The Tao Colorist

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A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Tao of Color's Official LCD Reference Monitors

Flanders Scientific Broadcast Monitors

The CM series is an affordable line of color critical reference monitors featuring 10bit panels, 12 bit signal processing, 3D LUT support,  3G/ Dual-Link/ HD/ SD-SDI Inputs, 12 onboard scopes on all inputs and world class support.  All standard and starting at only $3,295.

 

Learn More About the FSI CM Series Monitors

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The Tools

• [Video Chat] Managing Color Consistency in Workflows - Colorist Tom Parish has a video chat with Cédric Lejeune on the topic of color consistency and post-production workflows. Cédric specializes in digital cinema and video workflows, infrastructures, and colour science. (tomparish.com)

• [Video] Shot matching using an external waveform monitor - A quick demo from Colorist Bob Sliga. He shows how to use a hardware external Tektronix WFM5200 to match shots using the RGB Parades.  (youtube.com)

• [Video] DaVinci Resolve 9: The Nodes have it - Colorist, and friend of the Tao, Gray Marshall goes in-depth on DaVinci Resolve's Serial Node, Parallel Node & Layer Mixer Node. If these nodes confuse you, his explanation may clear things up..  (vimeo.com via @graymarshall)

• [Video] DaVinci Resolve: Three Ways to Grade with RAW - Colorist Denver Riddle shows 3 methods to color grade RAW from Blackmagic 2.5K and 4K Cameras. The footage from the tutorial is available at his website. (youtube.com via @colorgrading)

• How to correct colors in FCPx - I was surprised to see this article in MacWorld. Not surprised to see it well-handled by Marc Spenser.  (macworld.com)

• [iApp] ColorRotate for the iPad - Can you direct me to the intersection of art and science? Most interesting is the ability to extract color palettes from an image, then save the palettes and export to Photoshop CS5, 6, and CC. (mobile.colorotate.org)

The Business

• Hollywood, Silicon Valley Haggle Over Digital Media - Do you think the next generation codec we'll be using to deliver our Ultra HD content is being decided based on image quality? Read this to understand what the argument in REALLY about. (eetimes.com via @AssimilateInc)

• ESPN To Discontinue ESPN 3D - This story is a few weeks old but I kept forgetting to place it in the Newsletter, so here it is. Is this proof positive that we won't be having to deal with 3D for much longer? (sportsvideo.org)

• BBC 3D Programming: On Hold - Indefinitely. (bbc.co.uk via Avid-L2)

• The Market, The Movie and Your Target Audience - Part 4 in Director's Sridhar Reddy's series on creating a business plan for your movie. (lilithfilm.tumblr.com)

• Preselling A Popular Series To Fans First? - 'Binge Viewing' has been a popular term with the Video-On-Demand crowd. Is there a business model in there for content producers? (philiphodgetts.com)

Outside 'The Box'

• [iApp] Vine: 6-second Stories - Now you can make 6 second, looping videos on the go. It's a free iPhone app called Vine, which was bought by Twitter last year. (itunes.apple.com)

• [Video] The camera that changed the world - This is a lovely documentary that traces the creation of the first handheld film camera by French and American creatives and the launch of the age of handheld filmmaking. Make sure you put on a new pot of coffee, this one runs an hour. (vimeo.com)

• [Video] Reach into your computer and grab that pixel - The gap between our physical world and the computer is getting thinner, and thinner. One engineer/designer is working on a way to allow you to reach through the screen and directly manipulate the data inside our computers. (youtube.com)

• [Video] Martin Scorsese Directs - A 1990 PBS documentary on the directing style of Scorsese, featuring contemporary interviews with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Robert DeNiro. (youtube.com)

• The Long Take: When not to cut? - Click through both embedded videos to watch the two longest continuous shots in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'... and then watch an animatic for the longest shot, overlayed as the scene plays. (vashivisuals.com)

• Orange and Blue - Digital Photography School has a short blog post about contrasting colors. The article is aimed at digital photographers, and how to make the most out of orange and blue in twilight conditions. (digital-photography-school.com)

