Ask Mike Most Anything

[M Most]

I don't doubt the value of experience one little bit. And no where have I said experience is not important. Also at no point have I undervalued your experience ( I even praised you tonque in cheek, by suggesting you write a book about the good old days). It's Definetley not youthful arrogance either, all I'm saying is we're talking about an industry where technology continuously evolves, where the paradym shifts in technology can be so drastic certain types of experiences are negated.

You seem to be missing the point. Technology is irrelevant to what I've been talking about. Technology is simply toolsets. The skill and artistry are in the person, not the tools. Learning tools is easy. Becoming truly accomplished at any craft is not.

For example how important is an experienced telecine operator today?

Very, because the skill was never the ability to thread a telecine, clean film, or set up shading boards on a Rank Cintel machine. Most of the top colorists in the industry were what you're calling telecine operators. The skills they honed are just as important or valuable now as they were then. This is true of the top DI colorists as well as those working in television.

 

[mikeburton]

Read what I write before you attack me. Don't just read Mike Most's reply. I said it does not take you 10,000 hours to become a good editor, colorist or sound mixer. After 1000 hours if you're somewhat attentive, passionate, intelligent and creative you should be able to get the job done.

We're talking about filmmaking here not surgery or rocket science.

But we aren't talking about simply "getting the job done" as you state. We are talking about having an advanced understanding about a skill that requires creativity, muscle memory, a tuned eye and client skills. If you want to talk about just getting the job completed, well that's an entirely different conversation not worth having. Are you a better driver than when you first got behind the wheel of a car? Of course you are. There are experiences that teach you how to react and execute in different situations that you will never get from an Internet tutorial. So if you aren't referring to being a skilled colorist, what the hell are you talking about here?

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

FWIW part of being a first rate craftsperson is to evolve with the technology/tools of your work. Are there some "old dogs" who don't leverage new tech as well as they could, of course. Do most of them make up for it by applying honed techniques that produce top quality results just slightly less efficiently in certain respects? That's what I've seen.

The really great ones are fully integrated artisans who who use a mix of old school and new tools in clever and creative ways. When new technology comes along guys like David Mullen get their hands dirty and figure out what use cases it supports, they don't just buy into the marketing narrative. The knowledge he has acquired throughout his career provides a perspective on the "triage" process that increases it value. It's an example of scaffolding per educational dogma.

IAC, you don't have to agree with Mike or David, and they're well capable of defending their own positions, just a modest amount of respect and its all good in the hood.

Cheers - #19

 

[shashbugu]

You seem to be missing the point. Technology is irrelevant to what I've been talking about. Technology is simply toolsets. The skill and artistry are in the person, not the tools. Learning tools is easy. Becoming truly accomplished at any craft is not.



Very, because the skill was never the ability to thread a telecine, clean film, or set up shading boards on a Rank Cintel machine. Most of the top colorists in the industry were what you're calling telecine operators. The skills they honed are just as important or valuable now as they were then. This is true of the top DI colorists as well as those working in television.

Fair enough.

 

[shashbugu]

Isn't 10,000 hours only about four years of full-time employment?

Besides, this is just a metaphor, the expression just means that it takes time to master a skill to an expert level, not that it takes literally 10,000 hours.

Got it...

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

It does not take you 10,000 hours to become an expert at being a colorist, sound mixer, or an editor. That's just what you want to believe. The only reason it took you 10,000 hours is because you were among the few that had access to the equipment once upon a time, and the Internet didn't probably exist back then. So therefore you were in the studio for quadrillions of hours. I'm not in anyway disrespecting you for your wealth of experience and expertise in your craft. All I'm saying is the ,specialization, difficulties and limitations of the equipment of yester year gave birth to certain areas of technical professionals the extent of whose creativity could only be pushed as far as the equipment would allow. The how, whys and aesthetics of cinema are what they are and they will be the fundamental approach for a long time to come. If you want to work in an aprentischip at a TV station it might take you a few years before the old dogs will let you bite. You are only ready or experienced when they feel you are.

