Cinematic Color Grading: 5 Steps to Professional Image Design

So I build my LUTS in Nuke and the Nuke manual literally if you just read it cover-to-cover you'd be a VFX artist. I mean you do it just tells you how to do everything. A lot of people out there I know for sure think that a lot is just it's almost like an Instagram filter or something; is that true and is that not true and why? Uhh Yes and yes. What is going on Indy Mogul? My name is Ted and today I'm here with Jaron Presant ASC. Jaron just came off shooting the show "Daybreak" on Netflix he's also the DP behind movies such as "Rampage" has worked on teams for things like "Star Wars" and "Looper" and today we're going to talk about something that you guys have asked for something that I think is a little technical and talk about the image design process walk through it how an actual professional crafts images from pre-production all the way to post-production and we're actually gonna walk through a couple of steps using Daybreak as footage into the actual example so Jaron what is the image pipeline? The image pipeline is everything that we do with an image from this from the moment when we capture it all the way through when we present it so it's routed delivery. So you're saying that there's far more to this other than just shoot, color, export, it's overly simplified to say we shoot, we color, we export, there's a lot of steps within color that affect everything that we're doing all the way up to and including what we're doing on set in many ways and anticipating those steps is important to to the shooting itself. In a digital pipeline everything can be adjusted and it can and will be adjusted and if you don't take control as it cinematographer someone else will. The image processing downstream is by far more impactful than any camera you can choose to shoot on. And what's the reason for that? Are you saying that a lot of cameras at this point what the quality that they're capable of shooting or is is fairly similar to a degree now? Yea when we're when we're talking about professional cameras yeah they're all capturing enough data the question is what are you doing with that data and how are you prepping that data for display in the final presentation with every new technology there's more control gained in the post pipeline and that greater amount of control affects the image and what you can do with that image which affects then what we do on set. On a beginning level people don't view this stage as that important it's a step that will come later and we'll deal with the later mm-hmm but as you get more advanced in imaging it becomes earlier and earlier and earlier and you understand that the effects of what we're doing on set are intimately woven with the choices we're making for the future in this post process. Gotcha well there's a lot of filmmakers out here that I know want to start shooting bigger things at least want to start thinking in the right way to be able to understand the image pipeline so jump into this? Yeah image pipeline okay now we are in photochems "Keep me posted" facility we're here with Aidan Stanford the colorist behind films such as "Get Out," "Knives Out" and most recently of course "Daybreak" which we're gonna be talking about here in the studio so we're gonna jump into a little bit about the image design process and actually look at a little bit of the footage and actually walk through some of the nodes and what was actually done to make the kind of stylized look that the actual show had. So you guys ready to do this? Yeah let's do this. So for "Daybreak" Jaron, what were you guys shooting on and how early was Aidan in on the process? So we shot on the Alexa LF with Primo Primes they were expanded to cover the sensor and one of the things, because we knew we were creating such a strong look we brought Aidan in very very early in relative to the whole color process. We were discussing looks and and things we wanted to kind of highlight and then I was creating stills, emailing them to him, discussing and we did a lot of that kind of conceptual stuff early on. Starting off in the image design process what's the first step so the first stage is concept and it's where we're gonna conceive of what it is our goals are. You know what are we trying to hit? What kind of camera movement are we doing? What kind of lighting are we doing? What's the color scheme? What's the world that we live in? Every element that's going to be part of the cinematography comes from this first stage, right? In the concepting Brad Payton the director said you know the end result of the apocalypse is that the world looks like this perfect sunset like it always feels like this sunset glow but the skies are blue you know so it's like it's kind of like in some ways it's like kind of perfection of a day yeah. From that stage we start getting into development where we start building upon those ideas, right? And in the development is where you build out the LUT for the show which will create the complex transforms that carry the image to display. On "Daybreak" for example there is a base show LUT that everything goes through and everything everything is is taken through that LUT set up for Dolby Vision in this case so it's a HDR. To me a LUT is not just a color correction you know that's not the intention of a LUT. You can color correct anything. The intention of a LUT is a base transform that takes your footage and preps it for display and creates the base of your look. But it's something that can be applied to a bunch of stuff because it's not like just swing the knobs and then you've got a look and then you go bake it out to a lot yes because you can do that you know but that philosophically to me that's not what the purpose of a lot is what is not the color grid you don't do that's just a random color grid you don't just tweak something in copypasta yeah everything the best example is like you can create a color grade where you're doing secondaries and keys and then you can bake it out to let it'll look like crap on nighttime most stuff other than that shot I mean one thing that I do with every left that I make is and look at it on a ton of images you know so that just - that's part of like the check phase you know is to