Coloring Basics

hello everyone welcome to office hours if you've come via YouTube and want to know more about what we do just head over to office hours. Global that's our primary web portal it'll give you more information and links to things that are relevant to the show also remember the questions drive the conversation here and you can use the QR code that'll show up at the bottom of screen throughout the program or go to ask office hours. Global on the web and that'll let you submit your questions into today's question queue uh today second hour we're talking the basics of color correction Luts base grading looks stuff like that so if you're relatively new in the process or just want to refresh your course of some sort that's what we'll be discussing we'll be showing you examples of how color correction Works in certain circumstances and it should be a fun second hour of course this is our first hour and here we concentrate on your interests and concerns so Mitch what's our first question for today thank you Bill our first question is a QR code question coming in from John Jordan in Edison New Jersey I'm building a three camera podcast studio in a small room using Blackmagic Studio camera 4ks I'm looking to wall mount them on some sort of arm that will allow a small range of movement to reframe camera angles depending on the number of guests what are your thoughts Alex yeah if you do if you do wall mount for cameras you're going to get a lot of different options and you know it really depends on the wall and how how much weight and how much control you have but things like this so um here's what you can see here is a wall mount that is um that is going to this is going to give you much of what you're looking for which is you get it into the wall just make sure you got to find the studs and make sure that you have the you know you're in the right place to put that um to attach this but now you have kind of a bit of a head that you can work with that you know what you're going to want probably especially if you're not going to operate it is some sort of ball head then the one I just showed you may the ball head may be too small for what you're doing um but it probably could hold on to those cameras um but you want to uh be thinking about those types of it's that type of arm that comes out with a ball head Mount um to make that work Mitchell you could also get some purchase with a very pole which will allow you to stick the uh the pole at whatever angle or close to the wall wherever you have to have it and then a super clamp with the aforementioned ball head to keep the camera so you can move it around but sometimes if you're in an apartment or a place where you can't uh penetrate the walls uh that would be a all alternative that's what I did here except I did it horizontally uh Courtney yeah that was kind of what I going to suggest like a VAR pole vertically and then get you one of these Vasa mounts that designed for mounting a monitor and replace the end of it here with a uh uh with a mount that ball head that the camera could go on that might be a solution for you too that has an arm that you could swing out and so you could change the angle a little bit without having to move the vertical pole this is why I think everybody here on the panel probably has a couple of boxes full of grip gear Parts you go I need to put something on the wall and you reach in and you look for some sort of wall mount plate or cheese plate or something that you can start with and then adapt to most anything uh that stuff just seems to grow as you go through your career let's go to our next question next up is Douglas carmichel mix Halo and El Acoustics partner has released AI based tools that stream real-time interpretation through the user's device at a live event what does this mean for interpreters in the future Alex what do you think this is a pretty interesting pivot so mix Halo has has been out for a while and what they did is they were trying to build immersive experiences the reason that they're partners with El acoustic is they're building immersive experiences to your mobile phone so they're really working on very very low latency delivery of music so they could be at a venue and hear better music than what's at the venue which is often and so uh so anyway so but it kind of you know a lot of us looked at it going well the one time the one reason you go to The Venue is to hear it with everybody else to hear people around you I'm not sure that this is going to work so a lot of us looked at this when it came out and were kind of Uncertain they've now pivoted to something going on that's a actually pretty good idea which is the idea that you could you could um you know they're using they're being able to deliver real-time interpretation I believe this is all going to be AI driven interpretation that's going that that you're going to be able to listen to um in real time and pick anything I think that for on-site interpreters this is probably you know um the beginning of the end of being there um you know on-site interpretation is pretty hard to do well um and so I've done a fair bit of it you get six boxes or 12 boxes and you have you have to you know the politics of picking what languages you support and it's relatively expensive and people have to take breaks every 20 minutes and and there's just a lot of um you know things that you have to work through that are pretty heavy and I think that on-site interpretation uh is going to have a hard time uh I think that there's still high-end events that are going to use it but what you are going to see is that I think that with Technologies like this whether it's this one or not that you're going to see a point where most above average sized events will deliver to you 30 to 60 languages instantly um that you can listen to are will they be perfectly accurate No are the humans accurate No like you know so so that when we say oh it's not going to be that accurate uh the amount of time I've had to spend talking to clients about why interpreters can't be perfect every single time they're listening to Something in real time uh you know it it it happens I literally have to do a pre-build for the like basically set my clients up for the IDE for that process of there's going to be people that are upset about the the interpretation you need to know that they're going to come back and say this this word wasn't right and this phrase wasn't right and this changed the meaning of everything and that's just part of what that's part of the process so um so I think that you're going to see this kind of pickup speed uh it is very dependent on the quality of the audio so the AI is only as good as the audio so so this comes back to mics and this comes back to speakers and this comes back to those things as those things aren't as accurate or as good or there's too much Echo uh the quality drops pretty dramatically next question oh uh Courtney I'm sorry yeah I I took a look at the uh at the video a lot of the video that it's going to use uh uh AI to do the translation to text and then the text to voice and I would imagine the latency is going to be a little bit high on that because in in order for AI to do a good translation and AI can do really much more accurate translation because it can look at the stuff in context and use that large language you know model to get the right word and the right tense of the verb and so on in after it sees the whole sentence uh because it goes back and it changes the sentence after it understands oh I use the wrong word here so let me go back and fix that and it goes back and fixes that however that increases the latency and you don't want to have that translated immediately into audio because it'll be changing constantly and it'll be impossible to understand so you have to have some built-in latency there for the AI to a finish the sentence and get it right because a lot of languages like Spanish have uh you know uh gender specific verbs and so if you don't know you're talking about a woman or a man until you get the get the pronoun well she said you know oh were talking about a woman Sammy was a woman oh okay uh then you have to go back and change the tense of the verbs to get it correct that's why a lot of uh translators as well as as uh automated translation gets it wrong on the first try but once you have the whole context there it can go back and correct but uh and this of course then generates it you choose your language and then it transmits on a little phone app so the people have their phones and so they can follow along in the language of their choice on their phones but I imagine I don't think they said what the latency is I didn't get a chance to watch the whole video uh so iag ime it's a number of seconds late uh to get that translation so if you're watching live it may be a little disconcerting because the person you're watching may have moved on to the next subject so how about the time you hear what they're saying Alex I'm not clear that the AI will be any low slower than a human I mean typically we expect the the translator to be 3 to six seconds behind the what they're saying anyway so I think that um I I don't think that the I don't know if the translation will have any be any slower in fact it has to go to text and then to the text to speech the text to speech will be instant and the text the the speech to text will be almost instant I don't think that I think if you give it a a three to four second window it can do all of that pretty quickly so I I don't know if uh I I just don't I'm not clear that it'll be any slower than humans and I think that the problem is is that it will then speed up you know like that's that's the thing that it typically you know once it gets to a point where it's the same speed as humans and and again when when anything we do we we just have to look at this new realm as uh anything that you are doing that you feel like is boring don't worry you won't be doing it for much longer you know anything that is repetitive and mechanical and doesn't you know um that doesn't require you to keep growing uh is most likely going to be replaced by a machine you know and so we have to kind of keep that in the back of our head is that you know you have to be always the the lesson for us is always to be moving forward you got to keep moving forward because the you know anything that becomes something I can just go and I can dial it in or call it in probably not going to be there much longer so that's the thing we have to kind of keep in the back of our head I was just having fun last night I was um about to go to sleep and I was watching something I think whether they were Tik Tok videos or or shorts or something and it was fun because I had a lot of content coming in that was captioned by the producers and I also had the auto I think it was YouTube captioning on and it was just so much fun to see how YouTube Compared to What the actual text was because there were a lot of very amusing errors well understood and I think that when you have time to go back and work on it a lot of us like even some of the stuff that I've been playing with with Opus I go back and fix words and fix phrases and fix things like that and that's the case if you have any anybody do it that they have time to stop and do that I think that where the there's a lot of opportunity for the AI to do well is the things that are done in real time because it will be able to get up to that speed and you know right now uh that you know it it will be able to do it as fast as a human and as well as a human at speed in the next two or three years so that's the thing we have to kind of get our head around let's go to the next question Paul Wallace from Starling Plaza Texas D preview uh DP Review bit the dust or did it what news sources are focused like a laser beam on the topics of interest to folks in office hours I'm talking lighting audio video stream and the stuff we talk about every day Alex what do you think I have to admit that there's not a lot of places I mean most of what I most of what the new information that I gather is mostly from this organization so from this show uh so most of my information is from people asking questions and me going oh that's a good idea that's something I should look at so if you're a producer when you actually ask questions here uh you're kind of pointing us towards things that we should do further research on uh I haven't you know I with DPP review I think the problem that they had partially was that people like me would scan through for certain things but very rarely read all of it um I think there was a little bit there for everybody but I think it was hard to um and it wasn't something that I was regularly going to um and I think that you know part of that is is that the camera Market has become you know less vibrant um and so I think that that's the um so I think that that's that those those are some of the challenges there um I I have to admit that I mostly the things that I read every day are either you know I Flipboard and and um Apple news I go to Tech meme uh there's a couple CEOs that you know that I know that I've worked with that they live by Tech mem and I didn't even know what it was um but it's kind of gives you kind of what's going on in Tech at least um and then uh and then a lot of it's you know things that get posted on Twitter or LinkedIn I have a pretty large Network in LinkedIn so people will post things and I'll and I'll go oh I should check that out and that that type of thing but that's those are the those are the my major sources Courtney yeah DP Review used to do some really in-depth comparisons of all the specifications of cameras or whatever they were reviewing uh to like the last version or other other competitors that are in the same PL uh price class uh these days you know I've always liked Curtis Jud does good reviews of audio video equipment uh uh and good comparisons against uh you know he'll he'll put one audio recording device up against another and let you compare them side by side uh which is a good way to compare them um potato jet for cameras most of these YouTube influencers are a little a lot more superficial you know they'll talk about the you know they'll shoot they'll show some examples of what it did good and what it did bad but they won't get too heavily into the uh technical specifications of it so if you want a complete review with all the text specs you're probably just going to have to go to the manufacturers websites these days which usually have a pretty comprehensive list of technical specifications let's go to the next question David Brady in New York New York asked 2110 and Blackmagic design they have conversion and capture when can we expect 2110 capable switchers Vision mixers Alex what do you think we every neb we're going to go well is this the year is this the year we're getting I mean they now are releasing switchers with ethernet Jacks so it feels like you're you may already have some 2110 switchers that you just don't know that they can do 2110 yet so that might be that's my guess is that they may already some of these may be able to be upgraded in a firmware to to go to that um I do think that I I always felt like the reason that black magic wasn't really investing in um they weren't really investing in SDI routers they they finally did an 80 by 80 router but they weren't really investing in because I felt like they were just knew that they were going to go to ethernet and then they why why bother keep going down this path um but it I think it's been a little bit tricky for them to get through that I do think that most likely you'll see a a heavier push into 2110 from Black Magic this year or next year um