The CLAi 4k Color Grading Reel

The work of the Colorist can be something of a black hole as far as many film makers, video professionals, advertising agencies and end clients are concerned – often they believe that it is only necessary when footage has been shot drastically wrong, and super dark images need to be made visible or green faces need to be brought back to a more human look.

Of course, a Colorist’s work does include saving a production when a camera failure or undesirable decision has ruined a critical shot.  But the process is much more about making each individual shot in a sequence, program or film look as good as it can, then work seamlessly with the previous and following shots, before finally providing an individual style to a group of shots to best convey a feeling and/or identity as the Director and DP intended.  Colorists tend to be very visually creative people who see shots in much the same way as a good DP, as well as masters of the very complicated technology that allows them to produce exactly what the DP and Director imagined the imagery would look like.

This color grading reel has been designed and created using some of our real-life projects to show some of the many steps that we take in color correcting, color grading shot to shot, creating a look and removing unwanted elements from a film or video, and focussing the viewer’s attention on sections of the image that help to tell the story. Much of our work is shot in 4k or 8k RAW and Log – we have a reputation as RED and Arri large format specialists – and so in going back to that media for the best possible correction we stay in the 4k or 8k realm for the entire grade, only moving down rez to the final 1080P format for outputting the final master timelines.

In this case all of the footage included was shot on the RED camera. Our color correction software of choice is DaVinci Resolve, grading and mastering in 4k and above.