| Issue CDLVI: The Joey Edition |
| The Tao of Color Grading Newsletter |
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Curated links of news, reviews, thoughts, career advice, and humor for professional Video / Film Colorists & Finishers. Delivered Sundays.
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Depending on where you are on this globe while reading this email, you're either sipping your coffee or enjoying a fine spirit. Either way, thanks for allowing me to spend part of your Sunday with you!
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!Â
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| Get it done, Faster, Better and Cheaper with the OWC Flex 8 |
OWC's New Award-Winning ThunderBay Flex 8 Powerhouse Solution Is Now Shipping
This Industry-first Thunderboltâ„¢ 3 storage, docking, and PCIe expansion solution (with 85w charging) is dollar for dollar, the best way for serious media professionals to handle their storage, connectivity, and PCIe expansion needs.
All eight bays can utilize SATA 6Gb/s 2.5-inch SSDs or 3.5-inch HDDs. To take advantage of 40Gb/s PCIe technology, the top four bays are NVMe U.2 SSD ready.
The OWC ThunderBay Flex 8 is a recipient of the 2020 Future Best of Show Award, presented by Video Edge. Video Edge awarded the ThunderBay Flex 8 their Special Edition Best of Show Award in the store, charge and connect category.
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| Learn more at MacSales.com |
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Featuring the work of creative craftsmen, the theory of color, and industry news. Learn practical workflows, useful theories, and actionable insights from existing (and emerging) leaders and teachers in our industry.
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Colorist Toby Tomkins explains: "When there was a shift from night to daytime or dark interior to sunny exterior, he really wanted the audience to feel the change with eyeball-iris-closing inducing dynamics to really push a heightened realism not possible in SDR." Lots of other interesting tidbits, from pre- to post-, are detailed in this article.
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This write-up on colorist Joey D'Anna centers around his history and how the OWC Flex 8 (which he reviewed for Mixing Light) fits into his color grading kit. But I'm sharing this article for the last section - about Joey's take on how 'Looks' are created; or rather, NOT created.
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This interview is an interesting look at the sales side of film/television production. How has the market changed? Who's buying/doing what? Biographical note: Michel Suissa was once my boss, just before the turn of the century (ack!), during our Tape House Digital days in NYC.
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"Filmmaker Mode picture setting control, which preserves in the home the look of film intended by the content creators, will soon expand to include participation by TV brand Hisense and over-the-top service Prime Video." Amazon Prime? Now that's interesting.
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If you're interested in the numbers behind the major streamers and the war with exhibition then this article is a good update. I think the industry has finally entered the second act of this particular story.
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This article features some beautiful cinemas with fabulous lobbies. The sense of nostalgia I get from reading this is a bit alarming; I hate to consider that large-format cinema-going will never be what it was.
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Our craft keeps changing. And growing. Learn about updates to your favorite software. Discover new tools to help you work faster or more creatively. Build your tool chest with new techniques and approaches.Â
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After an introductory overview of ACES and why you might consider a color grading pipeline using it, Oliver Peters provides an overview of using ACES in Resolve.
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(video) The embedded video is an informative look at using Curves for exposure and contrast adjustments. While the tools are specific to Lightroom, there's plenty of 'fundamentals' meat in this discussion that relates to digital video color grading.
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The big new feature is support for the newest NVIDIA Ampere GPUs for Windows and Linux users. But if you're using older graphics cards you may want to click through and see if your GPU's support is discontinued?
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The Flicker Free plug-in has been refined for v2.0: "We’re using optical flow algorithms (what’s used for retiming footage) as well as a better motion detection algorithm to isolate areas of motion while we deflicker the rest of the frame."
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(video) Colorist Joey D'Anna shows you how he uses the DaVinci Resolve color page node tree to build great looking green screen composites (without jumping into Fusion).
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(video) Colorist Cullen Kelly shows how to combine his previous analysis of reference images with his previous analysis of the camera original footage - creating a cohesive, matching look.
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Get a hands-on look at OWC's direct-attached Thunderbolt-3 RAID chassis. Plus, three configuration ideas for post-production professionals.
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Stay updated on the latest hardware that's shipping - because the craft of color grading isn't just about software. Plus, keep an eye on future equipment trends and hardware odds-and-ends.
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"While the card isn’t new, capabilities continue to be added to it through various software developments and firmware releases. The most recent of which is Adobe’s support of the Kona 5 as one of the few ways to monitor HDR content in Premiere Pro, over either SDI or HDMI." This article then dives into the workflow and hardware/software options.
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Click through for the data transfer rates on this (10) SSD sled, "The power is provided by 10 connector cable array that plugs into the power port on the backplane. The 10 data connectors came from triple cables plugged into the ARECA ARC-1883ix-12 SAS RAID controller installed in a PCIe slot."
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(video) Colorist Darren Mostyn loads up a 1-minute timeline with a variety of codecs, applies realistic node trees, drops in a Fusion comp, and tests real-time playback and final render times. This YouTube channel is relatively new, so I'll be keeping an eye on it. (via Dan Moran)
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Another hands-on review: "Having storage, connectivity and PCIe expansion together will simplify everything. You will get good speeds from the disks, be able to plug in camera cards, be connected to a monitor, keyboard and put a PCIe card in of your choice in."
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Can't get your hands on a 3090? Late this month comes the much more affordable sibling: "GeForce RTX 3070 delivers similar or faster performance than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (which sold for twice the price) and is on average 60% faster than the original GeForce RTX 2070."
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Do you have a need for speed? "The dedicated PCIe 4.0 x16 host interface enables each NVMe SSD to interface directly with the system CPU to ensure maximum transfer performance and near instant response time." They're talking: 32,000 MB/s
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This is a good guide to the various HDMI features in 2.1 and what TVs on the market support them.
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Random thoughts, tidbits, and fun stuff that caught my attention this week. Maybe it's color grading related. Maybe not. Ya got'ta read to the end of the Newsletter to find out.
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Definitely fun: "The problem of [motion capture] finger movement is extremely tricky due to occlusion, scale, and the complexity of hand movements that people enjoy. Until now there has been a real problem with independent filmmakers, and researchers having many options for lightweight affordable systems with a low technical footprint."
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Fun: "A college student has mathematically proven the physical feasibility of paradox-free time travel. Does this mean we can all go back to 2019?" (via Robbie Carman)
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| Th- th- th- that's all folks! See you next Sunday. |
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