I'm not sure if it'll be this year but I think it'll be one of these two years I think that that's the probably the trajectory of their Hardware Courtney well maybe on their constellation their higher-end switchers you may see it you know all of our switchers have ethernet jacks on them right now Alex but they're not used for input they're used for output and control mainly uh but 2110 is a fairly complex protocol and it requires some pretty good infrastructure to handle it deal with it and uh you know I think uh a Tim really is looking more for the bottom end of the professional market and the top end of the consumer market so I I don't think 201110 is going to make a very big push into that prosumer market anytime soon uh so I I put it a little further off into the future uh Mitchell what kind of uh infrastructure Courtney would that require as far as the switch goes is this more than one gigabyte certainly got to be much more much more at least 10 gig at least 10 really 40 or or 100 Gig you know connections are really what you're looking for next question Rosco Jones from Madison Indiana if AI is going to do all kinds of metadata tagging of video clips wouldn't Final Cut Pro with its Advanced tagging features be the best nle for all this new AI metadata Alex what do you think I think probably out of the gate Final Cut is probably one of the best to manage metadata it's it's been built around that for from day one well day two you know the the when they move to Final Cut 10 uh when they shifted over they really built it around uh databases and d and metadata and so uh it definitely is going to do this very well I think that there's a lot of work that adobe and Blackmagic are doing with their products uh to really take advantage of metadata and tagging and so on so forth so I I don't know if if if Final Cut has any lead here I think that it's only short-lived um because I think that the the two will are spending probably what it feels like more effort on some of the AI Solutions than than Apple is at the moment but we you know it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next year Mitchell yeah that sound you hear are all the tech buffins uh out there typing away uh with the programming to do that to all the uh editing programs but somehow I feel that Avid will be the last to do it I don't doubt that and and and when as we talk about this because I think part of what brought this up of course is is strata Tech you know that we had Michael Chon on last week a reminder 9:00 today is when I think he's releasing the new video about all the things that strata does and it's a really exciting uh really exciting show you last week and since I've been there since the very first day of Final Cut in the new I will say this it's interesting Final Cut does have the capabilities because it has an internal SQL light database that is tied to its tagging and um its entire editorial system and it's really truly interwoven in there it is surprising that they don't expose as much of that database to the user as a lot of us think that they might have been able to it may have been a really smart thing because that gets really confusing if you start trying to have other things talk into a visual database as Final Cut has implemented so it's going to be interesting to me to see how they iterate um you know they're moving many more things into the cloud and the fact that they've had this database structure since literally day one of Final Cut Pro 10 at the time um they certainly have plenty of expertise in it whether they migrate to a different Foundation rather than the SQL light database that's in there now or they just continue to expand hooks into it as they move into 3D Envision and everything else it's going to be a fascinating thing to watch they certainly have the talent to make it more inter active that's kind of an interactive database it does some of that but it's not full scale and I'd be really interesting to see how they're going with the other programs I think they're all thinking about what databases maybe a little bit used to be and I haven't seen any of them take the kind of leap that Final Cut did with uh user tagging user generated metadata as opposed to imported metadata or metadata created by AI inside the program those are just my thoughts about we'll see how it goes going to the next question Danny Grizzle from long viw Texas yesterday just as Alex was throwing shade on classroom lectures being repurposed as online content EpiPen introduced their new Appliance the Pearl Nexus uh optimized for that exact purpose what are your comments Alex what do you think yeah epan um is um is the company that that released that and so I what I'm going to say I'm not saying that repurposing classrooms and talking on stages is a not a business I think that epan is probably going down a business that makes sense I think that there's probably lots of legs in it over the next 5 to 10 years I just that I what I was saying yesterday is that we should back up every once in a while and ask should we do this not that people aren't doing it not that the conventional wisdom is that we do it because what happen happens is when you constantly are doing something that is probably not the future and what people don't really want it creates a uh position of fragility where things will shift very quickly if you look at like what is disruption disruption is often times people have gone out on a ledge of things that people don't really want and then suddenly that collapses because somebody figures out how to drop a pin somewhere in that ledge you know and and just pull and and everything every and that's why when you want like how did something happen so suddenly how did this all move how did this all just shift over it's because it was getting brittle and someone took advantage of the of the brittleness and so what what I'm what I'm pointing towards is the brittleness is this idea that we have to give lectures you know in in a you know in front of a classroom or stand up on a stage and release a product instead of making a video epan didn't even do that like epan did it in his full Studio so my point exactly so so the um so I if they really wanted to show the product off they should stand up in front of a in front of a classroom and show the epan doing it it would be you know why they didn't do that is because it wouldn't be very good and so the thing is is that uh so I think that they the Pearl Nexus is a great product and it's going to sell a lot of lot of things to people that are in the past and but it is the past and we just need to know that that we as media producers want to constantly be getting ready knowing past still exists in the present but there's a future coming where we stop doing this you know and and it is going to arrive like I I am now clear as you start to see what Apple's doing as you start to see more schools going online as you start to see all these things people are going to stop doing these classroom records and they're going to start the teachers are going to sit down and go well how do we do this in a more effective way and that you know because really what we're doing here is experimenting with that and what I mean by that is and we're we're going to you're going to see us do more experimentation in this area what classrooms really should look like in my opinion and what I think we're going to end up going towards is we're going to have teachers or companies releasing videos for everyone to watch putting out a video that everyone can can see a week before or days before or hours before let people watch them and then discuss it with them do Q&A open Q&A like office hours and have that and that's going to be a much more interactive because the conversation will better if people have time to look at it so like you know and and so people see the video and can think about it and discuss it and then come and talk about it that conversation better and much more interesting to sit in and there's a better reason for everyone to be in one place at one time like like what we do here and so so I think that that is a a glimpse of the future um I don't think we're there yet but I think that's where we're going Mitchell uh first of all Alex thanks for correcting my pronunciation epan Epiphany I maybe had an epiphany when I saw it but um the fact that the device can record and can schedule and play back a meeting uh was a bit of an eye opener for me because I don't do that every day like you do so it seems to me that having a appliance that can do all of that for you does have some kind of connection to some people that are sort of maybe in the entry level well it's again it's it's really for a school that has you know 300 classrooms this is great you can put it in the back of it it just a automatically records the class it puts it up it's just that I've spent a lot of time being excited that Yale or Berkeley or others or MIT will put their classroom classes up and then I open those and I sit for about five minutes and I'm like it is a you know it's a basically a way to get through insomnia like you know like because you just get you get up there and I literally have a narcoleptic reaction to classroom videos so I think for me it's a you know like I can't watch them more than five minutes before my eyes just start drooping you know um and it then they're so static and so you know because this is solving the record problem it's not solving the camera problem which is this big wide camera and nothing's really there it's just and and it has some features that'll put this up and I know that there's a bunch of people in education and other people watching this they going to be very up in arms about what I'm saying but I'm just telling you that it's going to get replaced because it's just it is not a compelling experience and people are used to the abuse but that doesn't mean that they're going to keep on doing it if something comes out better and this is where we see disruption I'm just going to put the pin in the ground you're going to see this get disrupted in you know 5 or 10 years within the next 5 or 10 years you're going to see this disrupted because this is not a stable place to stand it's good for right now and you can make money with it right now and I'm sure um epan will do well right now but you do not want to be standing on this this this ledge you know five or 10 years from now because someone is going to disrupt it and then it's just going to this is when when you see something in the world just disappear it disappears because no one really liked it anyway way and then they and then they they were given another option and they all stampeded to that other option interesting discussion and for me the one thing that I've been thinking about what you've been talking about this because I believe in most of what you're saying but for me the the challenge is I come out of marketing and advertising and that was a process of trying to gather an audience so that you could affect them classrooms also have done that it it you telling people everybody come here at this time and here's the topic and here's what we're going to be dealing with as this training um online education as everything becomes more and more diffuse so there's not that Gathering of people at the beginning then all of a sudden I think marketing for Education changes a lot and it it's I I'm trying to think what's going to replace that how are you going to figure out I guess it's social media and all the rest of the things we're dealing with now I will argue that it's it's more of the kind of thing that we're doing here it won't be exactly what we're doing here but more of of companies being available like why did I get the idea of calling this office hours because Google does this Google does thing called office hours where their their developers will jump will will jump on a live stream you know once a week and answer questions about their products you know and I think that more companies need to do that more companies need to think about how do we engage our our audience not every once in a while when they want to do a release but every single day or every week or every month hey we have people here that are available to answer your questions you know and I think that that is a um and interact with you and and and having you know we have the tools now to do that we didn't have the you know we have to remember we have to look at everything through the lens of we created this uh based on the limitations that we had at the moment we created it so when lectures were created the Romans uh didn't have video like you know like so so the you know in the Greeks didn't have videos so they stood up in front of a a bunch of people and said something and we didn't really have the video and the access to the tools until the last 10 years but we've got 3,000 years of of weight kind of just of inertia kind of going down this this area but it is we have new tools you know and and again this is a a perfect example of a faster horse when we're what what what I'm saying is there's a car coming like you may not want to get hit by it but there's a car coming and when we talk about making lectures better we're talking about a faster horse not a car you know and so the thing is is that that is the you know like and we're we're going to keep on you know horses were great for 3,000 years and then in 10 years we use them for fun you know like you know and and so and so the thing is is that and that was back in the day when things didn't move nearly as fast you know and so the thing is is that we now are in a world where when the technology gets to a place where it supports this kind of conversation that we're doing here it supports the we already have a lot of the video distribution all of those things we're going to people are going to start realizing that oh this is way more you have a much better conversation if you give people the videos Marquez brownley released a a you know a video about the headset about the new Apple Vision um Pro he got I don't know I don't last night when I went to bed it was 5 million views five million people watched it if he and Justine and and a couple other people did a round table like what we're doing here and said hey we're doing a round table we'll take your questions there' be a lot of people there there would be you know it'd be a million concurrent views of people if they had said we're going to release our videos if they release their videos on Thursday and said on Friday we're going to do a or release their videos on Tuesday or whatever when they release them and then on Friday said we're all going to sit around and do a round table with Justine ezarik and Marquez brownley and a couple other a couple other people there'd be a million concurrent views there with people asking questions you know about that about that Pro that process you know and and so it's not that it can't be done it's just that people don't know how to do it you know I watched somebody there was a cooking company that was doing a live stream yesterday you know live streaming is hard so the reason that it hasn't taken off for a lot of companies is that they screw it up a lot like so I watch someone who's a pretty big brand you know put together a pretty roughl looking live video you know live event you know and um and so I think that uh you know I think that that's the sorry courney post the only my my only concern is that that works for the big names and stuff like that but what about Jane at James sprockets who wants you know is is the model okay for Jane too how that group it works way better for J yeah yeah CU how does she find out of those billion websites out there how does she drive people to