AMC theaters opened here in Orlando on Thursday. I wasn't quick enough to get in on the '1920 prices in 2020' opening day promotion. So the Tao Treasurer and I went to a Friday screening out at Disney Springs.

Besides the constantly permeating undercurrent of relentless visual and aural messaging telling me where to stand and how to eat in the 'happiest city on Earth', I found the 'social distancing' movie-going experience interesting.

This AMC theater is one of those self-serve setups - you grab your food and then pay for it. Except now, in the 'no-touch' world we are currently living, all the self-serve stations are off-limits.

My first thought: It's good they're running at 30% capacity because at 100% capacity there's no way I'm waiting 15 minutes as understaffed AMC employees use the self-serve stations to fill us up, one single presented receipt at a time.

My second thought: How do I add butter to my popcorn (the touch-button dispensers are closed down)? Answer: They give out little butter containers for the self-pour (I held back one container for a bag-half-empty pour).

My last thought before the lights went down: Walking into a Dolby Cinema the day after a 4-month shutdown is like powering up my grading suite after a 1-week vacation - something always breaks. In this case, our seats didn't recline and we had to be re-seated by the staff.

If you're wondering what movie we saw? Unhinged. My movie review can be summed up in two words: Relentlessly predictable.

Enjoy this week's Newsletter!

Reminder: I'm on an every-other-Sunday publishing schedule through the end of September. I'll be back in your inbox on September 13 (the Sunday after Labor Day).

Stay busy. Stay healthy. Get some sun. Take some breaks.

Happy Grading!

(and remember - if you have a story that's a fit for this Newsletter, hit reply or email it to 'newsletter@taoofcolor.com'! Include a quick reason for the suggested link.)

- Patrick Inhofer
Colorist | Publisher | Coach

Join the 'Color Cartel' Protein Folding Team - Rosetta@home allows you to donate the spare CPU cycles of your rig to the scientific fight against corona viruses and cancers! The Tao Newsletter's Color Cartel is a Top 5% team and climbing. Join Rosetta@home, set up an account, start 'folding', and connect to The Color Cartel team! 

If you're an educator, "With EditMentor, educators can create and customize their own challenges, quizzes and courses using footage of their own choosing."

"We improved on the H.264/AVC Main profile streams by employing per-title optimizations . . . we have applied innovations such as shot-based encoding and newer codecs to deploy more efficient encode families." Click through for a look at more recent in-house codec developments.

"What are the permitted hours of filming? Do any limitations apply when filming on public property? How will the film industry keep cast and crew members safe?" A summary of a report from the L.A. film permitting office.

In this free course, "Participants will learn how to communicate both color and color differences.  From the physics of color to lighting, spectrophotometers and color data, this module-based course teaches how to not only view color, but also delivers an in-depth understanding of color." Requires registration.

This was released just after the previous Newsletter shipped two weeks ago. It supports BMD RAW 2.0 SDK.

A new option has been added into Frame.io's DaVinci Resolve integration - import comments via EDL. If you don't want to (or are prohibited from) linking Resolve to a Frame.io account - this option allows you to pull down those comments directly into your timeline using old fashioned tech. (via Joey D'Anna)

(video) Colorist Luke Ross shows you "how to remove chromatic aberration from high-contrast edges and constrain it with a matte."

This is a good article to bookmark to save for jobs that need this guidance. Personally, I like to have them do the last step (render a reference movie), first - so I'm sure nothing has been altered while prepping for grading.

Nitrate offers, "a variety of motion and still photo negative and positive stocks . . . FilmConvert calculates and integrates grain based on the underlying color of the image." This is a favorite plug-in of mine because of your ability to turn on or off a variety of its processing tools and dial in exactly what you want it to do: Just grain, just the tonal curve, etc.

My DIT friends would know better, but to my eye multi-GPU transcoding in Silverstack Lab seems quite significant in this release.

If you've ever had RAID software ask you to disable Secure Boot on the Mac - and you're wondering if this is safe or opens you to malware? - then this blog post is for you. It also explains SIP and how it differs.

"Red Giant has updated Universe, loaded with GPU accelerated plug-ins . . . with 2 new tools, and more." One of those new tools offers up new blending modes.

An interesting look at this MoGraph app that has a definite Apple Motion vibe.

Interesting: "the most exciting thing for me was the June announcement of a public beta of Roto Brush 2, the automatic rotoscoping tool powered by Adobe Sensei machine learning technology."

(video) "Applying one color grade to multiple shots is easier with Resolve's Groups or with Shared nodes. Learn how to combine the two approaches for a powerful, adaptable workflow."

(video) "Learn how to fix frame rate problems and create both constant- and variable-rate speed effects (and the image processing options they enable)."

(video) "In the second part of his series on better blurring, colorist Joey D'Anna jumps into Fusion to explore its powerful capabilities to create natural-looking blurs (on a logo replacement operation)."

With this device's ability to generate a DaVinci Resolve project file with the ATEM's live-switch - I expect some of you reading this will find these projects make their way into your grading suites. It might be worth your while to understand this hardware.

"Datacenter Revenue Surpasses Gaming for the First Time". Interesting.

"The new spec should provide data transfer speeds of at least 30 Gbps per access point, double the bandwidth compared to 802.11ax to 320 MHz and also double the number of spatial streams in MI-MIMO." Nice.
 

(video) "Insane example of what you can do in Fusion." (via Robbie Carman)

The humor is in the headline. But as someone who toyed with the idea of switching careers into User Interaction Design back in 2000, this made me smile as it confirmed my frustration of how the PDF is used on the web today.