editing Question about hiring a colorist.

harmonica44 · Jul 13, 2014

When I give him the my edited footage for grading is there a format I should give it to him in where he can correct all the cuts individually? I have Premiere Pro, and that has export options such as MPEG-2 and H.264. But when you export the video like, you do not get all of the individual cuts separated, and he will have to make the cuts himself when the shots change.

Is there a better format, where he can be given all the cuts in order so it plays like a movie, but each one will be separated for grading easier?

Thanks.

Sweetie · Jul 20, 2014

I want our short film to look good on all TVs

You better get busy. Go door to door and help people adjust their TV set. All you can do as a filmmaker is make sure the film looks as good as it can based on current standards for the medium. If the color grader has a calibrated monitor that's specific for the task and is doing their job right, that's should translate well. Go and test on multiple TV's just to be sure.

Same for audio. You need to use the correct people and gear. Some people use (for a lack of a better word) sweetened speakers, so things sound better that can sound like crap on other equipment. I'd guess you made the mistake of hiring an audio engineer who wasn't establishes and didn't have the right equipment/environment.

To answer your question. It's simple. Hire the best you can afford. Check references. Let them do their job. Don't get under their foot and try to quote them some obscure statistic that has nothing to do with their job as a reference to "fix their work"

Santhem · Jul 20, 2014

harmonica44 said:
Okay thanks. I am ready to hire a colorist. I notice that in a movie, on everyone's TV or computer the footage looks different. Some TVs have it too dark, some too bright, some too saturated. I want our short film to look good on all TVs, generally.

When I pay the colorist, how will I know that the footage looks good on all TVs? We want to make sure we get our moneys worth. Like a couple of years for example, I hired an audio engineer, and the short film sounded great on her system. Then when I payed her, got the sound, and played it back on other TVs, it sounded like crap.

I don't want to have it look good on the colorist's TV, but have it look bad on all others, once I have payed, and get bamboozled. So how do I know it will look good on other TVs, do I just take a sample and play it back on several, before paying him/her to do the rest?

First of all you need to know what your distribution will be like. Online distribution, TV distribution or cinema distribution will all require different file formats, codecs, etc. Tell your colorist what he/she will be grading for. Do your own research, know what you want to get before hiring a colorist.

A good colorist will have access to a reference-quality computer monitor and a reference-quality TV, both well calibrated. If you then get the right deliveries from the colorist, it should look correct on most well-calibrated screens. You can't get it too look good on a poorly calibrated screen since that is beyond your control. Also, you wouldn't want to support the people who don't calibrate their screens (correctly), thats just insanity.

I don't think i'd be more than fair to get a sample before making payment on the full project, but that's ultimately something that you and the colorist will have to figure out between the two of you. Just make sure you do it beforehand, and don't go asking for favours half-way-through.

harmonica44 · Jul 20, 2014

Okay thanks. Yeah the audio engineer long before just used sweetened speakers probably, and I don't want to make that mistake again.

I have already put out adds for a colorist. Me and my fellow filmmakers are aiming for DVD and local film festival standards.

One thing I have noticed is that different media players make a movie look different. For example, on windows media player, a movie can have purple hazing or some sort of purple artifacts on people's faces, if shot more flat, under certain lights. However, VLC media player does not display any purple and it looks much better. What media player is best to view their work on, would you say? Or is it better to view it on a media player with the most artifacts possible to see how good it will look under the worse conditions?

Will Vincent · Jul 21, 2014

harmonica44 said:
One thing I have noticed is that different media players make a movie look different. For example, on windows media player, a movie can have purple hazing or some sort of purple artifacts on people's faces, if shot more flat, under certain lights. However, VLC media player does not display any purple and it looks much better. What media player is best to view their work on, would you say? Or is it better to view it on a media player with the most artifacts possible to see how good it will look under the worse conditions?

I don't have that issue with my various media playing software.. Maybe you're computer is hosed.

harmonica44 · Jul 28, 2014

Okay thanks. I want film festival distribution for a start and playing on a TV, through a DVD player as well for the actors and crew's copies, so I would probably need two different grades of the film for both, right? Is it the colorists job, or the DVD distributor's job to do this part? There seems to be disagreements when asking people so far.

Will Vincent · Jul 28, 2014

The grade should be the same regardless of the delivery medium.. otherwise the film will look different everywhere it's shown.

For festivals, more of them are wanting DCPs these days, for exhibition. That involves a little extra effort, though it's not terrible, to convert the colorspace from rgb to xyz, and then compress each frame to jpeg2000, and package up the video and various audio streams into a DCP. But other than transforming the colorspace, nothing else should be done to the image as far as the grade is concerned, so long as it was graded within sensible limits.

The easiest thing to do is grade for rec.709, which would be TV & DVD color standards.. that fits well within the color range for a DCP, so if it looks good in rec.709 it'll look fine on the big screen.

Then, once you have your rec709 grade you can render out to various formats for web, dvd, to tiff/dpx/etc for preparing a dcp, etc.

There's a lot of info there.. the important bit, specifically addressing your question is, no. You grade one time.

Santhem · Aug 2, 2014

Will Vincent said:
The grade should be the same regardless of the delivery medium.. otherwise the film will look different everywhere it's shown.

This is not true per-se. Some colorists like to grade the cinema version a bit more laid-back and artistic while having a more punchy, contrasted grade for TV. After all, you need to keep TV watchers more engaged (they might zap away), where as once you've got bums in theatre seats, they ain't gonna leave (because of a grade, maybe if your movie sucks, they will).