get her message to get the interactivity going so number one is when you look at first of all take a look at what YouTubers do um YouTubers are you know they do things they know that the first hundred will be not watched you know so someone has to be ready to to do things over and over and over again um to to build up where they where where they're looking for it the second thing is is that there is things like Google AdWords and and Facebook you know advertising and those are very effective so effective that they are you know people that we just had a congressional you know meeting about them yesterday so these these ad these ad tools are not are people aren't upset about them because they're not effective they're they're extremely effective so you know so you're going to have marketing that that pushes people towards that that um that process but the main thing is don't Market it you know there's that the thing from Joe Versus volcano that I repeat over and over again you know I know you can get the job but can you do the job and so make sure that you can put together a great live stream before like we didn't publish office hours until I felt like to YouTube until I felt like we were minimally viable like the first 6 months of office hours sat in a you know we just we don't put those anywhere because we were still figuring our our way out and even then we were you know we were just willing to put it on and we weren't promoting it now we're starting to promote that you're seeing shorts come out and other things because I feel like we've got a great you know a great looking product that that works fairly smoothly but you got to be careful about as a brand to put out things that aren't working um at the beginning and you have to work potentially with professionals like people in this group uh that will help you get make something look tight um or Tish it doesn't have to be conversation doesn't if you're answering people's questions you don't have to be nearly as tight as if you're doing a show so the video that you build and and again the the the reference is our YouTubers look at how many YouTubers are doing something that is relatively simple they've got one camera they've got a microphone they're recording these things they're doing Simple animations things that they could do in keynote they're doing all these things and that's what companies need to think about when they're talking about their products um because there is no Center like we just talked about DP Review and so I think that it's really really important that it's a great question but I think it's really important for us as media developers to realize there's this whole world that's coming that's available to us and it's part of why this show exists is to prepare everybody for what is coming you know and and that is going to be a huge amount of more more video um mixed with conversations and Q&A and and and communities but you know companies are really far behind in this area right now but they won't be forever interesting discussion let's go to the next question Andy korer from via Florida will office hours explore streaming beyond the YouTube uh we find LinkedIn quite fruitful last week's Mozilla two-person live panel added 4,300 views Alex what's the state of our distribution uh I I actually view LinkedIn as the most important but I have to do it to my own channel and so um part of it has been us making sure that the multi streaming stuff works we found we you know we did a couple tests we're do more next week um that the that the multicasting is working to YouTube um The Next Step will be Twitter um we'll probably add Facebook the last one will probably be linked in not because it doesn't matter but because it matters the most so we're so we're making sure that all the little bits and pieces of how we put this together that QR code that we work so hard on that we put up this little uh you know ask office hours. Global that that is all built for LinkedIn so so so so I totally agree with you um and you'll see us wrapping up to that but we should be starting to do a stream or two to LinkedIn uh per month uh by March so just keep your eyes on that but we're definitely focused on it because uh and and uh with all of these things when you see the streams just as you know just just to know if you're watching our shorts we have new shorts there's a shelf on our page that says shorts um if you go there if you see our um any post that we do on LinkedIn Twitter uh those shorts if you if you're willing to give them a thumbs up um because what it'll do is it'll help the algorithms um look at us and uh and we'll see if it if it gets out to more people next question Douglas carmichel coming in with a question I've heard that many broadcasters and Distributors Discovery and Netflix for example have specific approved cameras you must use when producing content for them how rigidly do they enforce that requirement Courtney start us off well every year Netflix uh publishes uh you know does a survey of the cameras that are out there and they publish a list and they expend a lot of money creating test footage uh from the cameras that they approve on their approved list and uh the reason they do it is for especially for dramatic they have a little more leeway this is their list you can find it online uh and they insist that at least 90% if its dramatic film be captured with their approved list and they have their uh approved uh requirements for the cameras that are on that list with resolution the code CC the bit depth the data rate the color space the transfer function they also have to support time code and there these cameras Airy Canon Panasonic red Panavision Sony and black magic are the current leaders on the list are ones that are primarily on the list and they say that 90% of the runtime of the footage used in your production if it's a dramatic production uh need to be meet those requirements and it's to give a uniform uh a uniform look to you know they don't want stuff that is uh far below the viewing quality of their Channel because they don't want it to reflect badly on their Channel there are exceptions to this of course if you're doing documentary work because that could include you know Library footage or footage shot on camcorders Etc from the 60s so and it is amazing if you do get a chance to go it's kind of boring but you they do uh release a um a cinema quality release DCI of the camera tests where they test all of these cameras in low light highlight moving all types of dramatic situations all type of lighting situations and you can compare them each one of them side by side and it's quite interesting if you can get to a screening of one of those in a theater Mitchell yeah it's all about quality and um Netflix has decided for example that they're going to decide what that quality is I would think that a uh aspiring DP might pay attention to it but an EST lished DP may have their own way of getting things done and uh that sort of concerns me just a little bit that they have to be the taste uh Masters uh when it comes to that but uh as far as how rigidly they enforce that I mean what does Discovery do when they have to use a stunt camera uh inside a car shooting something appar they have to break their own rules that's where the 90% comes in yeah said you can do you know the the stunt camera is usually much less than 90% of that footage and so you can put whatever you want in there and even now I talked to my brother about this and he's like oh those black magic cameras make great stunt cameras so they they're already kind of revving up there uh I think that any if you look at the guidelines that Netflix provides any established DP is already using those cameras like they're not this is not a they're you know they're not trying to they're not very stodgy about this they're pretty aggressive about making sure that there's enough cameras in there what I will is also say is that if you go up to Netflix and you Netflix Imaging or Netflix cameras and you do a search and you get to this partner help center um that Netflix has this is the most current and the most thorough explanation of production processes on the internet like it is a extreme it's a Tome of how to do sound and how to do post and how to do and all these other things it's not it's not going to tell you step by- step how to do it but the guidelines there if you are trying to figure out how to do your own production and you want to figure out how do you level up into something professional the explanations here are amazing and there is a team that works on that constantly you know and it is um it it blows my mind I sometimes will just go in there and just like try to be I just want to be smarter for today and I'll just read some of the Netflix stuff and and the breakdowns that they have at almost every level of Film Production is truly amazing and I would highly recommend um you know perusing that that web page I will also say that standards are removing Target I've been delivering why it's on a web page and not a book like it changes all the time it changes it I would say that the Netflix um changes as fast as it should like it doesn't it it's not you know it's not uh it doesn't take every whim that comes by and says oh yeah yeah we'll put that in so it's but it is it is a constantly moving Target as you said and it is constantly uh this is constantly updating and it's it's a pretty amazing resource and my anecdote was that I've been delivering into Hulu for one of my clients for about four years now and now Hulu's been absorbed by Disney plus and sure enough the next time I use the same recipe and delivered into them I got a failure and I had to go back and it's because they're increasing their standard requirements and Disney has more rigid standards than Hulu did before Disney so that's where this is coming from big companies coming from small companies this you just have to be agile about this because it's changing real fast next question Robin cutof from Atlanta Georgia do you use an electronic to-do list and a suggestion for one that shares between Mac and iOS CJ this wasn't always the case but Apple reminders has gotten a lot a lot better for iOS I mean that's on the right here uh it's got crossplatform or it's not crossplatform but cross device syncing via iCloud you can embed images you can put in checklists uh it's really really nice if you're finding yourself bumping up the Ed against the edges of that a lot of folks the next will graduate over to an app called things from a company called cultured code they've won a couple Apple Design Awards and it's it's really beautifully designed but it's going to get expensive it's 10 bucks for your IOS app 50 bucks for your Mac app and then if you want an iPad app it's another 20 so you're into it for 80 bucks if you need all three and at that level you're getting uh into omn Focus uh omn focus is 75 bucks uh for the regular 150 for the pro that would be the next Stone I would turn and then honorable mention to clear clear is a free app that is really beautifully designed and for a simple to-do list app I don't think you can ask for more Alex yeah I have an app that I use that it's pretty great you can um the app will allow you to put it on every computer every every Apple computer so it's iOS iPad OS uh it works on my Mac it works it works everywhere in fact I I hear that they already have a release for it that's going to work on the Vision Pro um that's there and it it lets you do to-do lists it let you keep notes you can even draw in it and drop photos in if you if you drop a photo in it will actually identify what's in the photo you can have it say like what is this plant and drop it right in and it'll figure it out it's an amazing app and it's called notes so in iOS and Mac OS it's everywhere on the Apple it's everywh the thing is an as an Apple user I I always look at at these to-do lists I'm like really because I take like for instance if I'm going if I'm going to thek market I'll send my a notes list and I just say make this a checklist and and then my I send it to my my wife and she'll sit there and update it and put things in I just keep on looking at the notes now there's some apps that do that really well for going shopping but but what I will say is that I every meeting that I have with a client I put at the very top this is the client this is the subject of the meeting and this is the date year month day and the time so I know I can relate it back to the meeting that I had in my IAL so that's the first line and I can see those and then I just start writing whatever I want to write while I'm talking to them so that but I can always find it and I I mean I've been doing this for so long that there's a huge you know world that I've you know and I and I know that there's other apps that do it and it's all the apps that CJ suggested are excellent um but I I will say that for me just knowing that I can just put it everywhere and I I live in a mostly as most people know a mostly Apple world I do use PCS and Linux as appliances but I don't really use them as a work product so so for me you know having something that's just that the operating system makes a lot of sense Courtney I use uh Google Calendar because it is crossplatform and you can create multiple Calenders then I just turn on notifications and so I'll get a notification either via email or via my Google home uh sitting over my shoulder back here that will tell me uh I've got something coming up so Google Calendar allows you to schedule your whole day and put anything that's pertinent in there for you you can have multiple calendars on there and you can share like I have a work calend calendar and a personal calendar and I'll share the work calendar with employees so they know what's going on at work every day without exposing my personal calendar to them and so you can uh each person can turn on notifications and have a notification show up on their phone or uh if they have a home assistant or something it'll light up showing that there's something coming up and you can tell it how far ahead of time you want to be notified either via text message or via email um so it's very handy in that respect it's crossplatform works on everything uh Android iOS um you know PC and Mac CJ it's free sorry the the the delineation for me is notes I look at almost as like a a person a PKM or a personal knowledge manager where this is like my this is my diary of everything that I've done and everything that I need to do and details that I need to be able to search and remember when it's a uh something where I need to be reminded at a time or need to be minded at a location that's when I'll graduate to those other things but even though I mentioned all these to-do list apps I personally don't uh thrive in to-do lists and task Focus things I kind of look at more Project based stuff so that's where I I find myself leaning on notes a lot too Mitchell uh if you're a technical leite like I am you use Outlook I that that's been around forever and so uh lots of possibilities for you Robin hope you got the answer you're looking before let's go to the next question Rosco Jones from Madison Indiana does each camera lens have its own unique properties that need to be replicated in The Vision Pro for believable results Alex absolutely yeah so camera Distortion is a big problem and it's it's been something that we've been calculating for for decades so basically what happens is each lens it's usually not it can technically be that lens that has a problem for some of these high-end lenses but typically it's the make a certain make of a lens is going to it's not just that there's a field of view for it it is that it is slightly bending