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Welcome To 2016! Jim, the Tao Treasurer and I all hope you had a great holiday break. We hope you enjoyed ringing in the New Year and we wish 2016 is a year of
accomplishment for you—however you define that word. As the Publisher, I can tell you this Newsletter hopes to bring in another long-term sponsor, just as we've had Flanders Scientific for almost 4 years! In fact, we've got one lined up in the wings that we expect to launch in the next week or so. And for you DaVinci Resolve
colorists out there, Tao Of Color and Mixing Light are arranging to fill another niche—which you'll be hearing more about in the next two months, since this Newsletter will be involved in promoting it. If, when the calendar clicks over to 2017, these two initiatives are still around then this Newsletter will have fulfilled my goals for 2016. In fact, we will have fulfilled my 5-year goal of having three
(and only three) sponsors supporting this newsletter—keeping it a free weekly publication for you. [change of subject] Technically, Tao HQ is still on vacation... so this week we bring you the Most Popular Stories of 2015. We've scoured our logs and pulled the most widely read article from each of the 45+ Newsletters of
last year. The stories listed this week were chosen by you, our readers. Enjoy! And we'll see you next week with a brand new edition. Sincerely, Pat, Jim and the Tao Treasurer
Happy Grading! |
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- [video] Learn to Use Your Scopes - color grading is a meeting of science and artistry. But if you want to grade like the best, then you need to learn how to use your scopes. Although, I'm not a fan of
the Ansel Adams tonal range metaphors for video color correction used in this post (one day I'll write a post explaining why). (cinema5d.com)
- [video] The Look of Gladiator - Dale Grahn has color timed some of the best loved movies of all time. In this tutorial Dale uses the new Koji Advance plugin to show you his
thought process in creating the look of Gladiator. He does a great job sharing how an old-school color timer thinks about manipulating images... and his process is 100% relevant today. But the last line of this video? Purr-fect. (kojicolor.com)
- Best Practices for Color Grading Commercials - Los Angeles-based filmmaker Noam Kroll weighs in on the meat and potatoes of television - commercials, or adverts and how to color grade them. Experienced colorists will have different points of view. It’s a fast read—even if you disagree with parts of it. (premiumbeat.com)
- [video] Top 5 Facts About Your Unreliable Eyeballs - why can color grading be so hard? It's all about your eyes. This video is well done and worth watching. (youtube.com)
- Color Grading HBO’s ‘Show Me a Hero’ -
colorist Sam Daley (The Departed, Runner Runner, Black Swan) discusses grading the mini series on DaVinci Resolve. He has quite a few good bits of advice in here. (postperspective.com)
- "War Room" Part 1: Acquisition and Editorial - Author, colorist, editor and a
really good friend of the Tao, Steve Hullfish, was co-editor of 'War Room' a Labor Day released feature film that was #1 at the Box Office for two weeks. He does an amazing job explaining their pipeline, from picking an NLE, to digital acquisition, syncing, subclipping and more. (provideocoalition.com)
- [video] Interview: Colourist Tony Osborne - there's so much to recommend about Tony's interview, where to start? It's part history of color grading, part technique but my favorite bit is his advice to new colorists; I couldn't have said it better myself! Pour a fresh cup of coffee, sit back and spend 15 minutes listening to a craftsman. (darkartoflight.co.uk)
- The Colors of Your Favorite Films - a website dedicated to collecting the color-rich pallet of stills from famous films. Nicely organized by director, title, year, and country. Let's hope Hollywood lets this site stay alive so we all have a nice
database of Looks for inspiration and self-education. (film-grab.com)
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- [videos] Become a Better Colorist - put on a BIG pot of coffee, take the phone off the hook, and dive in to this exhaustive roundup by editor Jonny Elwyn on how you can become better at your craft. (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
- [video] Geoff Boyle: An Interview - if I had to pick one link for you to click this week, this is it. Great answers to interesting questions. A chat with a craftsman. I LOVE his attitude and observations about 'The Film Look'. (DarkArtOfLight.co.uk)
- [video] Roger Deakins, ARRI, and LUTs - the DP who who took the early leap by lensing the first Digital Intermediate transfer, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, gets technical. Roger talks about shooting ARRI with an open gate, and working with LUTs. (filmmakermagazine.com)
- The Color of Mad Max: Fury Road - wanna know the secret to color gradingMad Max? Wanna know how they pulled off the day for night scenes? Click through for an insightful interview with
Colorist Eric Whipp who pulled it off. (postperspective.com)
- [video] The Eye vs A Video Camera - "Your eyes don’t always capture the world exactly as a video camera would. [this video] outlines the similarities and differences between your eye
and a video camera." (filmmakeriq.com)
- [video] How To Create Great Work - do you feel like a beginner in our business? Even if you've been working for many many years? Here's some inspirational advice—well executed—to keep you on The Path and make sure you don't do what most of your peers do... quit. (youtube.com)
