Sony A7SIII Footage Color Graded by Dolby Colorist in HDR!

hey what's up guys so about a couple months ago we went down to san francisco to meet up with shane ruggieri who's a professional colorist adobe and i don't know if you guys recall but a couple months ago we did a cinematic test using the sony a7 iii if you guys have not seen that video i will leave it linked down below we had some extra footage from that shoot and i thought it would be a really cool idea to meet up with a professional colors learn their workflow and really be educated about all these new technologies like dolby vision hdr this video is kind of long so i recommend you sit back maybe grab some coffee or whatever your favorite drink is also i reached out to you guys on twitter if you guys had any questions for shane which he will be answering later in this video so without further ado let's go ahead and begin so i'm here in the studio with shane and as i mentioned before i am no pro colors and this is really a unique opportunity and i'm actually excited to be here because shane is going to actually be color grading some of that sony a7s3 footage and then kind of walk us through some of the step by steps so shane maybe introduce yourself and let us know what you do at dolby great so my name is shane mario ruggieri i'm a colorist and senior production engineer for dolby uh main job at dolby is to kind of communicate and create content number one and also to create a bridge between the technical and the creative community so as we create new technologies my part of my job is to make sure that they're appropriate the tools are there that a professional would use them and how they would use them and give them feedback that's a lot of what i do with that that's awesome and i mean i appreciate you inviting us and letting us be here i think this is a really unique opportunity and we're excited to obviously share this with the audience so maybe you can walk us through some of this footage and maybe show us step by step of what we what you would do with the sony a7s reflector let's jump in all right let's do it so before we get going i just want to qualify that the lighting that we have here is is not something that we would use typically i wouldn't have all these lights on but um i think what for this purpose is i think it's perfectly well because we've done a lot of the early work to get the image to kind of a nice place but we wouldn't have all these lights flashing around we'd have a very nice even background um and the lights would be much more dim um just to kind of set the stage for everybody um we're gonna be working in an hdr scenario so basically we're taking this imagery which is the a7 s3 and we're going to expand it into a what's called simpty 2084 and a rec 2020 color space so it's a massive color space and a very high luminance volume so there's a just think of it as like a volume and a bucket so it's a massive bucket whereas rec 709 100 hits is in a tiny bucket this is a massive bucket um and like this and we're going to take that footage lay it in there and massage it so that it looks like maybe that you feel more close to the footage that's the general idea so usually the first thing that i do is talk to the director talk to the person in charge of the image and saying how do you want to feel like how how should this feel to me right because we're conveying those feelings of emotion context place and you need a starting point i just can't just go in there and start pushing things around i need to know what you want gotcha okay so let me tell you what i want yeah you can tell me what you want if you want to make it feel like we're there that's one of the things and that was the initial address from the dp saying hey kind of make it feel like we were there so you can tell me hey does it feel like we're there yet so the first thing comes in this is this is a flander scientific xm310 k it's set to about two it's set to 3000 nit max our image our project is set up um to go rec 2020 and we're going to kind of limit it around 2000 nits just so that we you know we don't have blowouts on the on this monitor and so the first thing that i would do is i would come in let me turn this this monitor off i would first come in and i would do what's called a color transform or a camera transform and that's what this first node is here and i'm basically taking the s gamut and saying take the s gamut take the sony log which is the color gamma as well as the the color volume and convert it into a rec 2020 space and a sympty 2084 which is a pq gamut so we can look those terms up for you but it's really just saying that's how i'm working i'm not looking at rec 709 i'm working in a pq color space and so take that footage and lay it in there so that the image looks proper then what i would do is i would go to this next node and i would say let's take this and if i reset it we kind of did a preset i need to then start to kind of feel how bright it needs to be so my first steps are kind of get the luminance in a general place right that's my first kind of step is to transform out kind of get a sense of luminance i want to use in this in this particular scene in this particular moment and then um and let's say this is perfectly good we can kind of look you know a little bit forward find a bright spot there's no blowouts on his face it looks really nice you know and the and then all of a sudden i'm going to start getting feedback from the director or whoever's in charge of the image saying okay yeah that's about how bright we want this image and this this here actually can go a lot brighter so again 2000 nits you might