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- Last week I was in China, along with my Mixing Light partner, colorist Robbie Carman.
- We were in the city of Shen Zhen (just outside Hong Kong).
- On Day 1 we were part of a panel of
judges in a Colorist Competition.
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A 4-day color grading seminar in Shen Zhen, China The Colorist Competition, in the heat of the
moment. - The competitors were all young at the craft. And I know what you're thinking, but the live
competition works better than you'd think. It's a microcosm of what we all do for a living - grade real-time in front of a room of people... on a deadline.
- Then, for the next three days we taught color correction to up-and-coming (and enthusiastic) filmmakers.
- In fact, that pretty much summarizes those four days . . .
This was a typical meal for us. Lot's of dim
sum. Your Tao Publisher used to have a problem eating whole fish. No more (but I still prefer not having the head stare back at me). - We did have a few excursions, visiting a Chinese Tea Museum. Plus an impressive visit to a new studio featuring traditional high-end Chinese fashion with yoga, meditation, calligraphy and tea rooms.
The calligraphy desk was just one of the many fascinating elements in this new studio dedicated to traditional Chinese crafts and
culture. - In sum, it was a terrific week. But our hosts kept us very very busy, from morning through evening.
- Which is why we didn't publish last Sunday.
- Next weekend is a holiday in the US. The Newsletter will also be on vacation.
- After
that, we go full time every week until our August break.
Happy Grading!
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- How Long Does it Take to Color Grade a Video? - “Things that impact on the time quoted are conforming, unfinished VFX shots, cut not locked, the number of cuts in the show, or a director that wants to experiment!“ Warren Eagles, CSI, provides some examples
to the age-old question colorists get asked all the time. (redsharknews.com)
- Defining the Cinematic Look - “Many of us talk about “the cinematic look” without defining what it is… Cinematic images are artistic images. They are
not reality, they are interpretations of reality.” One filmmaker’s deep dive into exploring cinematic imagery. (provideocoalition.com)
- Lighting 103: Greg Heisler On Light and Color - "Color and light is a narrative code. Basically, everybody everywhere all over the world gets
it. If you’re a storyteller, you can tell a story with light in a way that everybody will understand beyond words." (strobist.blogspot.com)
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- [video] LumaForge: What is New in DaVinci Resolve 14 - during NAB 2017, LumaForge hosted the Faster, Together Stage. One of the presentations was Alexis Van Hurkman who gave an overview of the new improvements for editors and colorists. (youtube.com)
- [video] SuperMeet: What's New In Resolve 14? - a different set of headline features than the LumaForge demo, including a look at the Collaborative workflow. (youtu.be)
- Why Would you Want to Sync Clips in DaVinci Resolve 14? - “First and foremost, it’s free! And extremely powerful… (surpassing) paid programs like PluralEyes in both speed and flexibility.” (blog.frame.io)
- [video] 5 Essential Video Effects - every editor should know (inside Premiere Pro). One of the 5 essentials is color correction and basic grading using Lumetri and adjustment layers. Start playing at 2.20 for more on that. (youtube.com)
- Baselight Announcements - In case you missed it, "FilmLight showed upgraded v5.0 releases of all of its products, including Baselight, Baselight Editions, Daylight, and Prelight, a new application for color-critical monitoring on set." Plus Baselight Student. (studiodaily.com)
- [video] Chromatic for FCPx - "all in one color grading plugin that combines curves, color wheels, tracked masks, inside-outside mask grades, selective
color correction, LUT loading and management and degrain, regrain all in one tool." (toolfarm.com)
- Blackmagic Design Announces NAB 2017 Roadshow - "Think
of this as Blackmagic Design’s NAB 2017 show booth hitting the road for all of those who could not make the trip to Las Vegas for the April broadcasting convention . . . will hit up eight major North American cities in nine weeks." But not south of Washington D.C. (provideocoalition.com)
- Adobe Premiere Is Deleting Media After Upgrading To CC 2017 - "having a temporary fix is one thing, but a lot of Premiere Pro users are not going to even be aware that this problem actually exists." Update to 11.1.1 immediately! (newsshooter.com)
- Bluefish444 and Marquise Technologies At NAB Show 2017 - "Bluefish444 speaks with Dan Tatut from Marquise Technologies at NAB 2017, about their latest versions of Mist and Ice, as well as the
collaboration between the two companies." (youtube.com)
- Blackmagic Design & Fairlight + Resolve - "although