everything very very slightly bending everything just a little bit this camera Distortion and so what we do is we um uh we will put charts up in front of it to measure these big grids that we use to measure what that Distortion is and there's two pieces of that one is Distortion the other one by by the way is chromatic apparation and we see both of those things in these lenses and so we're measuring for those things so that we can add them back to the SE G objects and one of the things that when you look at a lower budget film that doesn't have that and you think oh it doesn't look you know it just doesn't it doesn't quite look right um a lot of that comes down to lens Distortion and there's a lot of other reasons for it but lens Distortion is part of that you can't just put an object in there and expect it to match correctly if you don't if you don't calculate for that lens Distortion so um so it is really important and it's kind of amazing that they're releasing it the reason they're probably doing this is because of course virtual production is a big deal for them um and what's holding people back sometimes is they don't know how to do this lens Distortion calculation they have to do it for all of what they do and so they're putting this out of something that they've already they already had to Water's under the bridge as far as what they spent money on they had to do it for what they do and they might as well release it because in any company what you'll look for is what they what's holding them back and not something that generates revenue for them they're going to try to commoditize and what they what makes them different they're going to try to control and in this case what's holding them back is people not being able to do this well so they're releasing it I think it's a genius move next question next one in for Andy korfer from viea Florida DJI launched modifi 3D editing platform creating of models from flight data thoughts that's interesting Alex what do you think it's pretty amazing so if you watch the video what it shows is the that you know you can have a bunch of cars for instance they showed this example where you have a bunch of cars on the ground and they can you can select them and say flatten that and and it flattens those cars so what it's doing is it's calculating what's sticking out from the ground so it says I I I can see a plane that is the the the road and I'm going to flatten the cars against it and then you then it has 2D editing tools so that you can go in and remove all the cars and have it seamlessly you know remove all of those things and what this is great for for a From dji's perspective is being able to clean up uh a lot of drone shots so that you have kind of an empty space um to look at without all the junk that was there in real time and so I think it's going to it's pretty interesting and it and you know we have these things in scanning already where we can remove all the trees and remove all the things it's it's it can calculate these things so it's not brand new but it's really well implemented next question talik Lopez Waterman in Sarasota Florida in the past I've noticed on conversations with Tony Moy that if I post a bunch of shorts on the same subject in a row that only the first short gets a large number of views do you think this is a coincidence or because of the algorithm Alex I would keep on doing it or watching it I mean I'm just getting started so I don't have an answer for that because I've been just loading them all up as one big chunk and going hey let's see what happens here I have not found that it's the first one like it is definitely ones that are random I can't quite I'm still calculating what is the thing that causes certain ones to take off I had there was one that I thought was almost a throwaway from yesterday or from uh last week or whatever that I posted and or maybe it was yesterday um that I posted posted that took off and had 3,000 views and there's a whole bunch of them that are sitting at 30 or 40 views but it wasn't the order for whatever reason that one you know hooked into the algorithm and and took off and so I don't think that it it it is uh I don't think it's related to what order I'm not even sure if it's related to how many I think it's just what the algorithm grabs on to and thinks that is going to go somewhere I did notice the one that did really well had a really short title so so I think that those you know but I don't know you know like again all of these things are you know I have to you know and and again I think that um we can help each other by going to some of these shorts and and uh voting on voting on them because I think that it doesn't take very much for the algorithm to decide oh I should give this to more people and see what they do so um so please do that with ours and with Tony's how short was the title is it down to like the board rules of seven words three words yeah it was like three a lot of them are been longer because I've been trying to put metadata into them you know that hey this is like one of the reasons I really want to get strata out today was because strata is doing a launch so the bunch be searching for it so I wanted to have the the and and I think that Michael some of Michael's little Clips were really useful and I think it'll help them as well as us and so I want to make sure that um it was out there and so we'll see we'll see what happens over the next couple days nice next question Chris Weidner from Indianapolis Indiana here's a question any chance of getting a big streamer on to talk about how they manage their live streams single person or minimal staff streams have some innov tools for stream management I'd love to hear about their use cases Alex yes I'm I quite didn't quite single minimal staff have so he just wants maybe us as a have a guest somebody who does really big live streams the two things that that don't match up there for me was uh that I did what I didn't quite understand as you say a big live you know a big streamer to talk about their how they manage their live streams a single a minimal staff because that's those two things don't generally go together so if you're a big streamer you have a team that's putting on those streams you know I guess if you're you know that mean you if you're talking about twitch maybe um you know Gamers have a tendency to be kind of self-contained inside of OBS and do other things like that if you're talking about most things that are streamed if it's got a lot of viewers it's also got a relatively large crew um that's managing those things it's not really a one person if as soon as it gets past Gamers uh it moves away from that really fast interesting all right Courtney you wanted to have a thought I just gonna say maybe somebody like Aaron Peri who does a live stream a lot of stuff from his studio and does instructional stuff it's not a big super big stream but but uh he does live streams he images it all himself from his equipment there so maybe they're talking about somebody like that yeah next question Z stallsmith from shiaka New York what are some pros and cons of running a bit focused companion server on a Raspberry Pi 5 I don't use any of this and so uh no one has raised a hand on this I think this might be one of the questions you really want some good deep experiential knowledge here Alex do you have some thoughts on this yeah I Pro the only thing I'd be concerned about is whether it's underpowered or not to manage that um I think the Raspberry Pi probably can manage that but I think I'd be a little uh concerned uh about I I'd probably put a little bit more beef I'd probably move up to a melee to to do that there you go let's let's go to the next question Jeff VY from Henderson Texas what's your best guess on when the M3 chip will come to the Mac Studio Alex this year that's my best guess my best guess is this year will be released um if I'm going to be more precise but less accurate I would say uh June uh June the first week or second week of June is when you'll probably see the M3 come out on the pro and the studio so I'm going to lay that out as a more precise shot but a less accurate one the most accurate one but less precise this is a perfect lesson in precision versus accuracy but the is going to but the more accurate but less precise version is sometime this year but I would say probably the first between the 1 and the 15th of June is the most likely time you're going to see an M3 uh for Studio that's that's and I'm not making anything up like I have in inside information it's when wwc happens and usually wwc is where they've kind of started to they really have settled into showing pro products Apple does have a reputation for being a little bit good at security of product announc big deal for them well if if you know anybody there no one wants to know like no one wants to know anything like every everything that's in your head is a is a is uh liability yeah let's go to the next question Douglas carmichel many jurisdic jurisdictions uh require venue employees to have a crowd Management training planning and responding to emergencies in places of assembly anyone had experience with such a requirement Alex yeah it it it depends there's more requirements in certain countries like Australia has very heavy requirements probably the heaviest uh but you also see them in a variety of European best practices and in the UK the United States is pro is a little less stringent about the requirements that everybody has to prove that they did the training and take a little quiz and do all those little bits and pieces but it's definitely something that a lot of us pay attention to uh you do want to know what your points of egress are you do want to know uh how you're going to announce those things things um and both for your crew and for the audience I used to do a 5 to 10,000 person live event and uh I was chairman for a few years and had to run it and we had to have paid Security on site we had to have paid um police present literally sworn officers badged on site and we also had to have an EMS crew who was at the event and so those things in order to get our insurance certificates taken care of were all a a criteria for doing a large in-person event so if you don't do this uh talk to somebody who does do this and figure out what your legal responsibilities are and I do just beyond legal responsibilities um do think about what you're going to do with your crew I've worked on a lot of events where we the security is pretty high um and we talk about where everybody should go and usually we had a word you know or a phrase that would go out and that phrase you know we would we would not share with anyone I can say it now but but we don't use this word anymore but if you heard on the comms Super 64 Super 64 it meant everybody leaves like you know you literally there's a there's a place that you go and you know but if you heard that over the comms you know nobody says it you know and you it's a whispered you know thing but if you heard us say that over the comms it meant drop what you're doing don't ask what's happening and this is the door you go out of and usually our door was not where anybody else was going out of because we were worried about a secondary a secondary uh impact and so we would we would um everyone was going a different we would find a different door usually through the dock and um and we would um but that was going to be you know go quickly you know out of those things fortunately we never needed to use it but we we told people of what that was going to mean every single show that was that at that level Courtney yeah in public venues and even in a lot of production situations where you're just shooting on stage without the public present uh unions a lot of the unions require a fire safety officer to be employed uh be there for the entire Productions uh run of the production sometimes venues have uh will have a fire marshal that will show up once your production is in and and set up right before the audience comes in and we'll point out problems with Ingress and egress of like cables running across Pathways of exits and so on uh to make sure you're abiding by the rules uh but uh usually those uh on Productions usually the fire safety officer uh is just a retired fire person fireman or fir person and uh they get paid a large sum of money and a lot of people resent the fact that they have to hire one and have them standing around unfortunately but it's for this health and safety of of your crew let's go to the next question real quick it's from Zach stallsmith in shiaka New York I've got an Nvidia card that sends video signals to my monitors but is not seen in device manager and the Nvidia control says there is no card installed there may be a power issue with the pcie slot has anyone else seen this happen Mitchell well you're obviously talking Windows here because you're saying the words device manager if it doesn't show up in the device manager nothing's going to work U so the best thing I would do would be to go to the Nvidia site and make sure you have the latest drivers uh installed on your PC that's about all you can do and as far as the car the car could be bad um and I don't think that it needs the power assist in order to be seen uh in the system so I would go with the drivers first Courtney yeah I was wondering how it sends vide signals to your monitors but is not seen in the device manager and if it's not seen in the device manager it shouldn't be sending any signals to your monitors uh right then so I'm not sure how that's going on but as Mitch said just make sure you've got the right drivers loaded and that Windows recognizes it uh in the device manager refresh your device manager replug the card in see if you can get it to show up and go check the BIOS because sometimes it'll default to the internal uh you know onchip video generator as opposed to an external video card and that may be set in the Bios we have just enough time maybe to sneak in a quick answer to the next one so let's go to one more H it's from Rosco Jones in Madison Indiana PBS has posted its standards for generative AI that includes accuracy transparency and inclusiveness is this deserving of a deeper discussion I'm sure it is uh Alex what's what's your thought we're going to keep talking about it it's something that we're going to be uh discussing um a lot so uh so definitely uh you know I think that it definitely deserves us to keep on paying attention to it um but I think it fits into an overall view that we should have around you know what we trust in general uh when we watch the news and when we watch something online yeah we've always talked about this and I'm sure we will continue to talk about this as time goes on all right getting ready for our transition to the second hour uh a couple of announcements the Isadora lab with L Wilson Spearow happens 10:00 a.m. today 1 hour after after we're finished here an incredible opportunity to learn about Isidor for your own projects right after that lab so at 11:00 Oliver Briden boach is going to be chatting with Alex about mimo live in after hours so you want to get on to that if you're interested in mimo live um there's a new panelist meeting Saturday day after tomorrow so if you're interested in becoming a panelist at office hours this is the place for you to go and check it out we're also looking for volunteers if you're interested in NAB uh there will be an NAB Link in Discord under Alex's announcements for that that's coming up really quickly here we're interested in looking for panelists to be volunteers um we're now also publishing YouTube shorts as Alex mentioned earlier so uh go look for the office hour shelf look to vote on