The Colorist’s role is to create what the DP and Director hoped to film from what they actually shot – to hide problems, recover lost areas, make talent look beautiful and provide the intended mood for every frame of the final piece, at the highest quality while meeting all of the technical requirements for distribution. Color correction, color grading and the Colorist’s alchemy is a subtle mix of fine art and high technology which is why it requires a unique personality and years of experience to make a good Colorist, and almost as long to find great one!

Like most good Colorists the role doesn’t start and end with coloring the shot.  It involves a wickedly strong knowledge of all the “everyday” editing systems to be able to fine tune the timeline and export to get the material from the edit and into the grading software, and often to edit it all back together again with frame accuracy afterwards.  Completing the look also often involves small scale VFX and animation work to remove elements like green screens, cables and buildings, or to add motion elements like flashes, lightning and atmosphere – although, of course, full blown VFX is a job best handled by a VFX house.  As far as I’m concerned my job ends when the picture is both complete and as perfect as it can be, whatever that entails.

Colorists are there to pick up the pieces as the guys who actually do most of the “fixing it in post”, when perhaps not every frame of every image shot by even the most gifted of DPs will be perfect. Of course, only an idiot would believe that a camera can do that – or even that a perfect frame is what you want in the first place… many scenes you shoot want a look or styling at the end of the day, whether it is a beautiful golden hour landscape, a gritty street interview or a glossy fashion image – all far from a perfect frame. But what most people can agree on is that you don’t want to have that burnt out window in the corner of the shot, an actor with a green face, an actress with a giant spot, or images that bounce around the frame like demented kangaroos.

I get rid of those problems, as well as making everything smooth between frames, so you don’t have any faults that make one frame stand out, or every cut introducing a different color cast… while also making sure that you get the highest possible quality that can be achieved from your footage in the final masters.

As a color grader I can do this two ways – in an ideal world I go right back to the original camera footage and rebuild the project timeline with this, and then correct it shot by shot at the highest possible resolution. This is the “right way” and gives fabulous results every time, but it is slow, and so expensive – exactly how expensive and slow depends on the type of faults that have to be corrected and how often they occur, but think in terms of several weeks to get the finished and mastered production back, and a matching budget. In an indie film world, or for a corporate program, time and budget are always the enemy, and so there is an alternative approach, where I slice up your existing best output master file into individual shots, and then color grade each of these – instead of the original camera footage. In most cases the results aren’t going to be as good, and there will be some compromises that have to be made, but the end result will be faster to reach and the budget can be significantly lower. Like everything else that we do in the film and video industry it is a balancing game between desire for the best possible project and the reality of time and budget, and I work with you, explaining the options and consequences, and together we find the right individual solution.

If there is time on a project I like to both edit and grade a video or film, as the two are so closely linked, and that way I can put a rough grade on the footage as it is edited so the client sees everything more or less as it will be. With our powerful systems this is an easy step to take, and as we have been working on 4k, 6k and now 8k footage since RED’s first high resolution image (CLAi were one of the earliest adopters of the RED digital cinema system) we not only understand the challenges of large sensor work, but we usually work in 4k for every element of the entire project.

The goal is always the same, to make your film or video look as good or better than what you envisioned in your mind – before reality stepped in! Good color grading should be invisible, but it should bring a little something extra to every story, and account for the differences between international and national audiences, and multiple possible delivery options… and I think we manage to attain that on a daily basis. Fortunately grading doesn’t need to be done locally any more, and so although I’m physically in the South San Francisco Bay I work with clients anywhere there is an Internet connection – and have got well tested workflows for making this very successful and totally painless. Often color grading is part of a post finishing package, where I not only grade the footage, but also finesse the edit, run the final audio mix between sources, check all of the technical standards are met and then master the final project in multiple forms for you.

This is the color correction and grading reel, which demonstrates some of the techniques that I use, primarily within Da Vinci Resolve Studio, to bring new life to old ideas, save projects that have major problems, and simply make well produced pieces look spectacular… it’s the Art of Color Grading. As this little video uses 4k footage exclusively I decided that it would also benefit from bring created in 4k so you can see the smooth color transitions, subtlety and detail that this image size provides – although you will have to go to https://youtu.be/y84UoTxs52g and change your viewing size to 4k to get the benefit of all of those pixels.