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RED Hollywood SECRET Colorists

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mtseng

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For example i use knowing
http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/knowing/hd/

Forget little about the color corrections.
I know the use a contrast curve with the center raised up and below the center raised lower.

But what's the real secret i think is
Sharpness techniques or some texture secrets.
I know i can aproximate with unsharp mask, but this some different.
There are some real secrets sharpness texture.
I know this movie was made with quantel pablo 2k and cooke lenses.


any clue guys?
Do quantel pablo offer this secrets texture sharpness techniques or is a secret formula?

how do you achieve this type of looking.

some things i observed:
- the lows are quite a lot desaturated
- some skin tones looks like are more contrast than the backgrounds
 
It's probably some proprietary methods they cooked up in-house, that involves various matte layers to control the various elements.

Most higher end colorists that I know of (at least on effects/post heavy movies like Knowing) generally utilize multiple mattes to CC each individual layer on its own, so it's probably a high-contrasy matte over the faces, and it looked like he used a lot of directional light to get some hard shadows are stuff.

Then maybe softer light in the background. So I am sure it's primarily a combination of the lighting techniques, and various sharpness/contrast and CC mattes.
 
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know with that topic we have a lot to learn and share.
Please make this topic serious, not with phrases like that.
"the biggest secret is capturing great images. "
 
mtseng said:
know with that topic we have a lot to learn and share.
Please make this topic serious, not with phrases like that.
"the biggest secret is capturing great images. "
Click to expand...

But it is simply true.
 
Yeah; I'm sure hiring the DP who shot I, Robot and the latest installments of the Underworld, Die Hard and Mummy franchises wasn't really necessary, since they also had the super-secret "Hollywood Blockbuster" plug-in ... :glare:

I felt many of the online trailers for Knowing weren't exactly subtle in terms of grading; is that perhaps the look you mean? The power windows seemed much less obvious and more natural looking in the finished film.
 
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i don't wanna mean that dp and lighting is not important,
there a lot hollywood secrets
but
i am talking specific about sharping and constrast curves techniques differ from other movies.
There are several secrets in that area.
understand this , it's another topic.

please, awnser this topic if you really know what i am talking about.
let's share and make red communitie strong.
i really apreciate if you understand this.
i think forum is a place to share experiences not to throw bad opinions to other threads.
 
I don´t know why you´re expecting such big secrets in hollywood blockbusters. It´s really simple, good DP, good Colorist, enough money to light the way you´re looking for and to post it right.

I´ve seen independent films who do look like big hollywood flicks, it´s just people who know what they are looking for, and who know how to achieve it.

Try to build an wooden armchair with no expeirience, you won´t sell it to anyone, because it looks like your first armchair. If you know your trade, and learned how to do it, you´ll probably able to sell it for a good price. No secrets, just learning and hard work, not too many secrets in here.

And the knowing trailer is not really a very well done trailer, there are some scenes in there which are pushed too far, and you can see a lot of grain/noise. Clearly the DP hat a different / darker look in mind than the Production.

Don´t have the link here, but Stu Maschewitz did a great Tutorial on Red Giant Software about Color Grading, look out for it, this gives you some basics to start with, but again no secrets, just knowledge and skills.

found it:
http://library.creativecow.net/arti...iant-blockbuster-film-look/video-tutorial.php
 
Hi all,

A couple of things...

I am not a colorist, but I have had the good fortune to work with many of the busiest and most in-demand colorists in Los Angeles. Here are a few things I have noticed:

There are two kinds of colorists - people that come from a traditional film color background, and people that come from a compositing background. The ones who come from a film background, in general, rarely use shapes/mattes/power windows/etc. They do 95% of their work with primaries. I'm not going to name names, but I know that many of the biggest movies that are out on the screen now from some of the biggest facilities were graded almost exclusively with primaries.

This is an absolute testament to a deep knowledge of color and how color really works. People who come from a film coloring background are chemists and don't know it. : ) They have a deep understanding of dye layers, and how colors interact with each other at a fundamental level. Many of them that I know came from a fine art background and are talented artists in their own right.

The "compositing" colorists are the knob twiddlers. They are no less talented, but come to their knowledge of color in a very different way. They are the ones that have multiple travelling mattes on many shots, tons of vignettes, etc, etc.

This also breaks down, more subtly, into colorists who started in film, and colorists who started in video.

From what I have seen - colorists who start in film are the ones that typically have more "beautiful" films. They are the ones that are masters of skin tone, and can make an outdoor scene just absolutely luscious. The colorists who start in video are the ones that have more "stylized" looks. They are the ones that are big fans of drastic cross-processed, bleach-bypass looks, etc, and create a lot of the popular looks of the day.

But - to answer the first question - there are no universal magic recipes. Every talented colorist, just like every talented compositor/editor/mixer/etc., has their own personal bag of tricks that they use for specific situations. Things that they have picked up over years of experience.