those we're really interested in what you're most curious about and how that affects things uh tomorrow also there is going to be uh a chance to get on the email list uh oops I'm running out of time so we'll be right back in just a second welcome back to office hours and today's second hour you know when I started in this business decades ago color manipulation was something only done in high-end facilities you fast forward today and it's become something nearly every content maker has to contend with at least at a very basic level and that's going to be our Focus for today because this is a very visual part of every production um I'm going to go through a few very basic about how I approach color in my own projects I'm also going to start with a couple of minutes on how I've come to view color manipulation in the modern era it doesn't mean the approach I take is the only one but it'll give you at least a basic kind of uh generic idea of how this kind of thing works the first thing I wanted to talk about was people because for me if I'm approaching a project the single most important thing that I see are the human beings that appear in your video if they look wrong for any reason you have to make them look right even in the earliest days I've had footage come in from the field that just it didn't match and different cameras look bad and if you don't at least get the basics done then people can see that and there's something goofy about that one of the things I learned really early is that the light that the camera sees is going to affect color balance of things so you've got a couple of pictures here obviously the color balance is very different one of them looks more natural at least compared to the top photo than the other one so the other one you know the one that looks a little uh a little more golden a little more warm might have been shot with a camera set for daylight balance and it was lit by tungsten or something like that these kind of things can happen a lot but you have to be careful because sometimes that same idea of something that looks a little different than you think it should be is actually something that the director wants to see there here here's a shot from the current very popular movie poor things and you can see that the director and the and the producers and everybody have decided they want a specific look that looks more like the first example which was wrong in terms of color balance for nature out in the field but is exactly right for what the the director wants to make happen in this let's talk about a couple of color correction tools that we'll be talking about today the first Luts Luts are an important part of this they are mathematical transform that takes what's coming out of the camera particularly if you shot in raw and gives it kind of a quick base grade to get you more what you're looking for another tool we talking about here I'm sure Scopes this is a tool that lets you rationally see exactly what your color looks like this particular one is a vector scope and we're anybody who knows how to read these knows that this is a shot of a color bar grid and when a color bar is shown on a VOR scope those little bright spots hit exactly in the middle of Target so that's one of the kinds of tools color correctors use but at the bottom line of everything is the human eye um and a trained human eye somebody who understands how to do color correction is always for everybody I've ever talked to the ultimate determinant of whether or not your color grading is working for you uh just a couple of suggestions the first thing um I've always approach this is as an editor I just want a decent base grade I want the first light look to be something that doesn't distract anybody who's going to be judging what I'm working on uh the next thing I do after that is I try to figure out what is my editorial color for me as an editor so that I can look at the shots that are coming in and at least see what's going on I'm hoping you can see that in that little two shot at the bottom the first one is kind of what comes out of the camera and as an editor I'm going can I really see the Expressions can I really see what the character is supposed to be emoting and if I can't it behooves me to get that shot pulled up out of too much Darkness so that at least I can make good judgments about performance and things like that and then the last stage in this process is looks and delivery color which can be a whole different thing this is where artists get involved before this we've been talking about the process of just making it work on set to get the get what you need into the camera eventually hopefully you're going to go to U somebody like Charles who has just showed up on the panel great to see you Charles he'll be I'm going to turn it over to here in just a second to give a couple of thoughts about where color is stuff to show TJ has stuff as well excellent we'll go to CJ next all right so let's do that let's uh dive out of my quick overview and uh Charles good to see you again I just wanted to say hello because we haven't seen you in a while we always look forward to seeing you when you get here he Che it's good to be back this should be fun excellent all right so CJ has put together some stuff for today so I'm gonna I'm going to head it in his Direction CJ take over yeah thanks very much uh so the what I'm going to be focusing on today is kind of the first step that bill talked about just getting around some of the basics of resolve and really uh the color correction part that's getting a balanced first image across multiple shots that within a the same scene that need to cut together uh once they're all at a at a Baseline that's when you can start to apply those creative looks uh and get to more of the narrative Vision as opposed to and that's color grading to me color correction is more of a technical job we're actually just doing the balancing so uh what I was able to bring up here is here is my resolve window so I've loaded some footage in that was shot uh just some second unit footage that was grabbed on an early morning in Florence Italy I thought if we're going to be doing Da Vinci we should be in Florence and uh but the footage is it's C3 00 footage from about 10 years ago so it's this was not shot in log so we're we're starting already with a little bit of a compressed color space but I might be trying to intercut this with log footage uh so the first thing that I do is I start to build a node tree where I'm getting all of my different footage into a color space before I dive into that uh I just want to point out the main areas that I'm going to be working today on the left here this is where I have my viewer where I'm seeing the grade that I'm doing this box here is my node tree that's where I'm doing all of my uh individual grades and then I'm paying particular attention every single time I touch something to the Scopes I have my Vector scope here that's telling me color my parade and my waveform which is just giving me overall levels and then the histogram and finally down here in the bottom left is where I'm going to be touching my primary color wheels that's what's going to allow me to adjust for exposure and for color balance to get all of these shots uh so they would cut together I did mention the the the first and the last thing that I'm doing in any of these shots when I'm building a node tree is I'm actually using a color space transform to get it from where it was shot uh to where I'm going to be working now if it's already in Rec 79 why am I taking it from RE 709 to Da Vinci wide gamut and da Vinci intermediate only to at the end go back to re 79 well that's because I the the D Vinci wgam and da Vinci intermediate are working color spaces if I'm trying to intercut this with footage that was shot in log log I want to make sure that all of my uh all of my grades as I'm going between the different shots are working uh within a similar color space so uh right off the bat first thing I'm going to do is look at exposure uh down here at the bottom zero is absolute black 100 is absolute white so generally the first thing that I'm doing is trying to make sure something's exposed correctly uh patients has appreciated I normally work work with a da Vinci resolve micro panel but for the sake of showing you all I made my mouse really big so so we could follow along uh but I'm just going to grab my gain and bring this up a little bit and then I notice that my blacks are a little crushed so we might adjust that later and again I'm just trying to make sure that I'm bringing what should be white up near 100 and then I'm bringing my Shadows down whoops bring my Shadows down to what should be zero one thing that if you're moving too quickly if you it's you can easily start making adjustments not in the in the appropriate node so if I have this color space transform node I shouldn't be doing anything else there the reason that we try to stay organized this way is as we're going in and out of projects over multiple days and multiple weeks it's easy to forget what you did where so whenever I'm adjusting this exposure I want to make sure that I'm adjusting that within my exposure node so uh the the gain here is what's touching my high end the lift is touch my low end and then the gamma that's my midtones and as I move that up and down it's going to affect the contrast of the shot and as a shot gets more contrast and I bring that gamma down the saturation also going to pop a little bit more uh the last thing that I wanted to mention that is a a strategy that everybody should use uh when you're cutting multiple shots within a within a scene like if you have a shot reverse shot every single time you have a lighting condition every single time you have a camera angle resolve has this great ability to take two clips and uh and add those clips into a group and then that'll when that allows you to make a group level adjustment so that all of the different uh so that all the exposure and the color adjustments that are going to be a baseline applied to the whole entire scene are done consistently from shot to shot in this particular case it's a single shot that there is just a happen to be a cut towards the end it's a sloppy edit but if there's all of a sudden a big flash right here when these cut from one to the other uh it's going to be pretty Jun Garing and ultimately the job of to me the job of uh of color correction and color grading is to be invisible I don't want people to know that I'm here I just want people to know that it looks good the second somebody says oh what did they do with the color there I think I've I've lost the ball game uh so I'll just do this one last time I'm not going to go through every single shot uh so let me go and grab my Shadows grab the highlights I actually of all of the shots that I had I like the white balance of this one but I noticed that when I bring the subject of these folks walking in this taxi cab up to where they're uh where I want them to be in my Scopes and look good to my eye I've really lost a lot of the detail here and one button that I find really useful that not a lot of people do is in your primary Wheels you can actually go from a regular color wheel to a log wheel and that's going to give you a more targeted approach so if I move my highlights up and down on a log wheel you'll notice that only the highlights are being affected it's a lot like when you're in Lightroom or photo photos and you make a Shadow adjustment or a highlight adjustment if you overdo it you can have a overly compressed image and when you get a big flat line like that I'm clipping artificially so I don't want to take all the shape out of that scope I'm just trying to bring back some of the shape of the clouds in that reflection if I do that same exact edit over here in primaries it's affecting a lot more than just those highlights and maybe it's not what I want uh the last uh kind of intro tool that I wanted to highlight though uh was taking advantage of your gallery if this is the overall look that I want for my scene right off the bat this shot is too yellow this shot is too blue this shot is too blue so I'm going to grab this say this is my hero frame grab that still and then right click on it over here and hit Play Still and now as I go over to the other shots I can move this back and forth and see how the Scopes react and this is where I'm going to rely on my Vector scope just based on the angle of that Vector scope I can see that if I move my temperature slider and I'll go over to balance to move my temperature slider watch as I move this to cool and to warm how that Vector scope reacts I'm not even looking at the image to start when I do this I'm just looking at that scope and you can see it get more orange and more blue what I had in my gallery still is uh is fixed so now if I make those overlap right about there now those two shots are going to cut better together and I've got myself to uh a nice Baseline the other thing that I do a lot just to keep sanity because your eyes will lie to you uh even when the Scopes will not your eyes a lie to you so besides having uh a 6500k uh B bias light in the room so that my eyes have a consistent white point the other thing I find myself doing a lot is there's a button on my uh resolve micro panel that is is disable grade or you can hit command D on the Mac command D will show me what my will disable just the node that I'm on so there is my grading adjustment there same thing with this shot uh if I look at my Vector scope I'm going to hop over to my balance node move that warmer and cooler and now this one is cutting together more nicely so without uh without having too heavy of a hand I can really start to make those cuts more seamless cuz not every piece of footage that you get is going to be perfectly shot not every piece of footage is going to have a have a gray card or have a color Checker that you can balance to and really uh all of those technical tools are great but how it looks and how it feels is is the ultimate master of all these things you need to make sure that that your that your Cuts aren't jarring and that everything feels natural as you're going through and you can get into tremendously more complex node trees but but in terms of just a quick demo this is the the big things to focus on watch your Scopes when you're touching anything when I'm touching the gain I'm watching how those colors move around like for example I'll give you one more uh color balance because I was playing with this last night and I really liked what it did oh I noticed I didn't build my node tree here so I can actually I'm gonna copy the node tree and all of the grades just by copying and pasting and then but I don't want all those individual adjustments I made I still want my color space transform on the in and on the out I'll just right click in here reset my node grades there and there to keep that consistent I'm going to do a quick exposure bring those Shadows down and then I'm going to do the same thing with the balance I want these to be of a similar temperature so I'm going to move that a little bit and I really like What's Done in this alley here with the reflected light but now my sky is way off it's all over the place so I'm actually going to pop back into my actually I'll make another node so I can right click and hit add serial node and all that's going to do is add one more step in sequence to my color correction uh so this node think of it it's it's first in first out so this feeds this feeds this you can make parallel nodes as well if you want multiple full nodes to affect at the same time but whatever I'm doing here was I'm it's a as a baseline is starting at the node