I applaud your positive intentions. The following may help.
It will be a longer post but as concise as possible.

I ask respected coleagues to whom the following is already known, to perceive its purpose through the context of adressing this post and often seen reasoning.

1. Expertise

Definition of "expertise" or perception of an "expert" are relative. Which means they depend on the reference. The validity of this notion depends not only on the established reference of a person making it, but on a person or a group to which it is presented to. References vary as perceptions, priorities and points of focus of individual or group mental environments vary. Drawing an imaginary line beyond which one is an "expert" is of little usefullness and short lifespan. Not only is it dependent on subjective criteria and lacking an external observer, the next day of experience may easily move it.

2. Technical knowledge vs. overall expertise

Technical knowledge is what usually comes first and soonest. Many times it is fastest to perceive and easier to rationalize. It may be tangible, quantifiable, more exact and comparable, with more uniform principles and more obvious results.

Mind maps the perceivable options, if accurately mapped visual and logical maps allow navigating through those options, muscle memory and mental mechanisms get optimised with practice and those options become available and gradually faster and more intuitive. It is often seen that individuals perceive the basic developed technical knowledge and access to a pre-required set of tools as sufficient and point of main focus. This is understandable and the effect of one of the first and most noticable challenges.
Most challenges still remain.

On top of basics, sensibility, criteria, techniques and many other creative elements get defined and gradually developed. Many of them being less uniform and more subjective, less quantifiable and more felt, less exact and more abstract, less stable and more in motion. The development process which cannot be generalized, predicted, externally perceived and re-applied.
The process which takes time.

Fundamentals are one thing, man's mental and emotional development based on them is another and it lasts throughout a whole lifetime. While one may surround himself with tools that does not guarantee the development of faculties. In the absence of quality interaction with the chosen realm of activity, which also includes gathering, filtering and applying knowledge not only from own experiences but from more knowledgeable and their feedback, the development of those faculties remains constricted within the limitations of self created bubble.

3. Limitations

In an interactive, inter-dependent ecosystem limitations are often and necessarily coming from external factors. Limitations carry a crucial benefit, often overshadowed by first negative emotional response to an undesired situation one is faced with.

The effect of a limitation is the need to overcome it. The need to overcome the limitation leads to development. Should the sufficient desire exist. In this context the absense of limitation may enhance some creative possibilities in the start but proportionally removes the need for development. Removing the need for development most commonly reduces the amount of development, limiting the vast amount of creative options which depend on developed abilities. Creativity is not dependent simply on tools at hand, but on levels of understanding, valorising, and controlling its potential.
Creative potential stripped from an adequate stage of development easily leads into undesired direction.

Careful teacher will understand the balance between creative freedom of a student and his limitations, and a wise student will overcome the desire to have and know everything too soon, and accept the limitations as neccesary, embracing their importance as a crucial part of one's development process.

Less able equipment does not limit creativity, it only presents a challenge for reaching a particular goal while creativity still functions. If realistically chosen, that particular creative goal may still be reachable, only the route and time required may be different than expected. Neither the route nor the time are limiting creativity.

Additionally, perceiving elementary steps and their significance defines one's perception of value.
Perception of value determines quite a few things which come afterwards. Distorted values distort the entire unfolding equation.

4. 10 000 hrs

If one disregards a methaphorical purpose of the notion, in the context of adressing that post...
8 hour activity 5 days a week makes 10000 hrs less then 5 years of experience.

Gathering technical knowledge or equipment is one thing, for everything else 5 years is a small moment in time. How small it is becomes apparent years after it passes and one takes an introspective look back.

In audio post-production realm this is even insufficient for gathering the professional-level technical expertise, which also requires advanced knowledge of physics and mathematics. And access to equipment predominantly in analog realm and less affected by "Murphy's law".

Today there are faster means of acquiring information and more information is available. This is counter balanced with the greater time and effort needed for filtering that information. The time and energy required to understand and apply that information and perfect oneself still remain.




EDIT:

The "10000" part seemed familiar. There is a probability the notion got rephrased from the quote "Your first 10000 photographs are your worst" from Henri Cartier Bresson.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Shashbugu, once you put in your 10,000 hours and look back to today, you might think differently...