start to blow out on your camera but if you're looking at it here we could actually make it feel like the real lighting in that scene when you were standing there on set so are you doing it based on obviously there's a flanders scientific monitor right you're not i've noticed you're not really looking at scopes no so you just look at basically how it looks here is how you're going to grade it well to some degree well yes and no i i am peaking at the scope to make sure that i'm not blowing out any any details because i want to retain all that detail um in this particular sometimes you don't want to retain all the detail right in this particular sense i think it's valuable to have that because it gives a nice smooth representation of that image there's no real bright lights in there so we don't want to blow something out and lose detail in the shirt because that's probably the brightest image or part part of the image is right in this area here so you know i think for you you might just say does this start to take on you were there right right i wasn't there does that start to feel like it was there i'd say it was a little darker it's it was darker there a little bit so how about as we come into here yeah it's a little bit more right right about there okay so this is the process yeah gotcha right you have an idea you're the director you have an idea of what it should look like well i wasn't directing this but saying right now you're the director right um and you are going to help me craft this into that moment that you want to it's part of your story next we do things um a lot of times there's an outdoor scene and you're like oh can you bring this guy down can you swap this guy out can you change so i have another node that it says here's your sky nodes here's your blues here's your you know am i changing the sky am i replacing skies that kind of stuff so i have a node built into that um which i don't i don't currently am not using because there's no sky in here right and then what i'll start to do is i'll start to work on the image the face so if i turn on the face image um and so right now if you can see over here there's a window so there's a power window that kind of shows up right and that window allows me to kind of you know look at i can select just his skin so if you want to just kind of pull this i'll do a quick one here not be perfect but i will then grab it and then i will track it right to kind of give a sense of you know where this thing is moving where his face is moving now he's it's not doing a great job of tracking at this moment but i think that's the idea is that we would we would bring it in and we would then do some tracking and then track the whole shot to make sure that when i'm starting doing a change on his face then the change is being applied only to his face so it doesn't affect the other part of the image right right so in this instance let's go to a let's go to a part where you know it looks pretty good so let's just say this you feel like this is too bright and you want to kind of bring this up or maybe it's too saturated so you know what i might do in this scenario is go in and actually select you know for his face so if i show you the selection that i have oh nice right you can actually go in and say okay i just want to take that pull that down a little bit you know to only grab his face maybe take off the luminance there and then you can massage this you know you can massage this uh this selection and maybe get rid of some of the areas that you don't want um in a general sense you can kind of pull it down and just soften this edge out so now now i have control over this area of his face now i didn't do a perfect job of it i'm just showing you this is some of the things that i would do because a lot of times the director will then say hey can you just give that a little pop you know like from there to there so it goes from that to that can you just bring a little bit back in because we need to see his face and i felt like it was a little too dark and that's maybe something on the set that they couldn't light they didn't have enough light or you know he turned in such a way that it kind of was darker than what you would like to have now is that something that you do all the time is work on face i mean on the face part of it really there's a lot of work and i say this because i always tell people it's like i'm not a pro like this stuff that i almost never do yeah i mean i've done it before this is only one layer yeah usually there's there's there's the face there's the pop of the face and then there's eyes this is the next level stuff like again i don't mess with this kind of stuff so the fact that you're telling me that you're always working with faces and i'm sure you're doing shirts and all these other things so well the eye goes to face that's the most recognizable thing gotcha and then the next most recent well the most recognizable thing is your eyes when people look at they look at my eyes and mouth eyes tell intention right they really they really speak in tension you can say yes yes yes right and those are three different intentions and how how much i've opened my eyes or how bright they are and so a lot of the contact work that i do is context right so do you also i'm assuming work with the eyes too and kind of brighten them up absolutely and there's there's uh there's plugins for that right there's actually a tracking system in here an ai tracking system that'll actually find the face um it'll track it and then allows you to go in and brighten the eyes darken the eyes do all kinds of different things with it um and again it just