Fairlight has been a competitor to ProTools forever, I’m quite certain this will be the first time ProTools has serious grounds for concern from a broader market perspective… especially when you consider the fully capable free version of Resolve includes the Fairlight DAW." (library.creativecow.net)
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- NAB 2017: Understanding ACES - "this panel will explore the benefits of ACES from all sides of the production process." One of the panelists is your Tao Colorist Newsletter Managing Editor, Jim Wicks. (youtu.be)
- The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t
Outpace Obsolescence - "Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology". And the problem is LTO. (spectrum.ieee.org via Marc Wielage)
- How important is international box office to Hollywood? - "I built a dataset of all movies released between 1990 and 2016 and looked at their domestic and international box office revenues. Let’s start by focusing on how much of the money collected by movies from the big six studios came from the domestic market." (stephenfollows.com)
- 8K, RED and Guardians of the Galaxy - “What’s brilliant about it is that it’s completely counter-intuitive. It’s a large format camera and yet it’s tiny, And that’s it’s brilliance.” Director and DP from Guardians of the Galaxy 2 talk
about shooting the movie in 8K with the RED Dragon VV sensor. (youtube.com)
- Moving Beyond ‘Film vs Digital’ - “Archiving is a necessary part of filmmaking, just as production is and distribution is and marketing is, and it always will be so.” Filmmaker Christopher Nolan makes a passionate plea about “the importance of
photochemical and how it’s the essential backbone of archiving.” (medium.com)
- Samsung Takes On Traditional Projection Systems - a 34-foot LED screen for cinema at DCI and 146 foot-lamberts? (commercialintegrator.eu via Marc Wielage)
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The stories featured in this section are from MixingLight.com, 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 7-Day Test Drive. - Colorist Inspiration: ACES In May - "From the first job I did in May I have moved over to using exclusively ACES and will do every single job from now till June 1st. My feelings are that I’ve been too afraid to make the jump because it changes the way I
think." (mixinglight.com)
- Pressure: How To Get Things Done WIthout Having a Breakdown - "Over those years, I’ve discovered several time management, pressure relieving techniques that have helped me. It’s a few of these that I would like to
share in this article." (mixinglight.com)
- [podcast] From A Mac To PC For Media Professionals: Member Questions Part 1 - answering questions about RED Rocket cards, NVMe, PCIe lanes, optimizing your PC for RED vs CinemaDNG and more. (mixinglight.com)
- DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel: Scroll Mode - "It’s one of the few features that is exclusive to the Resolve Advanced Panel and not available in the
software interface. It essentially gives you an extra playhead that shows up on the thumbnail viewer as a purple box. . . . I’ll explain how to use it first and then why I use it." (mixinglight.com)
- Colorist Podcast: Adam Inglis - feature film colorist who graded Sherlock Holmes, Alien Vs Predator, and Mr. Turner talks about how to avoid over grading shots, grading without a panel and when it’s best to use one, and the role of Directors and DP in the grading process. (mixinglight.com)
- Find Your Color Correct Inspiration: Best Colorist Nominations 2017 - "The nominations are for commercial grading and this year the grades are surprisingly varied." (mixinglight.com)
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- [video] Putting the Love in I Love Lucy - old black and white TV shows may have a new friend in Zach Smothers. Colorizing black and white movies and TV shows can be tricky at best. Zach is doing some innovative work “using
nothing more than Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects…” (redsharknews.com)
- [video] Do Continuity Errors Really Matter? - The title asks the question. Watch the video for the answer. (nofilmschool.com)
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- Post | Production World Online - every year at NAB an educational conference runs alongside the main show. It features dozens of speakers addressing the entire spectrum of production and post production topics. For the first time you can get a sample of
that conference, interactively and online. June 22 - 24. (ppw-online.com)
- Sight Sound & Story 2017: Post Production Summit - "Panels include the art and processes of editing documentary film and episodic television, and post production in Cinematic VR. Our closing panel will
highlight the career of Oscar nominated editor Dylan Tichenor, ACE with author and film historian Bobbie O’Steen." (eventbrite.com)
- Learn Node Based