Thank you, Frank!

and 10,000 hours is just the beginning. I bet I may be coming up on 100,000 hours of color-correction... But in truth, I'd love to erase some of the masters I did in the first 10 years of my career in the 1980s, only because the equipment got so much better, and I got better with experience.

Isn't 10,000 hours only about four years of full-time employment? Besides, this is just a metaphor, the expression just means that it takes time to master a skill to an expert level, not that it takes literally 10,000 hours.

Very true. In some ways, I would hate to have to jump into color right now with zero experience, because there's a hundred times more stuff to learn than there was in, say, 1990.

 

[paulherrin]

moved from: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?108055-Color-for-Non-Colorists-Training-Day-Sat-Nov-9th-West-Hollywood/page4

Whoops, that's 12.

My list is almost the same....

Fortunately I was able to skip the CCC Sunburst....

Unfortunately for me, I didn't I was the guinea pig at Anderson Video, when it was considered as a replacement for Dubner…

anybody want to provide or point to a condensed (and/or comprehensive) history of recent developments in digital color-correction tools (and techniques) - in order to contextualize for myself what we're working with and where we're going? or is this just something else to add to my ever-lengthening research list...?

 

[Marc Wielage]

anybody want to provide or point to a condensed (and/or comprehensive) history of recent developments in digital color-correction tools (and techniques) - in order to contextualize for myself what we're working with and where we're going? or is this just something else to add to my ever-lengthening research list...?

I've been joking about writing The History of Color Correction for years. (John Buck's excellent book Timeline: A History of Editing goes into the exhaustive history of digital editing, which is a very complex subject on its own.)

I was just talking to a friend of mine about the Top 10 Things That Transformed Color Correction, and those highlights would include:

1) the ability to store color-correction decisions on disk
2) secondary color correction [initially we only had lift/gamma/gain corrections]
3) integrated still-store for comparisons [initially we had only standalone still-stores]
4) power windows [which I think first showed up in the 888 Renaissance around 1992 or so]
5) defocus/keying [which I think followed a few years later]
6) non-linear file-based image sources [which started with Clipster, Splice, and other file-based systems, then eventually became integrated into the color corrector]
7) the transition from standard-def to HD (and 2K and 4K)
8) digital intermediates -- bouncing images from film to digital, color correcting, then recording them back out to film
9) the end of CRT monitors and the introduction of flat-screen monitors.
10) digital projection.

That's all I can think of -- I have no doubt Mr. Most can easily think of many more. I should have included "the end of film and the rise of digital," which is a revolution that deserves its own book.

It's sobering to reflect that all color correction done prior to about 1990-1991 was performed almost entirely with lift/gamma/gain and a few secondaries, all accomplished by mechanically pulling actual film on a telecine. I just pulled up an early Resolve manual from about 2006, and it's stunning how primitive and slow it was even back then. We've come a long way.

 

[paulherrin]

:emote_head_explode:

woah. perspective.

reminds me of the feeling i had when i learned vfx history from my professor who worked on jurassic park and before that on punch-card coding. can't even imagine...
these are like... the things i use without consideration.

thank you so much for sharing, and for putting up with my shenanigans... y'all have been through a lot.
respect...

 

[Marc Wielage]

reminds me of the feeling i had when i learned vfx history from my professor who worked on jurassic park and before that on punch-card coding. can't even imagine...

In C Building at ILM, their main post facility when they were in San Rafael on Kerner Blvd. up until about 2005, they had a nice display in the lobby of the original VistaVision triple-head optical printer they used on all the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. This was from the days when everything was shot on film, edited on film, then composited photochemically on film and combining the images through glass and air. It was sobering to look at it and reflect on how difficult and primitive visual effects were back then, but how much they were able to create with such limited resources.

The moment digitalVFX came in, it made those machines obsolete almost overnight. A VFX buddy of mine said he saw Jurassic Park and immediately realized that he had effectively become a dinosaur. To his credit, he went back to school, learned computers, and is still working in the VFX business... so he survived by rolling with the punches, not being intimidated by new technology, and keeping up with the latest developments.