make sure that it's doing predictable things on a lot of images so after you create this kind of this kind of base lot that are gonna be using on your show you go through and you test different scenarios and they're almost things that you kind of have on your belt of if I'm in this scenario when I shoot this way I know that it's going to work the daytime light this works in this this works in that you know the what are what are all sorts of different types of lighting environments and can I just check it and make sure that I'm not getting something that's like wow that is not what I intended at all with this right are there any other big pitfalls that people have when they're trying to create a baseline if you start pulling on you know in different ways on an image you can sometimes run into a tearing on the image you can have pixels where they're very close together but they get pulled very far apart mmm in different directions and you can create just little artifacts but that's also surmountable by checking it against a bunch of images on the post-apocalypse side there is this very strong Mad Max vibe to all of the the imagery so that has upstream of the schola a transform that adds all of that warmth into the image but beyond just warming it up it's doing a really very complex transform on the color cube the color cube was d saturated in in green and magenta and then increased in saturation in orange and blue so it added in all of that that kind of color complexity but we also know we're going to also add in blue skies because a lot though very complex cannot know where the the pixel is in the frame it just does the same thing to every pixel that has that code value so we know that we're gonna need an additional step to bring back blue and skies and to isolate spatial elements so I build my Luntz in nuke right and nuke has a non-commercial version that's free it doesn't have certain things like you can't generate a lot in the free version but you can learn so much in that and the nuke manual literally if you just read it cover-to-cover you'd be a VFX artist I mean you do it just tells you how to do everything and it's all there just sitting waiting I mean there is so much you can do with $0 output just about just in terms of learning and DaVinci Resolve of course being sure entirely free yeah and I think I think red area I think a lot of places offer great footage too you can you can load in your own you know of log images and and some lots or whatever in practice now before we move on I want to talk to you about Squarespace it was honestly gonna be your next best friend when it comes to building any kind of following your audience now in a lot of our interviews with a lot of different filmmakers a lot of them talked about how important social media is to their growth problem though is that today there are so many platforms to point people towards you've got your Twitter your Facebook your Instagram your production company's Instagram your artsy photography Flickr you've got your Vimeo you get the idea but let me just tell you real quick that Squarespace actually has a super hand feature that lets you link and connect all those accounts into just one page with the click of a button and for us we actually do this ourselves we have all of our social media pages linked to the top so people don't have to dig through Google searches just to find out what we're doing and then really after that all you have to do is just choose from over 200 top-level domains that work for you and this is the early first step for putting your name out there you can start today by going with a 14-day free trial if you type in squarespace.com slash Indy mogul which is also going to give you 10% off your first purchase or website or domain now you find the link for that in the description down below but thank you again to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode and now back to the episode once you've developed all of the steps that you're going to go through you're also at the same time developing lighting plans and camera plans you're then going to go into implementation and you're going to you're going to apply all of the stuff that you've developed and that's when you shoot right it's our onset lighting mm-hmm it's our on camerawork our dailies color correction there are different philosophies for how to of how people shoot and some people like to shoot with on set color correction yeah which is where they have a di T color the image you know while they're on set during this implementation process you're also shooting with the plan of what you're going to do even if you're not doing it during dailies right so for example on daybreak we we weren't putting all the blue skies back in yeah but we knew we were going to go so we knew in framing we knew in in terms of what we were shooting and how we were gonna shoot it how you live it how we how we framed it if there were certain shots where we're like oh we should really look at that I'd pop it on my computer and I would just do a finish just do a little final final pass on it don't you show it all around and everybody's like great you know then after that step now you have an image and now you go into finalization where you enact all of those plans that you set up and to your question of what else is there that's the point where you start doing matching you start doing finesse work you start doing other additional transforms everything that you plan everything that you planned and because you have planned it well in advance you you shot with that plan all the intention was in is in the photography so the finalization stage is actually quite simple and straightforward because you've for it for example in daybreak we also did grain we also did halation uuu ad in multiple layers everything else that starts to make the image the final piece that you were planning on building from from the beginning also where you're working upstream and versus downstream of which thing you've done is very important because if you if you're just flailing away and and adding notes you can you can paint yourself into a corner get in trouble one thing that that we kind of keep referencing which I think a lot of times people don't think about know is which side