🎨 Colorist Newsletter #487

Published: Sun, 06/27/21

Issue CDLXXXVII: The U.A.P. Edition
The Tao of Color Grading Newsletter
Curated links of news, reviews, thoughts, career advice, and humor for professional Video / Film Colorists & Finishers. Delivered Sundays.
From The Publisher
Next weekend is a holiday weekend here in the USA. This Newsletter is observing that holiday so we'll see you again on Sunday, July 11. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, enjoy the start of your summer!

Happy Grading!

I'll see you in two weeks.
(and remember - if you have a story that's a fit for this Newsletter, hit reply or email it to '[email protected]'! 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.
The Craft
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.

This is a very interesting read about the workflows being used to originate live events as HDR: “What we did . . . was to develop a technique called Closed Loop Shading, where Shaders continued to work in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range). They just carry on doing their job. But we basically have an HDR production from which we derive SDR — we don’t have a parallel production process or an add-on from the output of the cameras."

An interesting breakdown of the top streaming services and their market shares over the past two years as Disney+ and Apple+ launched.

"As consumers cut the cord for streaming services there’s a crisis brewing for TV news which should be of concern for anyone who values a well-informed citizenry. Tom Rogers, the first president of NBC Cable . . . lays out the quandary for the TV news business..."

This is very interesting: “What if it actually looks for depth data when it shifts?” Nicholson asks. “If it can shift back and forth fast enough, you could do photogrammetry with a single chip and a single lens. It’s photogrammetry, but on steroids.”

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The Tools
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. 

Good stuff: "The history of my advocacy for a linear workflow has been full of examples like this. Motion blur, defocus blurs, simple compositing operations, 3D lighting and shading, combining 3D render passes or live-action exposures, even anti-aliasing of text, all look better, more organic, and more realistic when performed in gamma 1.0."

Blackmagic has 5 books for learning DaVinci Resolve. In the past few weeks, every single one has been updated to Resolve 17. Click through and scroll down to the 'Training Books' section to download the free PDFs and follow-along material.

(video) Colorist Darren Mostyn breaks down how the parallel node's image processing works and how he uses it in his fixed node trees.
 

(forum) This is an interesting calibration feature and the forum thread includes customer calibration reports: "The latest release of ColourSpace includes a unique Grey Scale Plus profile . . . and the subsequent LUT Generation colour engine has been developed for multiple primary colour displays - which as yet do not exist. But, LG WOLEDs are a likely potential application, due to the additional White pixel."

"The second release of Calman 2021 holds many new features for users of the software, including new Calman Ready BenQ supported displays and additional calibration functionalities of Calman Ready ASUS ProArt monitors . . . (plus) separated UPRtek and Gamma Scientific meter selections in its UI and improved the loading of reports to generate automatically on load across all license levels."

A detailed overview of the two new features in Premiere Pro that most readers of this Newsletter will find interesting.

As usual, they provide lots of context and workflow descriptions to help you understand their tools: "ShotHub’s core functionality is to provide the rich metadata coming from either Silverstack or Livegrade so that you can get clip metadata or grading information on any device with a web browser far beyond the shoot."

"Any OTT or streaming service provider, implementing one or more types of codec into a workflow, will reduce storage requirements, increase device reach, and reduce the actual cost of transmitting media from A to point B. The question is by how much and at what financial cost?" Click through for actual financial numbers.
 

If you want to understand this codec (that we all use at one point or another) this is a good place to start.

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Pushing Photons
These stories are from MixingLight.com's membership Library of color grading articles, tutorials, and podcasts (Tao Of Color is co-Owner). Do you want to read a story listed here but not a member? Sign up for a free 7-Day Test Drive.​​​ There's also color correction Practice Projects for purchase.

Also,
Mixing Light continues running its 'Work From Home' permanent discounted pricing offer as our industry is still trying to find its footing after the year-long lockdowns.

(video) "In Part 2 of his series on coding DCTLs, Cullen Kelly covers some additional setup and tools you'll need to successfully build DCTLs."

"Learn how to use Resolve 17's new remote panel capabilities for remote color grading that is secure, interactive, and color accurate."

"In Part 2 of his series, Joey shows you how to take remote color sessions to the next level by adding macros & remote control to your ATEM switcher setup."

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Gear Heads
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.

"How can you prepare to get the best experience with Jellyfish Remote Access? And what can you reasonably expect to achieve with it? We are happy to share some best practices based on real-world testing and user feedback."

You may also want to click through for a website link that lets you know the current latency between two cities - which can be useful for troubleshooting remote sessions.

"How does the Pro Vega II Duo compare to a single RX 6900 XT? And how fast do they run when BOTH are active?" Very interesting results when both are active.

Lots of detail in this article: "Part one will cover the basics of storage measurements and requirements which are typically required for media centric NAS solutions.  Part two will cover hardware based RAID solutions and part three will cover software defined offerings based on ZFS."

" . . . they named it ZeRØ as that is the amount of performance impact to expect from this mitigation. Considering the performance impact applying all current Spectre and Meltdown mitigations have on a system, making those changes will be seriously tempting." This article is a summary that links to a more extensive writeup, if you want the details.
 

"Big Sur resists the ideas of a bootable external backup . . . let’s start with an explanation of why that is, so you understand exactly how difficult the task has become, and then proceed to the best new strategy."

Sunday Fun(nies)
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.

(video) If you're a fan of sports then you'll love this high-speed video (Edgertronic) of a world-class knuckleball. (via Robbie Carman)

This item was sent in by a Tao Newsletter reader and frequent contributor. But here's why I placed it in the Fun(nies) section: After watching this 75 second commercial for Premiere Pro, read the comments! (via Vivian Pimenta)

(pdf) Why read news summaries when you can read the actual preliminary report on what the US government knows about UFOs. It mostly focused on the past 2 years, where the US military formalized data collection and documented 149 unidentified objects - of which only 1 was definitively explained. I definitely consider this: Fun.

 
Th- th- th- that's all folks! I'll see you in two weeks.