- Colorist Pro Tips - A series of 140 character tips from Tweeting Colorists to help you improve your color correction. (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
- Why No One Agrees On The Color Of This Dress - a great write-up on what this meme is about and the science behind it. (wired.com)
- How many colors can you see? - are you one of the 25% of the population with a 4th cone and is a tetrachromat? Use this chart to find out. I always thought this condition was
genetically limited to women. This researcher doesn't think so. Also - the associated graphic has dramatic changes in luminance that seems to me to muddy what it's testing. Still, interesting enough to share. (linkedin.com via @mitch_jacobson)
- Behind The Kingsman - colorist Rob Pizzey graded the new Colin Firth/Michael Caine movie in DaVinci Resolve. Pizzey and DP George Richmond talk about the film’s color and post-production workflow. (cgw.com)
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- 52 Tips for Colorists - want some quick color tips all in a neat summary? Editor Jonny Elwyn has gathered 52 Tweets into logical order. Mostly Resolve-oriented but it does go wide. (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
- [videos] Skin Retouching in DaVinci Resolve - to paraphrase the title of a Woody Allen film, this is ‘everything you could ever want to know about skin retouching, but were afraid to
ask.’ And we mean everything. Toolfarm’s Michele Yamazaki kicks off the roundup with her own tutorial. But there’s lots of quality video tutorials covering the subject from different angles. Page load is slow due to all the video embeds. (toolfarm.com)
- Why A Post House Edits video with DaVinci Resolve (instead of FCP X) - a list 6 reasons. Our fav: number 5 - seamless integration. Although reason #6? Mixed feelings. (provideocoalition.com)
- Pulling Better Keys - "Offline clips are usually a single Quicktime file of the EDL, XML or AAF you’ll be grading. The clip doesn’t have to have all the effects and filters taken off to be useful, and they can contain reference audio as well. Since the file is a reference clip, it also doesn’t function like normal media that can be added to the Media Pool." More details on
this useful function after the click. (premiumbeat.com)
- Resolve 12: An Editor's Review - friend of the Tao, whose writings we regularly feature, Oliver Peters weighs in with his thoughts on editing with the Pubic Beta. What's nice: Oliver tested Resolve on more than one machine to get a better perspective on what Resolve 12 can (and can't) do. (digitalfilms.wordpress.com)
- [video] Make Your Wide Exterior Shots Shine - with "tips for using gradients and blend modes to add some punch to images that otherwise look flat and uninspired." (nofilmschool.com)
- ProRes 4444 vs RAW - my response to this article: just because you can't tell the difference in the final color correct, doesn't mean there isn't a difference. But I generally agree
about the appropriateness of ProRes 4444 vs. ProRes XQ (premiumbeat.com)
- Moving A Timeline From Premiere Pro To Davinci Resolve - "The following are specifications for prepping to handover your Premier Project. Material that does not meet these
specifications will need to be reformatted at additional expense." I love that second line. And the rest that follows is a great example of how to succinctly instruct your clients delivery for color grading (or anything else, really). (tobyheslop.com.au)
- What is ACES? - a great explanation of what ACES was designed to do and when you should consider using it, "The best final image quality is always generated from the workflow that involves the least number of image transforms, and performs the creative work at the best possible effective bit-depth." (lightillusion.com)
- Debayering 101 - A solid thread on LiftGammaGain about why so much attention is focused on debayering. After all, it's been done thousands of times before... so why do pros keep reinventing the wheel? (liftgammagain.com)
- Instant Color Correction - Color Fixer Pro is a new free color correction plugin from NewBlueFx. Apparently, it's how the pros color correct. There's even a video proving it. (newbluefx.com)
- What's Coming Next to SpeedGrade? - in the blog post above, Adobe links to this post about what's next for SpeedGrade. Click through for the answer. Here's how I read it, summarized in two words: Premiere Pro. Bummer. (blogs.adobe.com)
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- How NAB 2015 Showed Me The Future (That I Could See Today) - "I’m especially jazzed about the hardware I saw this week… technology that has been promised to us but has been either impossible to actually see or underwhelming in previous
years. I feel like this was the first NAB in my career where I saw the future of our technology before it’s actually arrived—and I walked away excited." (taoofcolor.com)
- How to Justify Your Freelance Rates - ten years ago Brennan Dunn charged $50 an hour. Now? His projects can net him north of $20,000 a week. How did he do it? (99u.com)
- Establish Your ‘F--- Off’ Price - great title for an old story that freelancers are all too familiar with. How to ‘not’ take on a job that pays less that you are worth. It’s your craft,
and you’ve worked hard to be good at it. The title says it all. (lifehacker.com)
- Why I’m Leaving the Color Grading Business - longtime friend of the Tao, Tom Parish, sees the clock on the wall and decides it is time to shut down his color suite for good.