depends on the scene the set how much time we have is how much detail we actually go into you know i know a lot of people use creative luts yeah so like what is your thought on that like people buying luts and using them for their footage like it seems like after you tell me that you spend so much time is there such a thing as the the one click and it's done yeah it exists right i mean the creative led is there for a use and you can think of it like uh like a tool right you got a hammer and you got a screwdriver well a lut doesn't do all things all right and especially if you're shooting with multiple cameras that have different looks and different settings in different locations um you can see that the the image is going to be quite different from you know scene to scene to scene and so one big kind of look may be okay it depends on if you're happy with it if you're the director and you're in control that image and you throw a lot onto something and you think hey this is the bee's knees you're fine okay fine that's you you know and if you're happy with it and if that's your artistic expression fine not a problem um however if you look at a lut it is a destructive thing and you apply it to footage and it will shift colors around and a lot of times it'll take colors away it'll limit your range and if you try to get something back then you're kind of at a disadvantage so you have to do a little bit of work at that point gotcha you may have to go before that lut expand it out and then you put it on the left and the hut just chops it off and you don't you don't get that in you don't get that information it's one of the things that i wanted to mention now is it's really important about color writing is that it's a team effort right it's not just me deciding how things should look i i'm an influence on it and but my job really is to take the director's vision and to help this moment um come alive in what they thought they wanted to see or what they're saying in this moment of time because this is just a five-second moment in time that's got a bunch of stuff before it and a bunch of stuff after it and it needs to fit that moment to help tell a story right okay so take for example this situation um you might as a director say shane i i really want to create more depth i really want to focus on them but i'm getting i keep getting distracted by these other things that are going on and so one of the things that we might do is create you know pull it down you could have done this on set but on set it might have looked a certain way and when you're looking at it now we get it into the color suite you're like you know what it needs to be darker so we might do something um such as this we might take and create a bottom edge you know like a bottom edge and then just soften that up you know you can kind of soften this edge up to pull you know pull that bottom kind of out of contention you know so as before it was there you've got this nice bright edge now you've got this darker edge and you can actually do um you know one more you know you can actually do that same kind of thing but now let's take it and let's let's take it and take it from the top so now we can actually pull down a little bit on the top and even maybe just kind of angle it a little bit you know to kind of pull in the eye right so that you're kind of pulling in the attention again this is this is not every time um and it's not in every scene every single scene has its own its own elements and what looks right and what feels right but if you take these off now you've got a whole different a whole different feeling of this scene and you're you're much more intimate now and you're just kind of looking at this light and your eye is kind of guided between these two people it's amazing that these two changes made a pretty drastic difference and we didn't even touch color no this is just luminance right this is just re-lighting a lot of what color correction is is re-lighting recoloring picking up a color um it's part of the correction color correction right a lot of times you just don't have time on set and after you've built this edit and you've kind of gone through and we started telling the story sometimes you want to do a different thing in a moment and with color correction now being digital and as easy as it is and as powerful i should say is powerful not as easy um you can do a lot of relighting that scene to really get what the the dp and the director were going for in that moment hey guys so i just wanted to pop in really quick i hope you guys are enjoying this video we're going to move on to the twitter questions but before we do that i do want to thank condor blue for sponsoring our trip to san francisco and also today's video but they also want to hook you guys up if you guys ordered a sony a7s3 and are looking to purchase a condor blue cage well today's your lucky day because there is a special coupon code linked down below in the description that's going to give you 50 off this is a limited time so i recommend if you're interested hurry up check out that link down below in the description but without further ado let's go ahead and jump right into the twitter questions now shane before we go into twitter i actually have a question that i would like to ask you so we hear a lot of like dolby vision rec 709 hdr which can be confusing for a lot of people can you elaborate what dolby is doing with dolby vision what that means and all this stuff so go ahead sure um so there's the way that we used to do footage you know some years ago uh was called sdr so rec 709 it just defines a color space just how much color that you