Edumacate Yer'self

• Got Golden Eyes? - Are your eyes color deficient? According to one website 1 in 255 women but 1 in only 12 men have a color deficiency. Steve Hullfish, offers up a test to see if you have golden eyes. [Publisher's Note: I never score well at this test. Luckily, I've never had a client ask me to perfectly arrange chips on a chart... so I think my day job is safe.] (provideocoalition.com)

• Introduction to Color Management and Display Color Calibration - A 1-day training class. July 16, Burbank (roush-media.com)

• Tao of Color: Dailies, LUTs and Log Workshop - 1-day training class host by your humble Publisher. July 18, Burbank. July 25, New York City. Early bird discounts still available. (training.abelcine.com)

• Tao of Color: Grade A Film, Learn DaVinci Resolve - 3-Day workshops offered by the Publisher of this newsletter. Hitting multiple cities in North America. Click through for cities, dates and details. (fmctraining.com)

Sunday Morning Fun(nies)

• [Video] 50 Facts About The United States - It's one fun fact about each State in the Union. In honor of the 4th of July. (laughingsquid.com)

• [Video] The DeLorean Outfit - Doc Brown would love this. This is a short video shot entirely with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and Zeiss Primes in RAW 2K, graded in DaVinci Resolve. Filmmaker Kassim says he started his grade using the Kodak 2393 LUT. (vimeo.com via @kassimnorris)

• [Video] How To Make A Latte - Color suite powered on? Check. Client on their way? Check. Time for a coffee? Time to make a latte. (youtube.com via @CraftTruck)

• The New MacPro: The future, or pretty close to it - What a difference a year can make.  (starwipemyass.tumblr.com)

• Anatomy of Humor - A fun TED Talk on the selection process of cartoons at the New Yorker. And a dissection of what makes for 'funny'. (youtube.com)

• [Video] The Mother of All Demos - The inventor of the computer mouse died this week at the age of 88. Embedded in this article is a video recorded of him in 1968: "The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor." But what's that device he's using with his left hand? Did they never show that to Steve Jobs? (laughingsquid.com)

Weekend Warriors

• Sony's Pre-Loaded 4K Media Player - Move over Apple TV and Roku, there's a really big boy in town. Sony's 4K Ultra HD media player is now available in the U.S. The price is a penny short of a hefty $700. They've announced a rental program for 4K movies. (techradar.com)

Gear Heads

• Got Mac Problems? - If your Mac is giving you headaches (or you're the type of person who loves to open the hood on your Mac and do diagnostics) you're going to like this: The Apple Hardware Test (AHT). The program contains a suite of diagnostics that will test the hardware of your Mac.  (support.apple.com)

• Which is better: Shut Down or Sleep? - He reports. You decide. (allthingsd.com)

New Kid on the Block

• Canon reinvents video focusing - With the fiercely fast EOS 70D. Is this is a whole new ballgame, with Canon introducing a dual pixel CMOS to improve focusing for both stills and video? (engadget.com)

Your Career

• The Hacker's Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition - Well. More like how to lose weight by eating (a lot) less while not inducing scurvy. Written by Autodesk founder, John Walker. [Personal note from James Wicks: I lost 20 lbs following John's method.] (fourmilab.ch)

• Money: Attitude Is Everything - A critical skill to effectively manage your finances is understanding how to think about money. Seth Godin helps you make sense of money, what it should and shouldn't mean to you.  (sethgodin.typepad.com via @thisissethsblog)

• Giving Away A Part Of Your Business (To Your Employees) - I love the concept of this story, that giving away a few extra marbles to reward the people that helped build your business is the right thing to do. (fastcompany.com)

• Seven signs you have terrible people skills - Good tips. But presented in a way to inflate the website's pageviews.  (salary.com)

• Going Incognito - From anti-facial recognition glasses to personal, portable, DIY Faraday Cages, these are the extreme measures to really and truly get away (or more precisely, stay hidden) from it all. (bbc.co.uk)

A Step Too Far?

• A More Realistically Proportioned Barbie? - The horror. (laughingsquid.com)