of the letter you doing correction on right and generally speaking like all of the correction we do is upstream of the lot so you create the lot mm-hmm you're looking at that first but everything that you work on is upstream of the LUT on the log image so you've got it got a log image you'd going through color correction and everything else and then it goes through the letters last step these are the power windows for how you must see the window there so the key is inside like one of the things that they that really makes convincing windowed Corrections is that they work the way that that nature works so with skies they aren't perfectly you know horizontal and they have a symmetry and they fall off we kind of tried to make this layer of of Glendale that had kind of a neutrally warm almost smoggy layer yeah and then it was like the sky kind of finished at the top so you'll never see in the show where the where the blue sky comes right down to earth I think that's also what makes it look really great and this is what you were talking about about adding kind of a spatial and coloring absolutely now in the current entertainment environment we also have multiple deliverables and the deliverables are not straightforward anymore okay so that don't know when they exit out one file that's not enough so it depends on what your project is right one export is enough for if you're only going to a film festival and there it goes and they want a quick them in one boom boom you're done yeah but if you're doing a project for commercial release you may have an IMAX output you may have Adobe cinema output and you may have an SDR and HDR you habet Dolby vision pass and HDR Teton Pass there's so many passes and and each one has nuanced elements a little for indie filmmakers do you stuff to worry about this constant you do in some respect one of the big ones is HDR right in the past everything was in standard dynamic range now you have this option for high dynamic range how the image is prepped for that can very much impact how the image looks so for normal people that go home and sit on a laptop and watch something on Netflix like this for instance they will play the HDR version of the deliverable too so yeah I mean like like the like an iPhone is Dolby vision enabled now it's gonna send it whatever the the flag for whatever net value it can actually create yeah we have them using master and 100 mid 600,000 so they all go out all different versions for all different hdrwn yeah displays standard dynamic range is 100 nits yes right we haven't had monitors that were 100 nits for a while now we're getting monitors that are 600 minutes literally 6 times as brilliant thousand it's literally just because you have a bright contrasting monitor doesn't mean you need to slam everyone in the eyeballs with like the brightest image possible yeah and this is the thing that we as artists are up against is that you do need some artistry to go into how you want that image to be presented yeah and a break we have really specular highlights punched through to 250 so we have an image that feels correct when and specular highlights like the Sun punch through and get really bright but if I look at the image it's the same image whether it's an SDR or on HDR it reveals the same I'm not creating images to show on a TV set to vivid mode with motion smoothing you know I just can I'm sorry it's just not my thing but I'm gonna make the best image I can for some for someone who's got monitors it's set up correctly for their environment and has and and they're trying to watch something you're beautiful for people that want to start thinking about the the image pipeline and actually start thinking with the design process in the way the professionals do what's kind of the last take away a piece of advice that they need to know the biggest takeaway is don't be intimidated don't feel threatened by it it's just some steps just take a step forward right here's a great example okay you have a DSLR you shoot you're shooting with it and you shoot with it in standard mode try shifting it to low contrast mode right now it's something with low contrast whether it's log nod and then take the image in to resolve and then bring back the contrast and start playing with what that looks like and then play with what happens when you shift the colors off in different parts of that image I work on resolve so it's node based and I think just understanding order of operation how this thing affects that thing if I do this before that how will that change the end result figure out the basics of what you're doing before you just start trying to do all the advanced stuff once you start taking little steps you'll start asking more questions and then you'll get a little further and it'll all inform back into the portion of what you're shooting and how you're shooting start test they start playing things just take just one step okay well Darrin thank you so much for joining us and for breaking this down I know this is kind of immensely technical if there are people that have questions can they bug you online or call Jaron freeze I'm calm you can't ask some questions of course again thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video start by putting your brand out there by going over to squarespace.com slash Indy mogul for 10% off your purchase of a website or domain and make sure you head on over to get the full uncut podcast discussion with our awesome friend Jaron but we will also put in the description down below but thank you so much for joining us again I seriously it's the best fertilizer this thanks so much for watching and of course we'll catch you guys next time

Channel: Indy Mogul

Views: 91,424

Keywords: cinematic color grading, beginners guide, like a pro, premiere pro cc, how to color grade, final cut pro, davinci resolve, how I color grade, tutorial, tips and tricks, how to edit videos, editing workflow, professional colorist, video editor, nuke studio, vfx breakdown, color correction, lumetri color, cinematography, color theory, color science, storytelling, shooting on film, cinematic look, adobe lightroom, arri alexa, lattice program, canon dslr, brad peyton

Id: ndRbaMvtXeg

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020