers for Television i've not had much experience grading for a threatre - in fact when i've worked on a couple of super low budget micro theatrical films we've just graded in my normal suite on my BVM X-300. So i'm looking for advice basically on whether i'll get that much benefit from doing the TV grade first (as its the primary release) and then do a a couple of days in a theatre for a trim pass or if its needed at all.I'm not pushing it either way so want to do whats best for the production and they seem to have a decent budget. I'll be working on Baselight in a colour managed workflow either ACES or Filmlight T-Log/E Gamut. Many thanks!

I myself have always been told to use some form of I/O box to connect to a grading monitor and currently using the Ultrastudio Monitor 3G for short form projects at home on my Mac. But we’re looking at the future and a wider demand for editors and finishing artists to work from home and doing colour critical work remotely so my question was is using a HDMI port on computer connected to a hdmi port on a reference monitor going to give an accurate and reliable image to work from. From a budgetary perspective if the we wanted purchase several setups I’d prefer to have a more accurate monitor first and then look at better machines if they’re needed. If some form of I/O in the middle of the chain is needed then that’s ok but the current worklaptops only have hdmi ports on them. seeing as the clients are signing off on all manner of devices I feel more reassured when I know what I’m looking is a correctly calibrated image on a robust correction before I deliver. what’s everyone’s thoughts?

I learnt on Mistika - coming from a editing background I was “wtf?!” But you get to grips with it and the colour tools came on leaps and bounds during my time with it. Im now on Baselight and that’s a lot more locked in and it’s not restrictive but with mistika’s open timeline it was easy to cobble things together and properly comp from scratch. I guess that’s to do with it’s Compositor background. Hands down though Baselight colour management is head and shoulders above any other tool I’ve tried ( I’ve not tried them all though). Admittedly I’ve not tried to finish a whole project in Baselight as we online back in avid using the AAF round trip with Baselight for avid which in it itself is a handy as hell as my spelling is atrocious so I made for a appalling online editor [emoji1787] but I was delivering shows from conform through to final delivery including having to make editorial changes on the Mistika. It still wasn’t easy compared to everything in one box like resolve but I find anything but the simple bit of editing a real chore in Baselight...oh for the days when picture lock actually meant that and not “we’ve run out of money in offline” [emoji1787] The fact both are in essence layer based ways of grading meant it was a easy transition over to Baselight for me. I’d be curious to give Mistika another whirl and see what’s changed...I think I can still remember a few gestures [emoji23][emoji1787]

I think that may have been mentioned else where (infact i may have asked that too at on point) but if you hold down shift and the you can' find it in the expanded list then you'll need to contact Baselight support to request it.

I’m meant to be working on a upcoming project that’s heavily relying on graphics in after effects. I’ll be working After Effrcts in CC 2019 and will be delivering HLG only. I’ll be working remotely for some of the project and so limited access to my BVM X300. I’m expecting to receive Sony F55 or Sony Venice footage shot in SLOG3. I’ve not really worked in a colour managed project outside of Baselight. Does anyone have any tips to setup my project in after effects? Thanks!

Any one? lol

Im on a Basleight Two so not entirely sure what functionality the student version does or doesn't have but What we do here is create two timelines ; a conform timeline and a separate reference timeline. Once the conform is complete we gang the two cursors and use the the wipe or 2x1 to shot check either by playing the show through or shuttling through it on the timeline. If its me i tend to do it in real time if i have the time so i get a feel for the job, otherwise im pretty sure our busy assistants do it as fast as they can

Hiya, As the resident colourist at my facility I've been asked to put together a HDR primer course for people throughout the business, it doesn't need to be massively technical (which is probably why they asked me!). But what i'd like to offer is a snap shot of current industry trends for grading and finishing HDR. So if you have 2-3 minutes i'd be really interested in reading your experiences (can be as brief or expanded upon as you have time for.) Thanks! General questions Have you graded HDR? How often? What type of content are you working on? Who for? (broadcaster, on demand streaming service etc) Workflow questions Are you grading HDR first or SDR first? Are you using a Dolby Vision workflow? If you're not using a Dolby Vision workflow are you doing a manual trim or using some automatic tone mapping? How much time are you given for the creation of your secondary delivery format ie 1 day for a SDR trim pass Do you grade only in PQ ( even without a dolby vision workflow) or do you work in HLG? What grading software are you using? On what platform is the final online being carried out on ie Avid, Premiere Pro, Flame etc? Many thanks -Mark

The Arri Look Library is now a available for Baselight this adds additional looks and emulations that are worth taking a look at

Apologies to be the necroposter and restart this topic but this video gives you an idea of what you can do in LAB. One thing that ive always wondered and not been able to do is split out the colour channels like he does in Resolve. It was something i was able to do in Mistika but i cant seem to do it on good ole BL.