before it and if I go back into log I'm bring those highlights down a little bit I can actually see that the sky isn't balanced right the if I'm reading this waveform scope I can see left to right in the image is represented on screen by how bright the things are and because I have three separate lines here my my my blue my green and my red channels aren't in balance and it's aren't white and because the reds are so much higher than the blues that's why I get this big yellow cast over here so now if I take my highlight slider and this is why I use a track ball because I find that I I need to understand okay if I need to bring the Reds down I'm going to pull it away from the Reds and towards the blue remember color is all relative so as you're as you're take as you're lowering the Reds you're increasing the blues and ultimately once I make these highlights line up if I just move this highlight slider around a little bit so now I've have got them pretty well balanced and I'm not even looking at the image here I'm looking at the Scopes I get the Scopes to where they think they look good and then I look back at the image and say okay does that make sense and as you do that over and over again slowly you get to the point where you really get scary good at uh being able to uh utilize those scope so now I've fixed that yellow cast that was here in my sky but I still have this beautiful light uh down here in the alley so now as I cut this together I will take my highlight away now and as these shots are cutting against one another I didn't do that one but now as these shots are cutting against one another they look a little better except now that I going through this one again I was like man that one's too warm maybe I'll replay my still but it's uh it's one of those processes that after you think you get where you need and you're happy with your image it pays dividends to walk away go outside take a walk take a breather come back to it and then try to look at it with fresh eyes and say okay what does this look like to me as new and then is there anything that's jarring and what do I need to adjust so that's just the that's a a real real low-level just here's how one approach to color balancing it's not the only approach but that's doing a color space transform building a node tree reading your scopes on playing with some of those rudimentary tools great job thank you I think as everybody who is watching this if you haven't done much color uh correction or balancing or even base grading on footage coming in you're starting to see how complex this can be and how much time and effort it takes to become really good at this it is time well spent because we're seeing more and more good quality footage out there and remember as you do projects everything you do is going to be compared against the standards that people are watching in content on the web and and TV and and in the movies and every place else so understanding these Basics very important Alex your turn yeah no I think I think that the the great work CJ like thank you so much for putting that together I think it's really important one of the things that CJ and I had talked about before the show um was the need to just see the basic process you know like this is how we kind of approach uh this um this the situation as we start to put that together um and so uh so that's a really good overview of how to get you know how to get into resolve and and see CJ had a lot more complicated things to do and I was like just keep it simple one one thing after another just just we just want to make sure that if someone watches that video they know at least where to start working with those nodes and I will say that anytime I I you know I don't know if anyone else in the panel does it any any other way but I will say that anytime I need Precision color you know resolve is where we typically go to to make that happen um we also have Charles Charles Klein here and I don't know if Charles wants to add any notes that from things that he saw there what's up Charles hello guys no I think CJ did a great job it is a very technical and long process to try and get especially when you get a lot of different types of footage and you're trying to get everything to work cohesively so not only when you're looking at it still but when it plays out what's the relationship what's the visual rhythm of these things playing together and sometimes you'll find that uh what look good in the still once you play it down it might not work as well with the previous or next shot right so there the work going back and forth as CJ said you have to get that feel so that it works as a cohesive thing so that you don't recognize that there was a colorist involved it's just a story that you're now becoming a part of yeah there's also in different parts of the production process as you're going through your workflow you don't need to be perfect in the early stages often I find just EX cable and I mentioned you know what my goal is for showing rough cuts to clients is just there's nothing overtly wrong that they can get stuck in and instead of talking about what I want them to talk in which is usually about whether the the piece is effective am I communicating correctly if they get stuck with an hour's discussion about why that shot didn't look right I'm off course and I'm not doing my best for them if I can get everything acceptable I know because I'm not a colorist I'm an editor that eventually everything I touch on these is often going to be extracted if it goes to somebody like Charles and they're going to be starting over from scratch and doing serious color work and serious color tools if that's the kind of project I'm working on and if it's going to go to a large audience sometimes I know just enough to be not so dangerous that for a corporate piece the The Limited skills I have are enough to get it done because not every project is going to go and be seen by a million eyeballs but you certainly want to understand how this works so that at the basic level you can know what are the basics I should get right at my level and when is it going to get Beyond me and if I really want superb results I need to call in somebody call in a CJ or or a Charles and and get my hands off of it because I'm not really that skilled uh CJ you had another comment to make and the other thing to keep in mind is that once you get a baseline Comfort level and resolve you don't have to get into a super complex node tree with parallel nodes and mixers and uh if you get just the just as a starting point hey what was my camera's when my camera shot like Blackmagic raw film Gen 5 when that gets converted over to the output color space Rec 709 or Rec 2020 um that's going to get you at a really good starting place that then you can work backwards and work on the individual shots and get them there the footage that I was using here wasn't shot and log and I know that you don't always have a choice right if you're just on the finishing end of things you kind of get whatever gets thrown at you and you and it's your job to make it look good um but if you're the one who's creating if you're the Creator and you are shooting a footage and you're comfortable with just some of the basic tools then you can start to take advantage of the the log footage or the raw footage out of your camera it's just like when you're if you're recording audio and you're recording 32-bit float it's because you want to be able to or you're shooting raw photography you want to be able to bring back those highlights bring back those Peaks and not get a bunch of digital noise and clipping uh so getting comfortable with these tools opens up a ton of opportunity for you to make really goodlook stuff yeah we also haven't talked about the fact that you know this has been around for such a long time and and most of the nlees now have the ability to work with various lots and so if you're working on a camera a whatever that is Blackmagic camera Airy camera whatever they could well be a l that has been pre-built that you can just toss on the raw footage from there and it'll get you pretty close that is not fully graded but it's going to help you get from something that's unwatchable to something watchable now if somebody brings a different camera shot or a different thing in tossing that same L designed for camera a onto camera B is not going to get you where you want to go and that's where those color transform the color space transforms become so valuable because if you have hey I'm starting with Airy footage and I'm in this shot and this you know the B camera was a red and the C camera was a was black magic getting all three of those into that da Vinci wide gamut and da Vinci intermediate means that all of your adjustments are working in the same space and they're going to be consistent across the different cameras and then at the end you color space transform them back into whatever your delivery format is so you so Da Vinci is really powerful in its ability to translate all of those disperate inputs into a standard that then you can make look good and then have good results on the out Charles you wanted to comment yeah so if you're working on a production and usually if it's a large production you usually have an a camera Master camera you might have like a b camera for b-roll but on other Productions you might have a lot of different cameras you have to join in and knowing what was captured since everything passed a sensor you're just applying math to the image like past the de Bayer you're applying math so really knowing where you're starting from and trying to get everything into a cohesive color space as CJ said is the first thing you should be doing if you're working with different um cams and footage uh it's where things can fall apart very quickly if you don't get that base substructure down into your working pipeline that's the first thing you should be doing and you are coming in over iPhone right the iPhone 15's now your insert camera with their log well and to that point there are tools like media info and others that you can drop a shot on it at least give you the basic metadata that's being carried by that shot so you know where that shot's starting Alex you had a note well and I guess would you would you say and this is for CJ or or Charles um the the the per shot is getting all the shots into the same place like getting you know the per shot Corrections get them all into the same place and then the grouped shots it's kind of like this is a scene that I wanted to look like a certain thing and then the overall is the overall show this is what I want it to feel like but you're you're kind of like but the first step with the those shots is not really as much getting them exactly what you want but really getting them all to look the same a Bine I I kind of look at it like a sandwich and and what I like about the group clips I I've uh I've brought in I brought in a different node tree now that's a little it's a little over the top but um what you have here on your group pre-cp this is adjustments that are made to the entire group before the per clip grade so this is where I can get my color space transform in I don't know if I do the CST out there but I get my color space transform in I get my exposure correction and my balance correction and that's going to be if if I have a similar lighting condition across the entire group this is going to get them to a baseline then I can get into all the individual clip stuff and then there's another layer group post clip and group post clip is where you can do those per scene grades uh to move them up and down so it's kind of then then at the very end you have your timeline level grades where whatever you put on this so if you had your if your entire uh show was on a sing was in a single color space or shot with a single camera you could do your color space transform here at the Timeline level or your lot here at the Timeline level so it was applied to everything across the board but the group grouping uh your shots is ex is you have a lot of flexibility in how you can go about it but it's an incredibly powerful tool one of the things that uh CJ put together actually and Charles you may actually like this that you may have seen it is this processor that um that he that he wrote with with with the help of of uh was it chat GPT CJ yeah CH GPT but what it does is it goes you can take a a whole project throw it into resolve and and just say give me the middle frame of every shot in this project whether it's a whole feature film or it's an individual one and make a poster out of it so here's a PO picture for each one of them and what what is when you talk about the these individual shots versus the group shots versus the overall shots uh you know what you can see is in given scenes what the what the colorist or the DP or a mixture of both have made decisions about of how this is going to look and but it's scen by scene you'll see these like the and and I think that the most um obvious one is the Matrix where you don't notice when you're watching the movie but everything's a little green when you're in The Matrix and everything is warm when you're out of the Matrix and you can see that very clearly on a poster you know a post poster of every frame you immediately see these trends that go through the entire um uh entire process but that that's kind of a great example of using Color to tell a story so we have some questions piling up so Mitch what do we got we're kicking it off with uh Dave Troutman from Edmonton Canada asking can someone elaborate on the relationship between color and mood in dramas and how are these established Alex start us off yeah I mean I think that a lot of times I think we don't think about how much much color makes a difference and and it really does inform us we make a lot of decisions about whether they're cool or warm um what the colors are in the scene but also the overall feel of the scene um definitely is affected by uh the overall color so you may decide you want the and and what's really interesting about color is that like environmental sounds color lives kind of in your subconscious in your lower brain which in some cases makes it even more powerful than what you're listening to so instead of um you know and and things that that work in your subconscious or in your you kind of a lower brain operation often have more impact on the person than the things that are happening on the surface and and they don't even see them happening and so as we go into those colors back and forth we really affecting something that they don't even have access to in real time as a viewer and so I think that it's that's what makes it super powerful Charles and one other thing that you have to take into um um account is that mood will slightly shift the color based on the culture and the region of the world that you are grading for like what will work for a European audience might not work in Asia so that's another level that you have to consider how they wish to be perceived in the mood that you're trying to portray but how are their skin tones being perceived and that's a very big thing more into Beauty and in the Drama World um where you really have to take into account what are the final deliverables if it's going to be in the states is it going to be in Europe in Asia in South Africa those things tend to come into play yeah and as on the example that I popped up earlier here is that the bigger thing you know the director here knew they were talking about a period piece and the light would not have been tungsten or or would not have been something cold like it is now this was probably gas lit these scenes so the DP and the production designer understood