actually have and it also kind of determined uh or set a luminance level and it was by default because it was referring to the crt tube you remember those old tubes so if you got them above 120 nits they started to make noise right and they only kind of got to about 120 nits brightness wise right so that's where that brightness came in that 120 nits or 100 nits value and a knit is just a level of light right that's just a way of saying how bright is something and it's a way of measuring it like inches or it's a value of light and 100 nits was about how bright those tubes were and so that became the standard in fact it's kind of a funny story they had to go back and and measure it there wasn't a standard before that it was just broadcast right and that was defined by the rec 709 color space and the 100 nits that the tube could do because every tv was tube um so when hdr came about dolby looked into actually dolby looked into the market and said well what are the issues what are the problems um where can we make a big impact we're not like on an incremental impact kind of company we wanted to make a big difference and we looked at the broadcast and we looked at delivering content and there were a number of issues out in the market one of the issues that was really near and dear to my heart is what happens when you create thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of content right you've put tons of time into a five minute piece or a ten minute piece right now you've done all this work all this time and energy and i send it out into the world you have a different television you have a different television you have a different everybody's got a different television looking at on different things the image that we spent time crafting is no longer seen the same way you know we call you know you go into the big box stores and you see all the tvs on the screen are on the wall and every one of them is different right right and every one of them is wrong because it's not the one sitting in here that we made the choices on right it happens all the time i mean even this right now this piece we're looking at it on a 30 40 000 monitor of scientific monitor and some people might be watching this on their smartphone which might not be calibrated per se correct but those are getting way better right and they're getting a lot closer and more true to the colors that are they're also p through a lot more p3 color space so a great monitor so it's that that's all coalescing but to get back to hdr so when we saw was you know well number one we had lcds gamma wasn't important anymore gamma was a function of the tube it was a physical property of the tube that 2.4 gamma curve that was a physical property that gamma function doesn't exist in here it doesn't exist in there it doesn't exist in your phone right so why were you using it why did we keep using it well it's because it was the standard right so when we look back like well how do we make a big change so we we created pq we didn't create it we actually we did create pq um and we called it perceptual quantizer and it's basically the barton curve which means um it's a scientific person who made this thing and it's based on your eye how your eye works so as you bring level light level up every single step so if these are light levels my fingers this step to this step you couldn't see the difference you wouldn't notice the difference but from this step to this step you do see a difference and from dark all the way up to bright that's the pq that is pq it is based on how your eye works and it allows you to get accurate light levels in a non-relative way but an absolute way so right now in gamma it's a relative system i know these are kind of techie terms but it's a relative system versus a an absolute system so now 100 nits is 100 nits is 100 nits you know 80 percent and the old stuff was 80 on whatever you showed it on if you had a 500 tv 80 is you know up here 80 down you know you have some non rel you have a relative issue right there so this is absolute pq is absolute and on top of that what we did was how do you manage the image so if you've made an image in this let's take a look at this image right here it's 2000 nit peak white actually let's say it's a actually 900 net peak white so this is around 900 nits right there now what if i'm going to show that on a 500 nit tv it's going to look blown out it could but that was one of the things that we wanted to address was how do you map this image down to lower performing tier televisions in a way that we still have control and that's what dolby vision brought to the industry so hdr getting back to what hdr versus sdr was sdr was 709 100 nits hdr is defined by smt2084 it's 10 000 nits and it's the rec 2020 color space so a much larger color space more colors available so a wider color bigger gamut so if you want to look at a bucket this is hdr this is sdr so more colors more light now why is more colors and more light important well it's important because in the real world things are bright and you relate to them every day you can interact with them every day and with hdr you can bring people closer to the reality or pull them away which you can't really do in 709 all right there's a lot of things that you can start to do in hdr that you can't do an sdr still can tell great stories in sdr we've had 100 years of telling wonderful stories not doubting that at all but there's a lot of other things that you can do with hdr that you couldn't do there and with dolby vision you actually have a way of managing that image thank you that was really insightful um learned a lot i mean this is great