Do you want to help reduce the downward pressure on post-production rates and salaries? You can do so by taking this anonymous annual salary survey hosted by an industry-leading 501(c)3:

Take the BCPC 2020 Salary Survey

Who is the BCPC? The Blue Collar Post Collective (BCPC) is a grassroots global association of post-production professionals and creatives. Established as a 501(c)3 here in the US, they are a tremendous resource that brings together working professionals for support and affinity. Here's their website if you want more info.

In the past few years, they've done an annual survey of salaries for post pros. It's completely anonymous. They also publish the results for free - which is the point of the survey...

The BCPC Salary Survey helps incoming professionals understand their local market rates, so they price themselves appropriately!

If you've ever complained about - or been seriously underbid by - new talent that has no idea what market rates are for different post-production roles then this survey is for you. The results add transparency for a bevy of different skills and talents and show pay rates at different experience levels.

These details are broken down by geographic region... giving everyone the knowledge they need to intelligently set their rates.

This year's survey also includes a few questions about the impact of COVID-19 on your business. The results should be illuminating. I just finished filling out the survey, myself.

Please click this link and take 2 minutes to fill out the 2020 BCPC salary survey!

Especially if you're senior talent! The fewest responses come from the most experienced practitioners of our craft. If you want to help stem the downward spiral of salaries/rates then this is possibly the most productive 2 minutes of your time in 2020. Give our younger peers insight into what active professionals earn - and what they can also achieve.

It's the ignorance of new entrants that employers exploit - to our collective disadvantage. This salary survey is how we fight that ignorance.

Enjoy this week's Newsletter. I'll see you next week.

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 coronaviruses 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.

While not inexpensive, this course is also not prohibitively priced and is a unique opportunity to advance your understanding of the fundamentals: "Led by David L. Long and Ricardo Figueroa of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), this course has been developed for motion picture technologists and creatives interested in understanding the fundamental science behind light, color, optics, and imaging principles." Click through for full course details.

A good discussion with LA-based colorist Mark Todd Osborne.

"To begin, let’s please get one common, deep-rooted misunderstanding out of the way: that HDR is about overall brighter pictures. That's just wrong." This is a follow-up to a dispute about what qualifies as 'true HDR' and what is 'fake HDR'? It's a good recap, with creator quotes about their intent.

Good article: "Let’s see how the creative geniuses at ILM turned back to the classic Star Wars special effects that made the original films so captivating."

Sleep is essential to peak operation, a critical aspect to staying at the top of your game: "Because fatigue can corrode mission performance, a new physical training manual tells soldiers to grab 40 winks when they can, part of a new holistic approach to health in the ranks."

(PDF) The link is a direct PDF download from the US Army's website of the new fitness guide (also linked to in the previous NY Times article). Chapter 11 is dedicated to sleep fitness and runs 14 pages. It includes a section on preparing for periods of insufficient sleep and jet lag best practices. Chapters 9 & 10 deal with Mental and Spiritual Readiness.

(forum) In response to my mini-rant last week about the recent R16.3beta releases a reader emailed: 
 

"I think that Blackmagic has finally made it clear what 16.3 beta releases are for. I was struggling with that too, going back and forth from the beta to the updates of 16.2. A letter in the Resolve forum from Peter Chamberlain makes it clear that this is strictly for those with the new 12k camera." 
 

This is how I read it as well. Thanks for the email, Mike! (via Michael Parfit)

(video) If you're not familiar with Mistika, this 40-minute video may interest you: "SGO presented a special online live event exclusively dedicated to the Independent Colourists Guild, introducing the latest developments and upgrades of a completely redesigned Color GUI and other new functionalities of revolutionary Mistika 10."

"The Interpret Footage dialog box now has a color management section, where users can choose between Rec. 601, Rec. 709, Rec. 2020, Rec. 2100 HLG and Rec. 2100 PQ, and there is an option to assign input LUTs to source footage as well." There are also similar choices for Timeline and Export settings plus support for proper monitoring via AJA or Blackmagic hardware.

"You can see our performance benchmarks in this Google Doc. And download the benchmark projects for Premiere Pro (700mb) and for Final Cut Pro to run your own tests!" Resolve and Avid are coming soon.

(video) "I’m taking advantage of Motion’s brand new ability to import 3D models that are in the USDZ format . . . light them, animate them, composite them into scenes, and publish them for use in Final Cut Pro X."

If you use your Mac for paid post-production work then this item is in here as a public service message: Do NOT click through to this article unless it's to bookmark it for revisiting this topic no earlier than January 2021. Save yourself the downtime (and heartache).

"Learn to use VLANs, link aggregation and more to manage high performance networks for post production, using Ubiquiti products."
 

(video) "Learn how to insert 3D objects or paint out defects in videos with a moving camera using DaVinci Resolve Fusion's 3D Camera Tracker."
 

There are multiple GPU configurations in this shootout. But missing is (2) Pro Vega II cards. All tests are in DaVinci Resolve.

How is your main production rig performing? Are you getting what you paid for? This is a good roundup of benchmarking apps to help you answer that question, without costing you any money.

Speaking of benchmarking: "There is an ongoing need for a standardized multi-application benchmark . . . to provide a proper apples-to-apples testing environment . . . the 2020 version makes some important changes including support for 4K resolutions, as well as updating the workload traces."

"The company says that the SR Display uses spatial reality to combine the virtual and physical world, and creates an incredible 3D optical experience that is viewable to the naked eye. This is made possible by several technologies..." Including eye tracking. This article is an overview. The display is available for purchase (at a price point you'd expect).

Interesting: "The new models include reimagined pro camera systems and enable an end-to-end experience for HDR video with Dolby Vision, up to 60 fps."

The ultimate colorist Halloween costume set! I figure so many of you are going to jump on this that this link is from the Tao's Amazon affiliate account (don't disappoint me).

If you didn't know, one of the big challenges for display manufacturers is the inefficiency of blue-emitting diodes. A short blurb in Display Daily linked to this Nature paper about a potential breakthrough in quantum dot displays. I'm linking to this in Fun(nies) because this abstract is comically thick in science jargon... but which ultimately fuels our careers. Sort of amazing (though not really funny).