that when they were in these environments the light needed to look one way when they were outside in other environments the light needed to look another way because that's what we see in the real world you know in an office full of fluorescent lights we've all been in those offices and we know how they kind of look and if you're completely out of the range if you're lighting your character you know with a Tungsten fixture in a in a fluorescently lit scene that's going to stand out they're they're going to be a different color than anything in the environment around them and it's going to look false just as simple as that CJ more thoughts and just to to show the example that Alex was talking about uh when I ran uh when I ran that movie through this Lis script that would grab the middle frame and Export them out as pgs to see how the mood of that changed the whole I can Pro I can show this right yeah 100% so um right here here's the the beginning of that film is is in darkness when we're in The Matrix we're really green and it's a little uncomfortable almost like fluorescent light then we get out and now we're in this blue tone when he meets Morpheus for the first time it looks like the im a Mac im a PC ads uh of later when they're in the dojo it's a very it's a very East it has more of a a almost a cpia haze over it so each one of those scenes is a completely different mood and it helps not only drive the viewer's sense of uh sense of emotion but also their sense of space there's no question that uh you've entered somewhere You' you've gone somewhere and that's to me is more powerful than well uh and and you can also see the consistency between the shots you're seeing you're seeing these flows almost like layers in a in a you if you if you cut a um sediment you know there's almost there are these layers that have been put put down here and uh you know I've seen these posters in the past and I have to admit I was asking for this as a feature for maybe the last five years from black magic and CJ put it together on his own um and uh it is so powerful to see uh the flow of of how a colorist um you know puts the you know how this gets done on a showby show basis it's really really interesting let's go to the next question Mickey maure from Manila Philippines what is your preferred working color space and why Alex start us off I'll defer to Charles okay Charles Charles start us off I tend okay so the work in color space um will affect the way that your tools will interact with you so that's something you have to keep in mind I tend to like to work in locky 3 from AR because I like the way that my tools and my settings will interact with me as I'm working the knobs and twisting saturation trying to find the right exposure I like that works um I like the bigger color spaces but also remember 90 to 80% of your image will will still live inside of Rec 709 for the most part right you'll use things that go outside of that to help the story come alive and push along but most of your image is still relatively in a small world but for me I like the way that locky 3 works it's nice and smooth rest of my tools and I've set all my parameters for my tools to actually work in that way so they're very subtle the way that they work and and I just want to ask one thing there Charles so you're basically saying I'm going to do everything in log C3 and then you're going to is it your last thing is to put it out to where it needs to go yes yes so I will work and push I just but I'll be looking through a l or a display transform that's going to show to all my monitors so I have this monitor I have my big monitor up there and I'll have that displayed but the work being done behind the scenes if I'm working in resolve or if it's in bas light or mystica or Flame or luster is that's my working space because I like the way that it is working the math because remember after the sensor it's just applying math but but each color space has a different way to apply that math so you have to understand that and for me I like the way that AOG C3 tends to work it's very smooth it's consistent and it's easier for me to find a happy place so that's your grading mezzanine format essentially get everything into that you can work in that and feel like you really have control over what you're doing and then you know that at the Target codec later is a whole different thing yes now if you're working on a larger production and the team wants you to work in red or event you white gamut or if you're going to work I mean in anything else that needs to be taken into account but if I'm doing the whole production by myself or if the team agrees that's where I will work in makes sense Mitchell you had a thought I've got a question for Charles that relates to this is if you're uh if you're using your basic startup is Rec 709 and I shot something with an re camera wouldn't I use the re 709 and is there a difference between them if you already shot in 709 like you've constrained the image a lot so you have less wiggle room um if you shut in log or raw this is in post so I've already shot it in an already log or raw and post I'm trying to decide what am I going to look at am I going to look at their version or somebody else's version yeah so so each manufacture is making a decision about what data they want to keep going from scene referred to display referred because you have a 20 PB bag but display referred it's a much smaller bag right so each manufacturer whether it's AR or black magic or red or Sony they're all making a decision about what data to keep what to get rid of and how to take this XY coordinate of a pixel to this place right so it's very particular and you can if you get into the color signs of things you can start to play don't suggest this by any means but a possibility if you have a team of color scientists that you can work with uh you can mix some things and say okay I like what this is doing I don't like what this is doing I want to get rid of this and make it do something else so you can mix and match but if you're just starting off use the recommended L from the manufacturer it's what they intend as your display refer right and then work under that to your ey is happy with the image but definitely start there CJ HP Aon yeah and for me it's it's making sure that I'm making that transform from the Airy log to my output color space of Rec 709 or what have you at the after I've done all my work I don't want all of my all of my nodes that I'm using to work with the shot and manipulate it to be working in a compressed space I want them to have as as much data as possible and then at the end of the process if I worked the whole project in that AA log that's when I do my AA to 709 conversion I put that that note in right at the beginning so that I can be mindful of the output image but I just need to make sure that it's after all the nodes that I'm working in between very important point I'm finding that more and more that it's not only what I do but where I do it in a workflow has a big impact on whether things get easier or harder going forward that's reinforced to me a lot these days let's go to the next question and it's from Robert shogi in Los Angeles what are some common mistakes beginners make when learning color grading CJ start us off uh finding the the node structure that works best for you uh to me is a place where a lot of people get stumbled up because there because a lot of people when they first start they they want to do too much within a single node uh and then as they get more and more complex they find it difficult to back things out I'm more of the I'm more of taking the approach of where I'm going to make adjustments on individual nodes cuz I can make you know as many as I want and then I can if I want to say well what if I took out that temperature changer what if I took out that qualifier what if I I'm I'm able to isolate all of those things um but the other mistake that happens is people make way too many nodes and now all of a sudden uh you you get lost every time you go from shot to shot or it becomes cumbersome to continually switch around nodes every time and then you forget as you're working a really long day and now you know your node structure is all there and they're all labeled but that's not where the edits are made Charles thoughts yes a very good point um I have a note tree that is fairly large for let's say beauty work because that involves a lot of keys and mats and everything but for film work you know it's much smaller but I like to have a designated no tree just so I know I have to think about if I'm doing a key or some saturation I have a right node that's going to be just doing that and all the nodes are labeled so I know if I need to look at this in six months again because they're doing a revamp of it I know exactly where to go when they want to make a a change now the mistakes that I see a lot of people now because resolve has made the cost of Entry to do color work essentially free right uh when most of us started in post-production to have a resolved room you needed to spend half a million doar just to get it up and running um and it went up from there so one of the first things that I see people doing is uh buying Luts from random sites where they don't exactly explain to you what this Lut is expecting and where it's going to um or a YouTube video that says oh get the Joker look you might be able to get that Joker look on One Clip but you have to realize the preprocess to make the Joker look the way that it did happened way before they started shooting there was a CDL developed it was a lot particular L for the film and the entire pipeline of the color was set before they even started shooting so they knew what they were going to get so understanding that you can get a look for One Clip but if you're doing a commercial the uphill battle that you're going to be encountering trying to get everything to look that way uh it's it's let's say insurmountable to to to some extent uh so understanding where you're starting and where you're going is basically the first you need to figure out um as you're getting started and it's going to take some time uh to understand color and Theory since most people now starting are not starting in a facility where you get to see the entire pipeline they're just seeing the end result of I can make a cool image not what it takes to make an entire commercial or feature film so understanding that goes a long way CJ make sure you start with a really good foundation of understanding of where you're coming from and where you're trying to go so those initial project setup settings are really easy to overlook when you're just dragging clips into resolve and you're starting the edit and resolve and just moving right to the color page sometimes you can cause yourself a lot of Heartache if you had settings that were off at the beginning but the other thing to uh mention is if you are round tripping from Premiere or from final cut into resolve and then going back for the online you've got to make sure that you understand that process and do it successfully before you do all the colorwork like make sure that you're comfortable with that round trip before you start going because the last thing you want to do is you've got all this complicated stuff that's sitting on top of a foundation that's Sandy we've seen that before uh what have I gotten from these people let's go to the next question Douglas carmichel ask what's a useful resource for learning the basics of color management for someone coming from an audio background Alex what do you find uh you know I there's a lot of there's some great YouTube um Solutions and Charles and and CJ I'm sure have some um probably some suggestions of where they like to go I will say that the blackm magic training that is free that they do is probably the best first step like it is a very thorough long it's you know three or four days I think is their their first training and I think that they really they've gotten really good at this you know and I think that they I think that's the place that I would recommend most people starting Charles I second everything that Alex said that is the best place that they've been able to just go and open up the floodgates and essentially have a system where they can sit you down for a couple of days and actually get certified at the end if you pass the test of course but they have great free training it's going on all throughout the year and it's a multiple language so uh there are some in Spanish and English Portuguese I don't know why the portugu I was like Portuguese there's a lot of people that that speak Portuguese I mean Brazil is a big place as well as as Portugal but it's just a funny like Portuguese um yeah so the uh it means that they have a Portuguese trainer so so anyway so um they uh uh the the one thing I will say is that the certification like I don't really care about the paper like people like and so the the thing is it's great training and the certification tells you well you're ready to you know it's kind of a lot of people talk about black belts black belt when you come become a black belt they'll tell you that that's when you're starting to train like that's you know you just prove that you could get there and so you're not a useful martial artist yet you're just better at you're just ready to be trained and and so uh so I think that you want to look at taking that course and then the most important thing is to go out and shoot you know shoot shoot shoot correct things put little things together but shoot it in and I would recommend log so that you can't get away with anything you you know go out and shoot and have to actually correct it to somewhere um and the best thing right now is for those of you who have iPhones is that you can shoot 4 through2 log um with ases and everything else on your phone um so that you don't need to have a big camera to go out and do some of the stuff but you want to go out and shoot little stories or do other things that require you and I wouldn't do big projects I would do lots of little projects that are home projects or things you're going to put on YouTube or just things for yourself but force yourself to um you know to do lots of these little shorts I was doing for me to get up to you know to whatever level I know resolve which is nothing near CJ or Charles I uh you know I was doing Tik toks with my kids but I was shooting them in 6K raw and doing the corrections you know as I went through that to kind of figure you know to play with those tools and then outputting them from there CJ U I'm gonna second and third uh about the black magic training materials um the besides taking the actual course there's also like the da Vinci resolve beginners guide that is 470 pages long is a free pdf that is just readily available on the internet and what I love about having the PDF local on my machine is that I open it up and I search for stuff when I have a feature that I don't understand or that I need to learn more about I just go up to the search bar and all of a sudden all the pages highlight and it's I mean it's really in-depth it's really easy to digest uh understanding the best Solutions also means understanding the red flags that are out there if you see the YouTube video that's 8 minutes long that says this is the one node tree or the one thing or the one look that that's not the one look don't go there it's Pro I mean that's going to get you there a little bit but um it's they're over promising a little bit if you have somebody who's going to do a 2hour a 2hour long video of this is my grading process and they've got actual like production credentials and they're worth listening to that's the one