information let's jump into twitter because i already feel like this video is pretty long but so the first one comes from tyler stallman and his question is is there a significant difference working with uncompressed raw compress raw and prores 4444. well tyler thank you for your question um i would say initially my initial reaction is if you're thinking about those things you're not thinking about story right that would be my initial reaction to that because those things are very very similar those three of codecs performance are very similar and what i would encourage tyler to do is to think about the story that he's trying to tell it is tyler has a guy okay tyler's a guy okay tell it figure out the story he's trying to tell do tests record in that format record in this format record in that format and see if he's getting what he needs out of that format because those three formats have just slight differences right and yeah you get more out of a lower compressed raw image but do you need it number one do you have the system that can push it and and work with it seamlessly real time because real time is important because you want to feel the shot coming from one to the next to the next and be able to move back and forth fluidly because that gives you insight and then i would look at those three things and say well what does my camera shoot what how much storage do i have how long there's so many different questions that you can ask and that you should ask and i would say focus on the story first if you can get the story down do a test scene if it makes sense and looks good you're good all right if you're doing compositing that's a different story if you're doing compositing and you're going to step on the footage a lot higher bitrates are better gotcha but you might be able to get away with um you know the prores 4 what do you say four four four four zero four yeah yeah yeah xq keeping the highlights and low you know some extra data you could probably get away with that compressed is means you're gonna round off data you're gonna lose data gotcha it's also a function of your camera and your lens we could we could talk for hours this is a whole different you know a whole show in itself because all these factors come into play so i say start with the story do a test scene gotcha and to make the decision from there this one's from valentina v how do you deal with noise from underexposed shots well there's a bunch of different ways that you can do this there are paid programs you know neat video there are built-in noise reduction into resolve and some other color correctors there's also some tricks that you can do like one of the tricks in fact if you look right here you can see there's a splitter and combiner at these three nodes right there that's rgb you can split them out and you can see if there's a lot of red noise a lot of blue noise you can go into there and just denoise that channel right interesting and so there's there's a lot of different ways that you can look at so but i think the question was in a in a low in the underexposed don't underexpose light well and sometimes you don't have that opportunity to go back on set obviously but i think that's a lesson that needs to be given back to the person shooting and say look this was underexposed understand your camera you know what's the base iso understand it starts with the footage i can preach but if you have to deal with underexposed footage sometimes you can't really fix it it's just it just can't be fixed because there's no detail right and technically the light isn't hitting the photo sites it's not being saved so it looks like grain it looks like motion you can kind of get rid of that motion but then you soften then you can add sharpening or go into this ai stuff right now that's really popular and then resharpen but all that costs money so can you fix it can you get it better fix it maybe sometimes yes sometimes no can you get it better sometimes yes sometimes no i would try those things denoise use power windows right you can power window that area so if you're looking for an area of focus find out what the most important thing on the image is and is there is the noise the the the grain that's that's popping up the digital grain that's popping up maybe find what's distracting select that and pull that down interesting so you can approach it many different ways next question is from miles somerville what's the consensus on shooting log versus standard profiles in higher end studio productions is it simply a personal preference thing or are standards basically are there standards um there's no standard okay there's no there's no governing body like symptoms saying you must shoot this way um and i think that it's it's up to that production and it's really a matter of budget time uh editing capabilities speed delivery all that type of thing and you have to take all those things into account in order to say hey if i'm shooting something now and this needs to go to news in five minutes well you're going to shoot that different than you will if you're saying okay we're going to shoot this today and we're going to do some posts we have a week to do posts and then two months to do this and that and mix and you're going to do that different and you're going to want as much and we're going to do compositing we're going to do all this heavy lifting and twisting on the image and compositing robots in the scene right you're going to want to have a lot of detail a lot of data to work with um and so you need to base it on the production you need to see does it matter that's the question does it matter did i shoot this