Tom is walking away from the business he loves. Why? Click through to find out. We wish Tom well. (tomparish.com)
- US OLED TV Price; Panasonic 4K Blu-Ray; Vizio HDR TV - with some instant rebates, the LG 55" OLED has broken the $3k barrier. Plus other news this week. (hdtvtest.co.uk)
- 2K, Is It A Total Crock? - John Eremic, Workflow Specialist at HBO, says 2048x1152 is a bad idea. Click to learn. And seriously, bookmark this. (endcrawl.com)
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Current Colorist Control Surface Drivers |
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The stories featured in this section are from MixingLight.com, a
companion color correction membership website to TaoOfColor.com and paid sponsor of this Newsletter. Want to read a story listed here but not a member? Sign up for a free 24-hour Test Drive. - The NET 30 Billing Trap - it seems like the proper business thing to do, to bill your clients on a NET 30 basis? Read why your Tao Publisher thinks
this is a terrible idea for most creatives and what alternatives make more sense. (mixinglight.com)
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- The Perfect Cup of Coffee - it’s fair to say that coffee fuels a lot of Colorists. Now, a 76-year-old man has invented what coffee snobs say is the perfect way to brew coffee - at a fraction of the cost of high-end machines. This is his story. (medium.com)
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- External NVidia Titan X for Mac Pro ‘Cylinder’ - "a hack that enables a Thunderbolt 2 expansion box with an NVIDIA TITAN X GPU to override the Mac Pro cylinder's AMD GPUs." (barefeats.com)
- [review] New Colorist Control Surface: Oxygen Tec ProPanel - Warren Eagles snagged one of these new $800 control surfaces, from a Chinese company, and put it to use on a client session. This is his video review. (icolorist.com)
- Affordable Grading Monitors - a decent roundup from Jonny Elwyn with the emphasis on 'affordable'. One of the best quotes comes from Master Colorist Alexis van Hurkman, “don’t buy a display because you read that I like it—because my reasons may not be your reasons.” (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
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- [video] The Outer Darkness - is Valentine’s is a bit of a dark day for you? Check out this twisted short film that was released today, Valentine’s Day, from my good friends of BloodyCuts fame. I had a blast color grading it with a team of talented up-and-coming filmmakers. (theouterdarkness.co.uk)
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Th- Th- That's ALL Folks! See you next year! Happy Grading! 9,150'ish Stories Now Shared
Support this Newsletter: Like, Tweet or Plus =>
The Book Shelf- Color Correction Handbook, Updated - Alexis Van Hurkman has updated his Color Correction Handbook, which has set the standard for learning all things color correction. (amazon.com)
- Color Correction Look Book - This
is the second part of the Color Correction Handbook, exploring the creative techniques for over 200 different visual looks. A sort-of recipe book for colorists. (amazon.com)
- The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - Read how a dozen different colorists grade the same footage with the same gear, differently. A fantastic approach to learning the craft of color grading by Steve Hullfish. (amazon.com)
- Autodesk Smoke Essentials - Walk through grading a short sci-fi film (with downloadable
ProRes4444 source material) while learning the ultimate online finishing app... Autodesk Smoke. (amazon.com)
- Color Grading with Avid and Symphony - Written for version 6. Fully applicable to version 7. I was a contributor. (amazon.com)
- Adobe Speedgrade CC: Classroom in a Book - A solid book for a solid grading app. (amazon.com)
- Digital Cinematography: Fundamentals, Tools, Techniques and Workflows - Don't let the title fool you. I'm only a third way through this book and its explanations of how digital images are recorded, sampled and viewed is
essential knowledge for anyone who's craft intersects with digital images. Not light reading. But not filled with math either. I highly recommend this book. (amazon.com)
Have a book you
think should be in this list? Reply to this email and let me know!
FCC Disclaimer: Links in this email to Amazon.com, B&H Photo, or ToolFarm are Affiliate links that help support the TaoOfColor.com. FSI is a paid sponsor. Tao of Color, Inc. is part owner of
MixingLight.com—which is a sponsor. BlackMagic Design is sometimes a client.
We thank you for your support.
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Managing Editor:
jim@jimwicks.com
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Published by:
Patrick Inhofer: Photon-Wrangler, Fini.tv | TaoOfColor.com | MixingLight.com
patrick@taoofcolor.com
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