Thanks Andy, Putting it like that makes a lot more sense, i think i was approaching it from the wrong perspective, it makes sense about seeing the Rec2020 as a container. I'll have to look for the Dolby: ST 2084 PQ / P3 D65 / 1000 nits viewing option as from what i recall when i wrote my original post i didn't see it listed in my Baselight (we're running 5.1). My thought about grading in PQ/P3 was to play it safe a bit and make sure i wasn't grading any colours out of gamut that my monitor wasn't able to reproduce correctly, or that when the content hits the consumer screens. It may not be necessary but i wanted to try both approaches to see for myself. Ever so quickly what does the transfer matrix do on the X300? I've toggled it on and off but didn't see any difference to the image on screen. Thanks a lot for the links Marc! Thats really very helpful, theres alot of reading there....does it come in audiobook form 😉 Many thanks -Mark

Its really cool to see Park Road using Mistika for this, Empire magazine have done a stand alone podcast with Peter and he mentions how for the most part the restoration tools used were off the shelf, i don't know if that means they're part of the Mistika tool set or if they're using 3rd party plugins like Neat Video?

I'm about to grade some musical performances in HDR - The deliverable will be a HDR10 1000nits @D65. I've have been advised to set my Sony BVM X300 monitor set to P3 rather than the full rec2020 gamut setting as the majority of consumer screens aren’t likely to reach %100 Rec2020 but P3 is far more achievable by a larger cross section of consumer TVs, if i recall my Sony X300 doesn't even cover the full rec2020 colourspace. Is this generally the accepted approach to take for HDR? From alot of the HDR content i've seen (not including TV manufacture demos) the image saturation for HDR doesn't feel hugely more saturated from SDR, preconception-ally speaking. So other than dealing with some very saturated stage lighting i don't see this being a major concern? Looking at my Baselight cursor options I don't have a PQ/P3/100nits cursor on my Baselight. So keeping with the ST2084/PQ/REC2020/1000nits viewing cursor i switched the monitor into P3 and noticed a slight hue shift in my monitor on the test footage. Before i bother the lovely filmlight support team and rasie a ticket i wanted to ask if i need to, or just stick to rec2020 and be mindful of any highly saturated parts of the image? Thanks

I'd love to have seen her panel with Jet, and the demo afterwards. Did anyone here attend?

Pretty much what Andy says; if you're only delivering Rec709 at the moment then calibrate for that (unless you have lots of time to kill) If you're doing a variety of deliverables and can save presets into your monitor then calibrate accordingly but only work in the relevant preset to what you're being asked to deliver. Its an oldie but a goodie when i say its always good to check that your monitor is in the right settings before you start grading, many a good colourist (inc myself) has learnt that the hard way! LOL

I have a question about AAF round-trippig with the Baselight Plug-in that im hoping someone might be able to shed some additional light one. I've always sent grades back as full to legal scale, but noticed that if i were to change the output in the baselight pluging to soft clip to legal it seems to introduce additional contrast compared to Full to legal scale. The way i see it is that whilst both are technical operations a soft clip affects the image more by allowing for a bit more contrast in the grade? From Filmlights Manual: On full to legal: "When image data is scaled from full to legal, full range data is scaled down to fit into the 64‐940 range. This modifies every colour value in the range." On soft clipping: "Soft clipping is very similar to clipping; however, values are clipped to provide a gradual, rather than a sharp, transition through the white and black levels." So when sending a grade back to Avid for online (Broadcast rec709) I've always selected the full to legal scale option as how I understand it is we work in Baselight in Full Range and to maintain the correct grade intent technically the full to legal option scales everything to fit inside the 64-940 vales of broadcast video. So if i were grade with the occasional sub-blacks lets say -3 would the full to legal operation clip or scale the whole image to fit the -3 black value to be 64. I hope that makes sense?!