Color correction, editing, and sound mixing all have endured similar revolutions, but the real skills are the stuff outside the computers -- particularly client skills and knowing when and how to take shortcuts that don't sacrifice quality. That's the stuff you can only learn from painful experience.

 

[M Most]

4) power windows [which I think first showed up in the 888 Renaissance around 1992 or so

Actually, as I recall, Power Windows were introduced in a slightly cruder form (only rectangles IIRC) in the original DaVinci Unified Color Corrector in the late 1980's. That unit (knobs, not trackballs - those came later ;-D ) was built by VTA, a video facility in Atlanta, and spun off as a separate product to compete with the Sunburst. At least that's my recollection...

That's all I can think of -- I have no doubt Mr. Most can easily think of many more. I should have included "the end of film and the rise of digital," which is a revolution that deserves its own book..

I can think of a few:

1. Introduction of the TLC (Time Logic Controller) in around 1985 or so. That was the first device to allow frame accurate, 3:2 pulldown accurate editing directly from film to tape. That was a rather huge step not necessarily for color correction, but most definitely for telecine and post production in general. Similar capabilities were later made available in devices like Pogle and Datatron (used by Pacific Video), but the TLC was a very revolutionary device that changed what we could and would be expected to do for years to come.
2. Introduction of Keykode by Kodak (along with keycode readers by companies like Evertz). They had tried to come up with a machine readable time code format using magnetic coating on the back of the film, but that proved impractical. So they went to a man-and-machine readable barcode based system using a modification of traditional key numbers that revolutionized how dailies were done for both television and features (and, incidentally, accommodated both 3 and 4 perf as well as 16mm film).
3. Introduction of 3 perf 35mm film format to the US. I was at Lorimar when we adopted this on "Max Headroom" in order to be able to shoot at 30 frames but use about the same amount of stock as we would for 4 perf at 24 fps. When that proved successful, we introduced 3 perf as our standard shooting format on all of our shows. It was picked up a few years later by other studios, primarily for sitcoms when Panavision introduced 2000 foot mags on the PSR cameras that could run for almost 25 minutes using 3 perf, a great advancement for shows that were shooting in front of a live audience. It gradually took over as the "standard" format for film television production in the mid 90's.
4. (blowing my own horn here....forgive me.........) Introduction of the VIP (Video Interpositive) system at Encore Video. This was the first attempt at providing "uncorrected" material for tape to tape final color correction and was used by Encore for many years. Today, we work from log gamma files, but in 1993, television programs were routinely finished by doing tape to tape color correction on top of dailies that had already gone through dailies color correction. In effect, you were making your answer print from your dailies. I always hated that idea, so with the support of Larry Chernoff we developed a system in which we had two separate feeds coming out of telecine, one with full color correction, and one that completely bypassed the "downstream" DaVinci color corrector. The show was conformed from the "uncorrected" material, so the final color correction had essentially the same source information that it would if we were going back to the original negative, eliminating the notion of "bad dailies" as a limitation.
5. Introduction of 5D Colossus. This was the very first software only color grading system, and was based on technology from Colorfront (yes, the same Colorfront that is now known for their On Set Dailies and Express Dailies products). Introduced in, as I recall, around 2004 or so, it was eventually sold to Autodesk and became the product known today as Lustre. A lot of the basic Colossus features have now become commonplace in systems such as Baselight, Resolve, Film Master, Pablo, and others.

If I think of others I'll let you know.....

 

[Frank Cueto]

Cineon and Domino definitely deserve a mention here, me thinks...

 

[paulherrin]

awesome!

so... more specifically, who and what (else) made way for o brother where art thou?

 

[M Most]

. A VFX buddy of mine said he saw Jurassic Park and immediately realized that he had effectively become a dinosaur. To his credit, he went back to school, learned computers, and is still working in the VFX business... so he survived by rolling with the punches, not being intimidated by new technology, and keeping up with the latest developments.
.