that maybe you know do an Alex and listen at 2x but that's the one to pay attention to Alex you have a real quick comment we got lots of questions here uh yeah just just just remember that resolve is free so you can you can so resolve is free just always remember that uh that you can do that you you can download this and start to play with it without spending a penny let's get to the next question from talak Lopez Waterman in Sarasota Florida Charles if a director wants to have a black and white section of a film do you ever get to adjust a look of that I know having recently done a lot of black and white work for my Opera projections design I noticed how much that can be Charles yes so black and white is never just desaturated and just black and white it just goes um instead of resolve and and Flame and bas light and all of them uh let's say instead of resolve if you go to the RGB mixer inide of resolve you can actually play with how much red blue and green are affecting the black and white image and if you test that out it's going to give you you a hugely different image like it can let you pull out skin tones in black and white now that's just if it's all desaturated completely uh most of the work that I've done that is mostly black and white the director will at times depending on the projector if it's at a theater or if it's going to be for TV they might want to add a little bit of a hint of warmth at the top end the highlights or maybe some cool at the bottom so it might be perceived as black and white but it has a hint of color underneath that will help tell the story a little bit better let's go to the next question from Rosco Jones in Madison Indiana 422 yuv takes advantage of the rods to cones ratio of the human eye has this color compromise become unnecessary or we will we need it as we move to HDR and 8K signals uh Alex it's also a file sizee issue so you're going to see 422 and all kinds of other uh compromises continue to happen especially as we go to um uh HDR and and 8K because the bandwidth issues of delivering it to your house and so no matter what we do we can't get away from the bandwidth costs so sure we can send you 8K but then we have to get it to you and because we're moving to all IP you have to remember that 4K is four times more than 1080p 8K is four times more than 4K so a solid 8K signal is in the 50 meg per second or above and that's that's a solid you know reasonably good comp well compressed signal and it's really closer you know for a really good signal um you know not like a Netflix signal which is not useful um uh so like a real signal uh is probably between 50 and 100 Megs a second let's go to the next question Robert shoi in Los Angeles in Final Cut Pro how does the broadcast safe filter affect color grading well it is going to affect it it pulls everything down into the acceptable range for broadcast usually has 100 IR is kind of the upper limit and uh if you H it's quite possible in NL to get Beyond these standard broadcast specification so it's kind of an overall Major League top cap filter for that Alex do you have additional thoughts yeah don't do it fix it fix it by hand don't don't don't turn any filters on that say anything says I'm going to make it broadcast safe or I'm going to do whatever fix it do it correctly don't have an automatic setting do that for you that's crazy next question Mickey maure from Mina Philippines is there a situation where you would prefer to color manage at the project level instead of color managing with nodes Charles it's typically when I'm working with a larger production and I'm just a small part of the larger color Pipeline and they've already designated this is what we're working let's say if we're working inside of Asus that is usually a situation where it's entire pipeline is managed in that way if I'm working to my own project for some commercials I will typically go node based because I have more fine controls over each shot that needs to look the best that it can look individually next question next question from toic Lopez Waterman again in Sarasota Florida Charles have you graded iPhone 15 videos shot and log on the black magic design app and if so what are your thoughts Charles that be I have graded some iPhone footage and I think it's magical that you could go and capture so much data on a device that you carry around in your pocket and you just kind of walk around and forget about it where you would typically have a $60,000 camera now that being said it's a smaller sensor and it's a smaller lens and there's a lot of caveats involved but for what it can do for what it is it's pretty magical Charles I'm interested and when you were doing that test was there a type of shot that seem to work better like do the wide Landscaping type things do do they give you more trouble than for example a head shot that's well lit or something like that what what did you run into I run into where if things are well lit and you plan to shoot beforehand right then it becomes less about the camera okay great so yeah so it run and gunning and thinking you're going to get great results out of it without shot composition and shot execution can be a problem yes you could say that like like for example uh uh a oh my a few months ago we saw the Apple keynote and everybody was amazed that it was shot on an iPhone but then we saw the behind the scenes and everybody noticed there's entire teams of set designers and lighting Crews and at the end of all that uh you have the founder of company 3 Stefan sonnenfeld grading it right so at that point it is no longer about the sensor the sensor is capturing so much data it's not about the camera at that point it's was about the creative decisions and the problem solving that very smart people can do throughout the pipeline and that's what made the image so great so it's a great sensor go out and shoot and go out his great as much as you can you need to practice but it's an amazing device cool next question Adrien Watkins Wellington New Zealand CJ have you looked at cinematch to assist Bas grading across different cameras CJ I have not um I usually am I'm just using a color space Transformer to try to get it to the same place I have not seen cinem match but I'll answer because I was directly addressed there you go next question uh from Rosco Jones in Madison Indiana white brides dresses human skin tones and blue skies are colors that must look right in the final viewing what other colors have you had to correct for and have you ever used panone for video CJ start us off I haven't used panone for video but um the my number one concern is make sure my whites look white make sure my blacks look black those are easy because I can just look at that waveform scope where they have the overlay and when the red the green and the blue channels all line up they stop being colors and they start turning white um but the other one is skin tone and all those Vector Scopes have a skin tone indicator where you can say where does that face or where does that skin tone sit and uh if you're using a tool like no omnis scope it's a little bit more agile to to do this kind of thing but put a mask over your fa over the face and then now your Scopes are only going to reflect what's in the highlight and now you can see oh exactly where those skin tones are the other tip is when you're in your Scopes go into the settings and turn on the display qualifier in Scopes then when you put your eye dropper and select something it'll show you exactly where that is uh on your Scopes Charles Charles um I'd say foliage is usually skin tones skies and grass trees um but to add to that it's always about the creative intent there's been a lot of situations where I've been in the room and and there is a technician that is saying all these Reds are not matching what this is on the scope right but the client is paying you to make the Reds this red right so if you look at all shots from films uh uh let's say if you have a website that's like shot deck for example you have a lot of stills from from films and you bring those into resolve uh you'll see that a lot of times your skin tones what is perceived to be white or black or a skin tone is off the line that you might see inside of your scope right so that image is molded to look a certain way and technically based on the Scopes it might not say that it's right but when you look at the image you feel that it's right and that's the balance you always have to play right you can use your Scopes to get things technically right but then creatively how is the image feeling and that is always a balance that you have to play now going back to panone if you're doing it's like a lot of beauty work or commercial work a lot of clients will send you um a Pantone deck that you have to match right and I actually have like this with me all the time this is just skin tones right and I just have it on my desk and look at it every so often but for products uh there will be a particular color that you have to hit and the difficulty with that is that if they're not here with you in the room they're looking at it on an iPad or some other monitor or their TV and you have to find a way to get what you see here in your room uh to them and that's always back and forth but yeah like every happens it's interesting I mean Tiffany's concerned about their blue they want it to be exactly that BL I'm shocked let's go to the next question Robert Shi in Los Angeles wants to know what is Rex 709 CJ that is your standard uh color space for HDTV so when if you're delivering out to and you're expecting it to be viewed on any HDTV not HDR but SDR that's your color space that you use yeah it's a recommendation that came out of the standards bodies and everybody aderes at least everybody knows what it is um next question Dave Troutman Edmonton Canada can you copy and paste color page settings into other shots on the timeline to match them um let's see who in for this one CJ uh sure can if you click on the I was playing with Charles's color here with the black and white with it but if if I just hit command C while I've selected this clip and then paste it over here um it'll paste all of those no nodes exactly as I had them so if the shots are exposed differently they're not necessarily going to match so I find the copy and paste useful for similar lighting conditions or if I have an uh the node tree but not necessarily any of them changed I'll use that to copy and past the node structure let's go to the next question and it's Jeff Hedberg from New York asking if you know you need to Output to multiple standards like Rec 709 Rec 2020 Etc do you work in one color space and then simply convert afterwards and do you need to continually check that what that conversion will look like on every shot as you go CJ uh what you can do at the very end where uh earlier in my presentation I did a color space transform from my intermediate or mezzanine to output format you can actually do a parallel node there so that one of them is for uh one output and one of them is for another HDR SDR and then you can enable and disable them to check as you go along the way but that's how I would skin that cat Charles I will usually work in the color space that needs to be delivered first um if it's an HDR grade I will work in that I'll SLE my monitors and the Tim L to that and like CJ said then I will switch back and I'll do a trim pad um on some occasions if you have client a room and you have the capabilities you will grade your HDR and SDR at the same time it's a bit more complicated it takes a bit more time but some clients prefer that just so that they can approve exactly what the SDR and HDR is going to be looking like but normally I will grade and whatever needs to be done first to get out for broadcast last question Mickey maacho from minila Philippines Charles when delivering for review over frame IO do you transform the rec 79 gamma 2.2 or keep it at 2.4 the way I have if I'm working in resolve the way that I have my resolve set up I will do the gamma at 709a which is something that resolve did to try and fix that pesky gamma shift uh that we've all have encountered um but that is very particular to to the way that I set up my system and other systems it might be uh let's say like a tag of srgb that will get it to look correctly and if your clients are working remotely and they're working on a particular browser then you have to take that into a account different browsers will display certain things slightly differently if they're not reading the text properly so if I'm in resolve I will tag re 709 and then the gamma instead of 709a and that has worked for me and we actually did a test yesterday and that's still the uh the best way to go for us so cool today thank you all thank you to CJ and to Charles for being here on our uh basic color thing I think this has turned out to be a fabulous so I enjoyed it immensely and I hope everybody else did too a couple of notes Here 2 hours of Q&A tomorrow the new panelist meeting is Saturday day after tomorrow uh don't forget about volunteering for NAB if you'd like to that's in the Discord under Alex's announcements um if you're interested in being a pal or volunteer uh that's important um go look and go vote on the YouTube shorts uh the isidora lab happens in one hour from now uh tomorrow a basic primeron genlock uh oh no I'm sorry that's something from an old message there that's wrong um that's an incredible opportunity and then right after that uh don't forget mimo live and Oliver Brien back our thanks to all the produc producers everybody who submitted questions for today we cannot do this show without your questions you drive everything that happens here and we truly appreciate the time you take to put those questions into the QR Code system and into uh the general mukana question system and how you vote on them that really does make a huge difference to the panelists great panelists as always and particularly today when we have experts coming in to freely give their knowledge to everybody who's watching the show this show that's what this show is all about and we hugely appreciate every everybody who shows up to do it and we never forget the backend crew the incredible numbers of people who are doing so many tasks that are unsung in the background from arranging guests helping guide the guests through the processes of coming on the show it is an amazing Village of people who assembles every day to help us do office hours and each and every one of them is incredibly valuable and we thank them uh let's see stats for today the traversal 765935 miles that's 123,456 Charles you're the Maestro thank you so much for being here that was so awesome share that with you no no I actually thank you for what you did because so much of that gets lost in YouTube videos that people see out there so we needed a very straightforward this is exactly what you need to be doing and understanding because resolve has so many options people can quickly start making mistakes and they don't know that they're making a mistake yeah they just glaze over if they don't have the basic steps and if you want to get started with it it will run on a $220 melee quieter 4 I installed it R it actually runs the deliver page is a little slow oh my hey if you can't color correct on your watch you're way behind times yeah noise reduction might slow down the system but it'll be yeah yeah yeah yeah ex all right see you guys thanks everybody thank you excellent show thanks everybody great job thanks Laura CJ you okay yeah just

Channel: Office Hours Global

Views: 2,356

Keywords: office hours global

Id: -n732uSW4Gs

Length: 125min 59sec (7559 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024