Compositing Fast (and For Free) - "Node-based compositing really isn’t that hard–once someone explains it to you. That’s what this moviola.com course aims to do-in less than 12 minutes of your precious time." (provideocoalition.com)
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Current Colorist Control Surface Drivers |
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- [video] The Worst Movie Castings Ever - the right actor can make a bad movie tolerable, or make bad writing acceptable. But…the wrong actor for the wrong role, well, that
can ruin everything. (youtube.com)
- [video] Go Ahead, Make My… Ode to Joy? - ear plugs are generally considered rude during a classical music performance. Except, when the chief of the Russian shooting society whips out his “instruments.” (youtube.com)
- [video] Don’t Deep Fry Gnocchi - "If you’re like me from three minutes ago and you’ve never seen this video but want to laugh really hard, push play on
this little number. You can safely skip ahead to about 0:33…that’s when the action starts." (kottke.org)
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- Gigabyte AERO 15 - “the AERO 15 may be a dream machine built around a display that ensures true color reproduction.” The first laptop with a X-Rite Pantone certified display. (provideocoalition.com)
- Hands-On Review: DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel - "We got our hands on a DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel and wanted to see if it was too good to be true. Was
this really a panel that cost less than a $1,000 that both amateur and professional colorists could love?" (premiumbeat.com)
- Inside Tangent’s New Tsunami & Wave 2 Color Grading Panels - at NAB Tangent showed two new panels, the
"Wave2, an update to the well established Tangent Wave all-in-one grading panel. The second, is the ‘still-in-development’ Tsunami which will be the most advanced, and expensive, colour grading panel Tangent offers." (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
- [video] LumaForge at NAB 2017 - "also mentioned our new hybrid systems, that combine both SSDs and spinning disk drives. These systems are designed for customers who need extremely high speed storage for things like 4K OpenEXR and DPX image sequences." (fcp.co)
- The Best Mouse For Film Editing - "So what’s the best mouse for film and video editing of today? What tool can you put in your hand to not only cut for hours on end comfortably, but also more efficiently? The answers to those questions
are what this post is all about, plus . . . why I don’t edit with a mouse at all!" (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
- LG OLED55B7 OLED TV Review - "Whether it’s worth paying just under double the price for the B7 over the B6
depends on how sensitive you are to the flaws (particularly near-black quantisation noise and posterisation) of LG’s 2016 OLEDs." (hdtvtest.co.uk)
- Nvidia Volta Unveiled: GV100 GPU and Tesla V100 Accelerator Announced - "NVIDIA is going to be sacrificing a
lot of silicon for a relatively small number of good chips, just so that they can sell them to eager customers who are going to pay better than $15K/chip. This is how badly NVIDIA’s customers want more powerful GPUs, and how hard NVIDIA is going to push the limits of modern fab technology to deliver it." (anandtech.com)
- AMD Updates GPU Architecture Roadmap - "The most useful aspect of the new roadmap is that it helps to illustrate which process nodes which
architectures will be on. We’ve known for some time now that there are multiple Vega GPUs, but it hasn’t been clear how they’re organized." (anandtech.com)
- Bluefish444 at Avid Connect 2017 - "Bluefish444 Managing Director, Craige Mott, explains our Avid and IngeSTore workflow, with the new version of IngeSTore featuring edit while record functionality, editing of growing files, new
codec options, and more." (youtube.com)
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- [video] Fragile Storm - short film shot on Red Epic 1 and graded in DaVinci Resolve by colorist and friend of the Tao, Gray Marshall. "It was my first time working with director Dawn Fields, whose first interview question with me was 'Are you more of a technical colorist or a story colorist?' I assured her that I was definitely a 'story colorist.’” (vimeo.com)
- [video] BTS Fragile Storm - Gray shows you how he dialed in his look for the film. Fields narrates the first half and, starting at 2:57, walks you through some of the color grading process. Gray takes over the narration at 4:14 and breaks down his grade. (vimeo.com)
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Th- Th- That's ALL Folks! We'll see you next week. Happy Grading! 12,050'ish Stories 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)
- Color Grading with Avid and Symphony - Written for version 6. Fully applicable to version 7. I was a contributor. (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, CSI
Colorist, Coach: TaoOfColor.com | MixingLight.com patrick@taoofcolor.com
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