Tech Talk — Colour Pipelines Without a Colour Suite
None of this is prescriptive. It is what worked in one room, on one shoot, with one set of limitations. Take the parts that map onto your own and ignore the rest with a clear conscience.
Gallery 12 photos · 2 MB
The plan was simple enough on paper, which is usually the first sign that the day will not go the way anyone drew it. We arrived with a shot list, three cases of gear and a rough idea of how long the light would hold.
The part that went wrong
What follows is the part that is normally cut out of these write-ups: the setups that did not work, the compromises that made the schedule, and the two decisions that ended up carrying the whole piece.
- One key, one bounce, and whatever is already switched on in the room.
- Meter for the highlight you cannot recover, then let the shadows fall where the scene wants them.
- Match colour temperature at the source rather than in the grade.
- Leave one practical slightly hot so the frame has somewhere to breathe.
Nobody watching will know how the shot was made. That is the entire point of making it carefully.
What we would change
Every frame here was captured with equipment that would fit in the back of an estate car. That is not a boast about resourcefulness, it is a constraint that shaped the coverage from the first day onward. The full rundown lives on the about page, including the gear we no longer recommend.
- Ingest to the working volume and verify the checksum.
- Generate proxies at a quarter resolution in a codec the machine decodes in hardware.
- Sync audio against the mixer feed rather than the camera scratch track.
- Lock the assembly before anybody opens the colour page.
One last thing. The edit ran long, as edits do. The first assembly came in at nearly double the final length and included an entire sequence that we still think is good and still had to remove.
Sound was the part we underestimated. It always is. The camera work forgives a great deal more than the mix does, and audiences notice the difference long before they can name it.
Genuinely surprised by the monitor comparison. I would have bet on the opposite result and I would have been wrong.
Been following since the first archive post. This is the one I will be sending to people who ask what the site is.
The section on the lighting setup answered a question I have been asking on three forums for a month. Thank you for printing the actual stop rather than describing it.