| Issue DXXIII: The Fundamentals Edition |
| The Color Grading Newsletter |
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News, reviews, thoughts, career advice, and humor for professional Video / Film Colorists & Finishers. Delivered Sundays. Curated by a professional color grader.
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If you're a long-time reader then what I'm about to share may not be for you - precisely. But you probably know someone who will find it useful... but first - a preface.
I've been creating DaVinci Resolve training for over a decade.
Quite a bit of that training is the onboarding type. The problem with producing that type of training is the pace of software development. For such a mature application, Blackmagic develops Resolve at a dizzying pace. And that shortens the window for any training series targeting newbies. Once a new Public Beta version is released, the training seems like it's obsolete.
In 2020 I almost decided to stop creating stand-alone Resolve training courses for beginners.
But I decided to give it another go. Only, it would be different. No more version-based training, repeating itself yearly. It would be based on timeliness concepts - updated only as necessary.
The result of this new approach is finally coming to its full fruition, on MixingLight.com
It's a series of 5 stand-alone training courses all falling under the moniker, " DaVinci Resolve Fundamentals". The first three courses are available now, with the remaining two coming online over the two weeks.
These courses were originally released on LinkedIn Learning but I've just integrated them into Mixing Light's continuing education platform - allowing learners to dig deeper into many concepts by linking to related concepts that we've been talking about over there for a decade.
These training courses may be too 'fundamental' for many long-time readers.
But I'd be surprised if you didn't know someone who could benefit from this approach, including an assistant or a colleague getting up to speed.
I just ask that you keep it in mind and help spread the word! Thanks :-)
This week's Newsletter is short.
Enjoy. I'll see you in two weeks (since next weekend is a holiday).
Happy Grading.
- Patrick Inhofer
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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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(video) "Join us for this special conversation with senior colorists Andrea Chlebak ("Watchmen," "Elysium," "An American Pickle") and Eric Whipp ("Mad Max: Fury Road," "Happy Feet," "Lego Movie 2: the Second Part") as they discuss the creative process of color grading in their work."
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"Even if you don't apply these concepts to your actual images, these ideas could still prove valuable on websites, portfolios, or marketing material many of us make. The main takeaway here is that every color a photographer uses will come with its own connotation."
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"Ever wondered why music makes you feel a certain way? Learn what makes music sound happy and choose the perfect tracks for uplifting scenes."
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| Learn more at MacSales.com |
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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 toolchest with new techniques and approaches.Â
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(forum) Beta 5 requires a database update applied to all existing databases. There are quite a few performance enhancements, plus: "The DaVinci Resolve Studio installer includes the new Blackmagic Proxy Generator and the new DaVinci Resolve Monitoring app."
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(video) A livestream replay: "Come get an inside peek at the different color tools, coding projects, ideas, and more that I'm working on behind the scenes"
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(video) "I show you how you can scale a text to create nice animations or transitions without losing any quality in Fusion."
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(video) For a change of pace: "Working on sound for a big theater? Dolby Atmos is one popular audio format for presenting surround sound in theatrical films. The amount of options for working in Fairlight are truly staggering to me, a non-audio type of person. It’s easy to forget just how much power Resolve has."
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"No matter what type of flickering you are dealing with – from rolling bands caused by out of sync cameras to time-lapse strobing – selecting a preset from the dropdown menu at the top of the Flicker Free effect controls allows you to automatically change the rest of the settings (Time Radius, Sensitivity, etc) so you quickly try several different configurations."
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In case this type of work falls on your shoulders: "The web-based technology offers auto-transcription, auto-translation and auto-spotting into more than 90 languages, helping subtitlers and content producers communicate effectively to broader audiences."
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(video) "Team Mixing Light, and members, discuss Log Gamma curves, revisit Rec-709a, Premiere Pro 2022's color management, and declining job offers."
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(video) "In Part 14 of Learning Baselight Student series, Luke Ross shows creating keys using Baselight's DKey and HueAngle tools. Plus, sausages."
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(video) "New in Resolve 18 is the ‘object tracker mode’ in Magic Mask. Learn to use it for color grading and advanced blurring workflows."
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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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"Now that Apple has a faster entry-level processor, does it make sense to buy the higher-end M1 Pro and Max chips from the last generation?"
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Some interesting possibilities are detailed in this article: "You can connect one Thunderbolt cable for very fast direct-attached storage. But there is also an option called multi-pathing where you can connect two Thunderbolt cables to two different Thunderbolt busses on your Mac for even more performance. It’s a unique option that I’ve never seen before."
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There's more of this: "DaVinci Resolve Studio is another application where we will be primarily looking at the results when using the "High Performance" Windows power profile. This only gives the AMD Threadripper CPUs a small ~5% bump in performance for the Fusion portion of our tests, but the Intel Xeon W-3300 series saw a massive 50-90% increase for those same tests.
This is a large enough difference that we would argue that High Performance is almost a requirement when using the Xeon W CPUs for DaVinci Resolve."
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If you're new to the concept, this is a good primer: "Constantly running out of disk space for your media projects? Look into Network Attached Storage and whether NAS is the right storage solution for you.:
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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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(video) "We get a glimpse of what future generations of virtual reality displays from Meta could look like with a trip to Reality Labs Research, where we meet the Display Systems Research team and try on four of their prototype VR headsets that test the limits of resolution, brightness, focus shifting, and form factor."
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| Th- th- th- that's all folks! I'll see you next Sunday. |
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