A regular Newsletter contributor writes in: "I just caught this Red camera story on the look of the new Suicide Squad movie, and since it mentions Stefan Sonnenfeld and has some discussion of the look, I thought it might be good for the newsletter." Agreed. (via Marc Wielage)

This article is really about the documentary, but at the end it gets to a brief discussion of the color choices: "Unger notes that her preference is for “hyper-realistic color” in documentaries, but in this case... " Click through to read what they went for.

I have to admit, I rarely check out YouTube for color grading techniques and most of these names are not familiar to me. Let me know if you think I should be following any of these YTers for inclusion in this Newsletter?

(live stream) This recording of a recent SMPTE Hollywood meeting features, "a panel of experts discussing the critical importance of standards in the motion picture and television industry."

Personally, I feel strongly that 3D engines like Unreal will be a future opportunity for the readers of this Newsletter. This article is a very basic birds-eye view of what it takes to get started with Unreal and a few common problems.

The latest versions of Unreal Engine are adding tools for filmmakers. Epic Games brought in a team: "The goal was simple: to put each of the new tools through their paces, in a “real world” situation. To that end they created a short test piece to mimic a production workflow. The three-minute production test they created was shot on an LED stage over just four days." Interesting.

(video) Luke Ross shows a simple technique for reducing overall brightness that isn't using Lift/Gamma/Gain and offers up different results than an Offset adjustment.

(video) This looks like a good idea for my on-set readers: "This presentation shows how the HS Scope uses the camera's electronic chroma signal as a guide for calibrating LED lights to get accurate colour reproduction on the different cameras you use. "

Precisely as the headline says.

Jeff Greenberg, a friend of the Newsletter, shares a very interesting workflow if you need to deliver to the YouTube with timestamps, "At this point, neither Adobe nor anyone else lets us go directly from the timeline to YouTube. This solution is a free workaround – using Google Sheets and google’s version of Regex to make this a copy/paste. Three steps."

(video) "In part four of his ongoing series on creating DCTLs, Cullen Kelly builds upon work done to create a static DCTL by adding user-adjustable controls."

"1,000 Insights are now in our Insights Library! In this article Team Mixing Light has new announcements and a look back at our favorites."

(video) "In his latest Custom Workshop, Colorist Joey D'Anna gives you 3 useful custom Fusion templates for use on DaVinci Resolve's edit page."

Lots of charts and number crunching in this write-up: "many users may opt to pay the extra $300 to go straight up to the RTX 3090 which has twice the VRAM (24GB vs 12GB) and a more powerful cooler."

"The RX 6900 XT was priced 36 percent higher than the RX 6800 XT." But does the performance differential match the price differential? Lots of bar charts at the link, including Resolve 17.

DP Ben Allan: "As part of her prep, Clara marked up the script with her preference for ALEXA or URSA for each scene, based on her plan for the visual style of each point in the story." It's an interesting and detailed read about camera selection and shooting with a small crew during the Covid lockdowns.

It looks like Dolby Vision / ATMOS is available only through select cable companies, here in the US.