Always keep in your mind - real DI as we know it started with "O Brother Where Art Thou." There are an awful lot of films created before then that look pretty good. The people who said, "start with good looking images" are not wrong either... ; )

Best,

Lucas Wilson
------------
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
luki said:
There are two kinds of colorists - people that come from a traditional film color background, and people that come from a compositing background.
Click to expand...

That's quite true. Steve Scott at EFilm is one of the latter - he was never a colorist before coming to EFilm. He was a Flame/Inferno compositor, and a very good one. I've often told him that while "traditional" electronic color work is often called color correction, I think of his approach as "color compositing" - in other words, taking the picture apart and putting it back together again.
Although I come from a more "traditional" color background, I began incorporating a lot more of the "color compositing" techniques when I became more involved in digital intermediate work, simply because there was more time available (compared to television work), and because those kinds of things are much easier on software based DI systems than they are on DaVinci 2K's. But I still feel that an over-reliance on multiple isolations and heavy use of secondary correction, especially at the beginning of the process, is usually either a sign of inexperience, or an attempt to do things simply because one can, not because it really helps to tell a story. All color manipulations - just like all editing decisions - should be done with a purpose, not just because it seems to "look cool" at the time.
 
Given the Knowing reference, shouldn't this thread be retitled, Red Adelaide secret colourists?
 
Shane Betts said:
Given the Knowing reference, shouldn't this thread be retitled, Red Adelaide secret colourists?
Click to expand...

I believe "Knowing" was shot primarily around Melbourne, Victoria (not Adelaide) and finished at Park Road in Wellington, New Zealand.
 
The best thing to learn is how each color affects the other. Grab a clip and find the footage that best suites what you are looking for and go for it. I've learned experience of doing is the best for me and I've had very very little training and a lot time in front of a machine experimenting.

The thing to do is get out there and play!
 
knowing at park road isn´t just a primary color correction.
efilm doesn´t do just simple process color correction on film.
They all have lot of color changes and texture changes. Not just different curves.
I am talking about , sharpness techniques, halos, composition mask curves,individual channel luminace changes, etc...
Is this that i am trying to make people share more and discover more.
I think this is one of the keys to good looking images.
maybe i am asking to much.
i wonder if some colorists can talk about some techniques.
 
No one ever said that any of the films you mentioned were simple color corrections. But as has been said before, there aren't really any secrets.

It was linked before, but it bears repeating. Watch Stu's video, and you'll see how a few fairly simple changes can have a dramatic effect on the image.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/maschwitz_stu/red-giant-blockbuster-film-look/video-tutorial.php

There's no secret sauce, no super-secret hollywood plug-in. Just talented people using powerful tools.

I recently had the opportunity to exchange emails with some of the Colorists at Company 3, the people who handled the DIs for Terminator, GI Joe and pretty much every big name film this summer. If anyone was going to have a secret trick, it'd be them. But everything they told me about their techniques was something that I could do. (I'm not good enough to do it yet, but I'm theoretically capable of doing it in the tools I have available, namely FCP and Color)
 
mtseng said:
I am talking about , sharpness techniques, halos, composition mask curves,individual channel luminace changes, etc...
Is this that i am trying to make people share more and discover more.
I think this is one of the keys to good looking images.
maybe i am asking to much.
i wonder if some colorists can talk about some techniques.
Click to expand...

There are no secrets. There is only experience and talent. What the controls do can be learned from a book, or from "tips." How to make images help to tell a story can't. If you're looking for magic "make great" buttons, they don't exist. Every system, from Apple Color to Pablo, can help a talented colorist to make the images sing. They all have essentially the same capabilities. The same cannot be said of the people running them. That's where the experience and talent come in.

You seem to think that there are some things that colorists know that you don't, and you're probably correct. But you also think that if someone would just tell you these things, you would then be a colorist. That's not the case. Being a good colorist, like being a good cinematographer, takes time. If you don't enjoy the journey, you're not going to like the destination.
 
Exactly. Also remember that the techniques used by any colorist is entirely dependent on the source material. Dependent on exposure, captured contrast, desired end result, color/texture tastes of the director/dp. No single solution...

But what could be helpful is maybe uploading some uncolor-corrected stills of your own and opening up a discussion as to what potentially could be done to correct and grade them.
 
Maybe take a look at this...

http://red.cachefly.net/redreel/RedReel_h264_720.mov

I'm not a colorist, but here is my advice... Get a good set designer (dont put happy people wearing black and blue in a dark room, maybe happy people wearing yellow or light green in a park with flowers...) awesome lighting and a great DP. Know how to expose for RED, remember its NOT exposing for film. Getting a good exposure makes a world of difference in post. Use your histogram, false color, meter, zebra, etc... to achieve a good exposure. Color correcting isn't about fixing an image, you enhance the image you have, build on the emotion your conveying with the story, your actors, lighting/camera work, and set design. Your color correcting should be another tool you use in achieving the look you want, not a substitute for any of the above.
 
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