Its partly inherent with a lot of 3rd party plugins that they seem to be much more render intensive or wont allow real-time playback as esily in avid as other NLEs My online editor told me her avid reported back 69hours of rendering time to render a 8minute uhd sequence on a z840! After some investigation we found that the issue was 3 fold: -UHD 50p rendering -There's an update for the drivers for the avid BM box which helped -A semi-complicated grade was created by yours truly, ive found anything over a couple of layers and it really affects rendering time. The system played better simply by bypassing the avid box and that's how we found the driver issue, like I said above the driver update helped and it was

I do a lot of non-scripted factual and light entertainment work, 50minute programmes and I'm usually booked 16hours for that (2x8hr days). For me that works out a day to grade the whole show, then review and tweak the next morning. Client signs-off at 2pm and I deliver back about 4pm. This is averaging about 800-1000 shots per film, and 2hours per part - some parts take longer and some less time depending upon duration. Ive recently completed 5 x 10minute short indie films and that was 1x 8hour day per film that was with DOP and client present for the whole day. I think its sometimes hard to know exactly how long to quote for a job as it maybe a short piece with many cameras, cuts and locations or a long piece with only 1 camera and a single location. As soon as you start to add keys and qualifiers your time can get easily eaten away very quickly!

We use the Baselight plugin here at Sky for both round trip workflows and standalone grades. For the roundtrip the benefit comes from the online editor having access (assuming I don't lock my grades :p) to the main Baselight toolset so if shots need to be extended, or replaced they have the option of doing this in the online suite rather than sending this back to grade and dear I say it if the client changes their mind it can happen without its becoming a big "thing" From a logistics point of view not having to do a flat render passes makes the workflow very flexible and quicker getting it into online, with one caveat - render times. The draw back is render times, I've noted that event out top spec UHD workstations struggle with real time performance when more than a couple of layers have been used in the grade But I may be being unfair as we're doing a lot of UHD 50p work at the moment. The other workflow is that the online editor grades in the baselight plugin, the new version allows you to hop from shot to shot without leaving the timeline so this was a huge issue originally. The main problem is that if the online editor cant really review complicated grades without rendering. So what ive encouraged them to do is use the standard Avid symphony colour corrector toolset for the bulk of the their work but any troublesome grades or things that need more love and attention "promote" this to the baselight plugin. Sorry gone off on a tanget, regarding the Baselight vs Resolve debate I think that if you get the fundamentals of what and how colour grading is down the tools become less of a issue for the most part until you start really need to get to grips with color managed workflows and big jobs that may require more specifc tools. Keep it simple and you'll be able to easily go between softwares without too much stress. Its only when you start to get complicated will you run in to trouble when tools don't behave or react the way you expect. My vote would be for Baselight for all the above reasons that people have stated. The only other thing to consider, and its a real world issue above my pay grade is budget. If you don't have the budget for a Baselight then go for Resolve. If your facililty is limited on funds id much prefer a good Monitor I can rely on and calibrate than compromising on that. And the two software's are differently priced If you're just starting out you can get really far without any need to pay for anything by using resolve, As resolve is free id recommend downloading it regardless if you go down the Baselight root. Spend the time to understand their colour managed workflow and it'll make you appreciate Filmlight's software and the similarities and differences between the two programmes. I started grading on Misitka and there were somethings I missed when I went over to baselight - but that was due to not finding the right tool for the job and leaving the more online\finishing aspects to someone else.

I have a bit of downtime at the moment so I thought it might be fun, interesting & very useful for people to suggest films that you think every colourist should watch, These could because the grade is really amazing, or as importantly doesn't work for some reason.

Heres my cave: Sky TV - London Baselight 2 with blackboard 2 Sony BVM x300

Its great to see some decent indepth tutorials coming from filmlight! One question (forgive me if i missed id in the video) - what do the ratios in the texture equaliser refer to?

Tends to be DnxHr for me too, although im still requested to deliver ProRess422 HQ from time to time

Thanks Steve for your swift reply, at the moment we're not using a LUT box but hopefully that's a purchase for something in the not too distant future as i think we're at the limit to what we can get out of the Sony.

I asked my Sony BVM X300 to have a calibration check as i was concerned that someone had been playing with the settings, when presented a pluge test pattern to the monitor everything was sat-up and soit has been corrected. I was told that they've ran colorimetry calibration on the monitor in question but i can see a slight but visable red tint to the blacks, i ran a quick test on lightspace over lunch and for the most part the colorimetry looked pretty good but sure and sure can be the red channel kicked up right at the bottom of the scale. I dont want to tweak anything myself as what lightspace is displaying on my screen looks arguably fine all except right down at the black end of the scale. Any suggestions or ideas as to how this may have happened. Ive run a similar test on another X300 and that doesn't have the same problem but didnt get chance to compare settings....any ideas or is this something that has too many variables? Thanks