Color grading in Apple Color

[Pablo Villegas S.]

Hello,

I have a basic question about grading RED footage in Apple Color...

When you start grading, do you reset the primary leaving only the RAW footage to work with? or do you keep the metadata (ISO, Gamma, Sat, etc...) and start from there?

I know you can do it both ways, but which one is better? Does keeping the metadata settings will narrow your range? Or the other way around?

Any advice will be appreciated.

Thanks in advanced.

 

[Tom.Wong]

It depends on a lot of factors, how much time you have and what the DP and Director wants. I usually like to talk to the DP and Director wants. If they want to give me a little more free reign and creatively tweak the look which i sometimes get, and tell me what the want out of it, i generally set everything in the RED tab to the most balanced color temp, and use CAMERA RGB to make most use out of the dynamic range it has, and then go into the primaries and secondaries and all the other RED look functions to build the look from "scratch" if it's time sensitive and the DP already built a look using the metadata, and wants to keep it consistant and only wants me to add contrast and fix any legality issues with the signal, then i just stay in the red gamma and barely touch the RED tab settings, unless i absolutely have to, like if they shot at the wrong color temp, or accidently had the iso on 2000 instead of 800...

 

[Pablo Villegas S.]

Thanks...

So CAMERA RGB gives me the most Dynamic range? I will try that.

I'm the DP, and I have to grade it, I didn't created a look with the metadata, just set a pretty basic look for monitoring, and messed with the ISO.

I will try both ways and see what gives me better results, I'm not an expert in Apple Color. And this is my first RED job, and didn't do any testing, before hand.

Thanks again.

 

[Kaku Ito]

I'd say it's easiest to build from Gamma=RedGamma and Color=RedColor. So if the footage were shot with pre-build30 or not set to Redgamma and Redcolor then I usually select one with those settings and copy to all to begin with.

 

[Pablo Villegas S.]

I'd say it's easiest to build from Gamma=RedGamma and Color=RedColor. So if the footage were shot with pre-build30 or not set to Redgamma and Redcolor then I usually select one with those settings and copy to all to begin with.

Thanks!

It was shot with build 30.5 I think, or the latest one.

 

[Brandon Kraemer]

Here is another approach...

I pre-transcode in RCX... set my spaces to CamRGB and REDLog. Then I grade from the transcodes. Using REDLog preserves the 12 bits of data by translating the information into a 10bit QT or DPX file.

I find Color a lot friendlier to deal with when I am working from transcodes (especially 2k) vs. R3D.

Sharpening is also your friend when working with red footage, found in the Color FX node tool room... but a little goes a long way.

 

[Pablo Villegas S.]

Here is another approach...

I pre-transcode in RCX... set my spaces to CamRGB and REDLog. Then I grade from the transcodes. Using REDLog preserves the 12 bits of data by translating the information into a 10bit QT or DPX file.

I find Color a lot friendlier to deal with when I am working from transcodes (especially 2k) vs. R3D.

Sharpening is also your friend when working with red footage, found in the Color FX node tool room... but a little goes a long way.

Thanks...

This time the footage is already edited in FCP, and they used the proxy worlkflow. So I'm gonna have to import directly from a FCP sequence.

But I'll remember that, and use it in my own work.

Thanks again.