does it matter how i who am i delivering to what are their requirements makes sense that would be my question who am i giving this to who's paying me what do they need deliver that that makes sense um this one is from luke pollock what are the industry's biggest misconceptions or myths about color uh that it doesn't happen that's that it doesn't happen i would say a lot of people think that what you shoot is what's in the what you see um like news you're shooting news you kind of see what's there in movies and in a lot of youtube content a lot of ugc content you're applying filters you're doing this you're doing that you're um you're changing images you know you're pulling down the face or bringing up the face highlighting the eyes you're doing different things and that was not shot it was you know so i think one of the biggest myths is that it just doesn't happen or when i say i'm a colorist they're like oh you work in a beauty salon it's like no actually that was a question by the way that was a question too you know what is a colorist you know it's like well my job is to create context to build in the context behind the scenes colors make you feel things and that's what i do this one is from cheese on everything nice i like this already okay are these 99.9 adobe rgb monitors good enough to not calibrate anymore no okay next question calibrate if you care about your image yeah calibrate yeah if you don't care you don't care okay that's fine don't it's it's as simple as that if it's close enough for you great but no they're not good enough to not calibrate this next question comes from brian c paul what is your process and how do you see color charts or by eye both so the process is to look with your eye verify with charts verify and and in charts i i i think you mean scopes and so um and or you know your cie chart that kind of stuff you want to verify with the charts and with the scopes and um you can use scopes like when i white balance i you know you can white balance with just scopes uh using the lift gamma or the game and gain and gamma um but a lot of times i trust my eye that's why i'm a golden eye that's what they call me all right next question is from zolf zolf when is the ai to automatically color grade footage like a pro coming out um they've already tried to to do things like that with machine learning yeah with machine learning and and in some ways it does a decent job if you're looking to interpret like they have ai right now that says okay take a look at this painting you know do a goya painting and then paint this scene like this scene and they already have that that exists and it'll just mimic that but one of the things that color grading is is you're making choices you're making the nth degree choices and they're personal to you so ai can do it but it's their grading right yours so if ai wants to make a movie and color it great i want to see it right they don't have a slider that says natural aggressive they might but you know it's there it exists right there there are some existing things that that are out there that are experimental um see graph you'll go let's go to sig graph there's a lot of papers a lot of cool stuff that's out there but i would say that you're looking to a person to tell you a story and if you're looking to ai to tell you a story okay that's still a story and they can do that they can do that now this one is from alberto 93 24. nice teal and orange honest opinions a teal orange it's great you know it it's it's it's a look it's a look it's a style it's it's michael bay right that's michael bay so if you're if it's appropriate and you like that style and that's your expression teal and orange it up if it's not don't this is your expression and this is your statement to the world color it as you see fit just understand that the colors you use say something yeah they mean something that's it's not guessing right we're not just saying oh let's make this green or this blue or whatever teal and orange represents you know contrast and also compliment right so it's what you see when you wake up in the morning and the sun and the star there's a lot of connection to teal and orange that we have in our real world shane thank you so much for having us here in your studio i learned a ton of stuff looking at your color grade i thought i knew something about color grading clearly i don't know anything about color grading after coming here and i'm gonna definitely apply a lot of things i learned here onto some of my stuff so again once again i appreciate you having us here whoa that was a very awesome experience being able to get so much knowledge from shane hopefully you guys learned a lot from this video too now a little bonus for you guys who stuck around and watched this whole entire video if you guys are interested in downloading some of the footage that we were kind of playing around with there will be a link down below courtesy of condor blue so make sure to check that out and while you're at the condor blue website if you guys are interested in downloading some free luts they are offering this to you guys so again check out those links down below i hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did give it a thumbs up my name is armando thanks again for watching and you will catch me in the next one [Music] adios

Channel: Armando Ferreira

Views: 339,092

Keywords: sony a7s iii, sony a7s3, sony a7siii, color grade, color grading, how to, sony alpha, a7s iii, dolby vision, hdr video, hdr workflow, color grade video, color grading slog3

Id: 2K9oe7aEpdg

Length: 34min 17sec (2057 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020