A lot of the VFX "luminaries" come from that era. People like John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Scott Squires, John Knoll, Ken Ralston, Dennis Muren, Hoyt Yeatman, Mat Beck, and many others all started either in the VFX camera department or the optical department, and it's one reason they are still vital and relevant as supervisors. What they developed was not computer skills (although a number of them possessed such skills, and put them to use inventing and developing things like motion control), but an understanding and an eye for what "works" and what doesn't in an image. Those skills are universal, needed, and somewhat rare regardless of the methodology.

 

[M Most]

awesome!

so... more specifically, who and what (else) made way for o brother where art thou?

I'm not sure I understand the question, or if you're asking one. That picture was done at the original L.A. Cinesite, using a Pogle Megadef color corrector and an early version of the Spirit telecine for scanning, The colorist was my friend Julius Friede. What else did you want to know?

 

[M Most]

Cineon and Domino definitely deserve a mention here, me thinks...

If we're talking about equipment, the Spirit Datacine was a very important piece of gear as well, for a number of reasons. As was the original Sony D1 videotape recorder (the very first digital component recorder, and the only uncompressed one), the Sony HDCam recorder (the first viable HD recorder, and the first to offer a 24 frame version), the Panasonic D5 recorder, and the Sony HDCam SR (also for a number of reasons). All of these devices led to allowing colorists to have images that were far more manipulable than any formats previously available.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I'm not sure I understand the question, or if you're asking one. That picture was done at the original L.A. Cinesite, using a Pogle Megadef color corrector and an early version of the Spirit telecine for scanning, The colorist was my friend Julius Friede. What else did you want to know?

I was told by Jill Bogdanovich, who assisted Julius, that they did it all on a daVinci 2K from cut negative on an original Spirit (serial number 002). I think the Pogle came later. The process of doing O Brother was extremely painful and difficult, and took months of work, trying everybody's patience (particularly DP Roger Deakins). Julius did a terrific job under very stressful conditions.

Good call on the TLC -- this replaced the old controllers, which were notoriously not field-accurate. I can't remember the name of the original telecine controller that preceded it, invented by the engineers at Vidtronics in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

We got in one of the original Colossus color-correction systems with the original designer from Hungary to babysit it, back at Cinesite in 2003, and it was a terrible, terrible machine -- crashed every five minutes, had some awful design flaws, just an unreliable system in every way. The eventual improvements that resulted in Lustre made it far more useful, but I still don't like their design paradigm and interface. Baselight or Resolve are far better implementations to me. The current Colorfront system is a patched-together improvement of Colossus, and I'm still not impressed with the interface, though I don't dispute that it works well for dailies delivery.

I believe Kevin Shaw has an interesting list of highlights in the history of color-correction at this link:

http://icolorist.com/library/history-of-color-correction/

 

[M Most]

I was told by Jill Bogdanovich, who assisted Julius, that they did it all on a daVinci 2K from cut negative on an original Spirit (serial number 002). I think the Pogle came later. T

You might be right, but I could have sworn Julius told me it was the Pogle...

The current Colorfront system is a patched-together improvement of Colossus, and I'm still not impressed with the interface, though I don't dispute that it works well for dailies delivery.

If you're talking about On Set Dailies, that product has little to nothing to do with the Colossus/Lustre. It is an all new design that was created with the sole purpose of dailies processing from file based media, as is the more limited Express Dailies. I understand why an experienced colorist might not like the interface, but it's not designed for colorists. It's designed for an operator to do the necessary steps required for dailies processing in the most efficient way possible. And it succeeds in doing that extremely well, as illustrated by its rapid adoption. Color is only one of those steps, and quite frankly, not the most involved and arguably not the most important one. That might sound like sacrilege, but it's absolutely true.

 

[M Most]

Good call on the TLC -- this replaced the old controllers, which were notoriously not field-accurate. I can't remember the name of the original telecine controller that preceded it, invented by the engineers at Vidtronics in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

As I recall, the most common controller prior to the TLC was "3-2-1-Roll......" :laugh: