The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP017: Tips For New Colorists

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

We get asked for advice by new colorists and those looking to do more color (editors,DPs, etc) all the time.It’s easy to get into the technical weeds very quickly. In our opinion, a super technical deep dive into modern coloring is not the place to start - it can be overwhelming and turn off a lot of people who are looking for a creative outlet. So instead of debating the merits of specific workflows and tools, in this episode, we jump into a handful of high-level tips geared to help the new colorist or those working in other disciplines get their feet under them in the world of color. Some of the things we’ll explore in this episode include:The power of a less is more approach and following your instincts on overdoing gradesLearning how to respect the photography of a project and not reinvent itWork in passes, focusing on big moves first and working to not get caught up in tiny details right awayWhen it comes time to massaging details learning how to focus on the ones that really matterUnderstanding and learning how to fight visual adaptationA good-looking scope doesn’t always equal a great-looking shotLearning to understand visual intent and why neutral is not always the goalWhy reference monitoring is and always will be important & why calibration/environment is more important than a specific display technology. Not overcomplicating color management & believing everything the internet has to say on color pipelinesThe importance of allowing time for experimenting & learning not to feel pressured to use new tools just because they’re thereShaping your best characteristics - confidence & communication Thanks for watching/listening! If you liked this episode please be sure to like the show and follow us wherever you found the show. Big thanks to our friend and fantastic colorist Josh Petok for the show concept. Follow Josh on Instagram @joshpetokThanks as always to our sponsor Flanders Scientific for the support and to our editor Stella.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another installment of the Offset Podcast. And today, we're talking about our top tips for new colorists and those who want to be doing more color. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody. I'm Robbie Carmen, and that is Joey Deanna.

And Joey, today we're going to be talking about something. It's actually not an idea that we came up with. It's an idea that we got from our buddy, Josh Ptock. Josh is a awesome colorist based out in L.A. He does a lot of reality stuff. We've known Josh for, I don't know, probably a decade plus. And he's always just a good font of information. And he had some great ideas for some various podcasts.

But one of the ones that he suggested, and I think we gravitated to pretty quickly, was the idea of our kind of tips for people who are new to the color industry are also those who might be doing something else in the industry but have an affinity towards color, want to be doing more. I'm thinking of editors, DPs, et cetera, who I'll dabble in color. It's great, it's a great topic from Josh, and I think we have a lot to say on it. But before we actually dive into those tips and those things that we think are important, I did want to say one sort of table setting kind of thing. And that is the industry is very different than when we came up in it 20 or 25 years ago, right? You know, when we started, you know, in our early 20s at some of these places, there was, there was, I don't know, this thing called a facility that doesn't exist as much as it used to.

And at those facilities, there was heavy iron equipment that cost hundreds of thousands. if not millions of dollars. There really wasn't, you know, freelance colorists in the sense that we have today. There really wasn't people doing color correction in their bedroom, their basement, their laptop, all those kind of things, partly because of technology, partly because of cost. You had to go to a facility. You had to work on one of these big iron systems. And kind of, I think the biggest part of that is that when we were coming up 20, 25 years ago,

there was also a much more robust mentoring system than there is today. You know, you sat with somebody, you learned the ropes, you went and got coffee, you got yelled at, all those various things. So it is a very different world. And I think we just owe it to our listeners to say that we come from that other world, right? Where, you know, we don't have all the answers for the new colorists or those who aspiring to do color. But I think, you know, we have some interesting perspective on this, right? Yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, as, you know, like you said, these things have been.

democratized, especially over the past like 10 years. And the one thing that hasn't been democratized as much is that mentoring pipeline. As we get further away from the facility, we get further away from really solid mentorship. And that's something that I hope, I know we both hope that we can kind of help with things like this podcast. So let's just jump into some tips. Let's say you're new to color grading or you are starting to move from another field. and post-production into color grading.

The first tip that we really want to talk about is less is more. As a overall concept, you in most cases want to try to do the least to an image to make it look correct. And what this means to me is a lot of times you might be looking for a really big AB toggle, right? You turn off the grade, you turn on the grade. Wow, I did a lot. It's really different. Yeah.

I just want to tell everybody. And Robbie, I'm sure you'll agree. Big different doesn't always mean a proportionally amount better. True. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that is funny to me is that this is an instinct that turns up a lot in coloring and a lot in the finishing stage of post-production. It's this, and we've talked about it before on other shows about HDR and, crank it to 11. And it just seems like the temptation to do a lot because you can do a lot

with the tool sets that are in modern coloring applications just seems like this like free fall pass for a lot of people who are getting into it. And related, we've talked a lot about how like, oh, it doesn't matter. There's no, you know, there's no scorecard. While it matters is that your client likes it, it ends up on TV or whatever. But I have found that especially when interfacing with people who are new colorists or new to doing color, that that temptation to overdo it is something that you have to like break early on in somebody. It's almost like training like a horse or figuring out a new race car or something like that to put it in your terms. And I think that a lot of people look at the tool sets in front of them and go, oh, well,

I can do a key. I can do a curve. I can do this color warper thing. I can do X, Y, and Z. And then they end up with not just an overall complication in terms of the tool set they're using, an overall complication in their node or layer structure, an overall complication of what is actually doing what. And the end of that, to me, tends to be images that you can tell are over-engineered, right? And there's a lot of tells to that. But like, I had something the other day on Facebook, you know, it's one of those groups where they posted something and they're like, tell me what you think about this. And I'm like, well, my first instinct was, I have no idea what your client brief was. I have no idea what the context is because it's just a still frame.

But looking at this single frame, it feels very engineered to me. They had done something, you know, pretty robust with the sky and some colors that didn't feel natural. So I think that that's in one way. I think less means literally doing less. But I don't know. I just think that this is something that I think has to be kind of over time kind of, taken out of people's instincts to do. I don't know what you feel, how you feel about that.

Yeah, and that's an important thing to mention is the instincts, right? Because when you're just getting started in this, and you haven't been looking at images critically in detail for a very long time, your eye and your taste might not be sensitive to some of the damage you're doing to an image when you make these broad changes. You could make a really aggressive white balance change, for example, and 80% of the image could look great. But then you're also introducing some.

real crunchy or noise in the shadows or in a detail somewhere else. And if you're not experienced, you might not notice those problems. So you might look, I made this big change, my before and after is like amazing. I'm the best colors in the world. But your eye might not be sensitive enough to really see the entirety of the impact that big, big, big change of the image has. So when you're getting started and just in general, no matter how experienced you are, the less you can do to the image in general,

general the better. Obviously there's exceptions to really advanced grades or things that need heavy compositing or stuff like that. I'm not saying, you know, cut yourself off at the knees, but just always be mindful of if you feel like you're working too hard for it, you probably are and you might want to try a different approach. Yeah. And I think the, I think there's three things that come to mind that I rip on this particular one. Number one, we've heard it a lot from a lot of experience colors. We say it a lot. I think we owe this, this, this, this, this, this, this to our pal Walter Vopato, but it's the idea of respecting the photography. First and foremost, your job is not to reinvent the photography.

Your idea, your job is to enhance or, you know, correct small problems of the photography. I agree with you. If you're finding yourself totally reinventing the image, chances are it's not a very good production. Now, with one caveat here, and I think we're kind of bouncing around it, but if you are new, you're not likely getting the highest quality starting images either. So like anything else, it's a balance. You might find some of these things you do need to hit with a pretty big hammer,

but just always be mindful. Yeah, I think the other thing that comes up, not the second, because this is like the ninth, but the other thing that comes to mind about this is that I think there's so much talk about precision, like, oh, it's 32-bit float, you can do this, you can do that, you can do this, which leads people to, I think, have the idea that coloring in no way is a destructive process, and I disagree with that.

Because at its heart, you are changing, fundamentally changing what the pixels are doing in the image, right? And because of the math involved, because how all these tools work and all the various, you know, edge cases and, you know, sort of potentiality of some of these tools that way they work, you are doing something destructive to an image. And the more that you do that, the potential for more degradation in the image is possible. I mean, you see this all the time with things like bad keys. You see this all the time with curves that might have control points that are too tight together. And there's not enough, you know, bit depth or color information in the image.

So you're getting banding or noise. I mean, it is, yes, the tools are amazing what they can do and present us a clean, finished image. But there is still some destruction possible. And I think that the more that people bend and push and pull on the image, that's the other thing. And then the last thing about this one, I'll say that I think less is more. And I think we made a joke about this in another episode we did on color grading myth busting was the idea that like, you know, I gave the story about a client came over behind the desk and said, well, obviously you don't have enough nodes, right? And I see one of the things that's happening to a lot of new colorists is, again, that inkling to do a lot.

more than they really need to. But there's also this idea that just like, hey, well, if I have a big, complicated fixed node graph, that means I'm doing it right. And I think you often see with new color, so people just getting the color, they'll have a node that, let's say, set some initial contrast. And then they'll have a node, like three, four nodes down, that kind of cancels out and like, you know, softens the contrast, right? And they have all these nodes where like, even from an organization point of view, it's like, what the hell is going on? But in reality, from a pure technical point of view, they have a lot of canceling out going on

because they're not, you know, they're trying to do too much in the image in too many places, and that can also be a danger. Yeah, and that kind of brings me into our next topic, and this is going to sound a little funny

because we literally just said, less is more, right? So it's going to sound like we're crazy when I say, you need to do the big moves first. 100%, yeah. It sounds like we're saying the opposite, but we're not.

What I mean by saying, do big moves first is doing all change to the image. Don't focus on tiny detail your first pass through a piece or for a show. And that really applies to your node structure building as well. Like you just, it's it's easy to build a really over complicated node structure and do a little minus one plus one, minus two, plus three to get back to one. That's just going to confuse you. So if you take a mentality of, I'm going to go shot, do one overall adjustment, right, white balance and exposure, my basic grade, just do that for the whole piece.

Then watch it again and refine. Watch it again and refine. And every time you watch it down, you can add more value and add more improvements to smaller parts of the image. But I'm a huge fan of working in passes. I've always worked like this. It is, you know, your first pass, the goal should be to get through that. first pass almost as quickly as possible you know go in balance exposure next shot balance exposure next shot make one big move to get the to you know big hammer mold the shot into the

ballpark and move on we can get to the other little tiny nitpicky details later so in that big move we still believe less is more you don't want to break the image totally but condense it into if possible one big move in your initial pass. Yeah, so there's some sort of like subparts of that I think are worth talking about. So, um, and we'll get to another one of these things about adaptation and that kind of stuff in just a second. But I, I agree with you because I see a lot of new colors or people who are, you know, editors who are jumping into color.

They, you know, we look at like, you know, a typical like long form timeline for us might be thousand shots, 1500 shots, something like that. And we have two or three days. to get through the show, right? And I see a lot of these new people to color, A, intimidated by the sheer number of shots, but B, getting stuck on this idea that, like, okay, I'm on shot number one,

I have to perfect shot number one before I can move on to shot number two, right? And not only is that shooting yourself in the foot for some color science, psychological reasons that we'll talk about in a second, that's also slowing you, massively slowing you down, right? it's also kind of giving you kind of like image bias right you're trying to perfect this one image you're and I know this sounds counterintuitive but the longer you look at something the worst you're

going to make it and I also I also think often about there's a colorist she's now she's now based in LA but Andrea Clayback is her name and I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrea maybe five or six years ago maybe a little more even actually now to think about it She had, she had done a lot of work with Neil Blomkamp, the director who had done District 9, Elysium, that kind of stuff. And this was right after she had done Elysium, which was one of the first films, by the way, done in Aces, which was a big, big, big cool thing. But she talked about working with Neil and the, you know, the stakeholders in that film and watching the film hundreds of times, right? And I think to a new colorist, they're going, well, dude, I just want to get through this and be done with it. Like, why would I watch a film a hundred times?

It feels like torture, right? Because of what you just said. Because context matters. Because context matters, passes matter. You notice different things at different times, the flow of shots from one into another, what precedes it, what follows it. All of that context really matters. And if you're trying to perfect an image one shot at time and do very small minutia kind of things in that initial first couple passes, you're going to just paint yourself into a corner and have a problem with it. Right. And then I think the other. part about this is that some of those detail things that you think matter might not matter, right? In other words, like, I see a lot of people getting caught up with like, oh, I'm going to tweak this pixel and tweak the pixel, right? And it's like in the context of flow, you never notice it, right? Now, I know I keep bringing up Walter because he's, you know, one of my intellectual heroes, but, you know, he did this film Dunkirk, it was Christopher Nolan film, right and if you know anything about nolan nolan's a big film fan you know all that kind of stuff right and i remember watching this film in the theater and going nothing matches this is like the

worst grading ever and you hear walter talk about it and he's like dude it's just it's it's about story it's about flow it's not necessarily about every single you know people were getting on it about like well in this reverse the sun's at a different angle and it's like dude it's was it a good story or not and i think a lot of time new colors get so caught up on and we've talked about this in our MythBusters episode about things like skin tone line and stuff like that, get so caught up with these, these things that they've heard that they forget to watch the film in context as a film. They're so caught up on details that might not really matter. And again, that's a, that's a speed and slow you down thing. So yeah, let's take that kind

hypothetical. You're new to this. You're going shot by shot and you're trying to perfect every single shot. You're spending five minutes on a shot, six minutes on a shot. Let's talk about why that's never going to work. One, you can never develop efficiencies, right? If I'm going through the same thing on every shot, my quick balance first pass, I'm going to get into a flow where I've got in my head the overall balance of this scene, and I can go shot to shot to shot and match it every shot quickly. It's muscle memory, right? You're going to just get into a zone where you kind of feel that overall first adjustment, and you're going to get through those shots so much faster than if you had, even with your additional passes, you're going to get through faster

and have more time to perfect everything than if you tried to sit on each shot for five minutes. But the real science behind this is something called adaptation. And it is a real thing that happens to all humans, because remember, our eyes capture light, our brains assemble images. The longer you look at an image, even in the most perfect, calibrated, controlled, your brain will subconsciously fix that image for you. Right? So if you're staring at the same shot for five minutes straight, you're going to push yourself into some wacky direction. When you come back and look at it a couple shots later or maybe the next day,

you will be like, this isn't even the shot I remember looking at because it isn't. You're tricked you by looking at that image for too long. I cannot tell you how many discussions I've had with people. And I think this, I don't mean to pick on photographers, but this is just an easy way of saying this feeling, is that a lot of photographers, they look at a frame and they perfect that frame, right? And that's great in frame based corrections, right? Like you don't necessarily have to have one frame matching another frame and so on, right, unless it's a, you know, a triptych or some sort of series or whatever. So a lot of people take that, you know, again, that whole, you know, thing about, hey, I'm going to focus on this, make it perfect, whatever. And not only is it the time suck that we just spoke about, right?

It's the adaptation is that the longer you look at something, the worse you're going to make it. And it's like they get, I mean, I, we say this all time, right? Like, anybody can make a single shot look great. What the challenge in doing what we do is making the next shot and the next one and the whole scene and the next scene and the whole movie. feel like a cohesive thing like they all belong to each other. And you're 100% right about this, that the longer you look at things, the worse you'll make them.

And that plays into the big moves, add value, you know, move on thing, right? It's like, you know, I didn't say this when we talked about a second ago, but the other part about working in passes that is an adaption fighter. I mean, that's really what we're talking about is fighting adaption. By working in passes, you're fighting that process of adaptation. But the other thing you're also doing is like a value add. right you know if you have a 1500 shot timeline and you have three days to do it if you're stuck on each shot you're not going to get to the end the whole thing i always want to be i never want to be

in a position where i've graded 70% of the shots and i ran out of time for the last 30% of the shots right so that big honking moves thing also just lets me touch every shot so if if somebody pulls the plug i run out of time or whatever well guess what at least i've touched every shot i've improved slightly every shot even if they're not perfect matching or whatever i've done something that's That's something I wanted to mention earlier. But from an adaptation point of view, that workflow passes, helps you battle adaptation. And I think to a lot of new colorists or those who try to do color more, it's not just that part, Joey, that focuses in adaptation. There's other color science, psychoscience or whatever that phrases that affect this.

When we've talked about these things before, in room environment, big one, right? It's crazy how many people try to do color critical things in rooms that have like, you know, the pink spill on the wall like you have for the podcast, right? Or they have windows where lights constantly changing or all that kind of stuff, right? So those are all contribute to that. I would also add to the fact that adaptation is not a weakness because it happens to everybody. And one of the ways that I think we get, you know, the higher end professional colors, you know, fight this. the things that we just mentioned, but also a big one is taking a break.

It's amazing how often, and this is the situation that I hear all the time for people, new colors. They go, all right, man, I got resolve or I got whatever, elementary, and I'm getting into the shot and pulling them a thing, everything looks killer. Like, I'm going to win an award, this looks awesome. Let's go and take a break.

Let's go grab some lunch, right? They come back, they sit down in front of the machine, and they go, wow, that looks horrible. Like, did something change? Did the balls on the color panel start moving? Did somebody sit down at my desk and tweak something? No, that's not what happened. The fact that you were adapting to that image, as you just said,

and your brain was making you think that it was all right, and you sit back down in front of it and go, well, now it's yellow, now it's green, now it's too contrastier or whatever. A lot of colorists will get egotistical and say, I'm a colorist. I have perfect vision. My eyes or my living.

I'm wonderful. You can exercise your sensitivity, to perception and the more you do this, the more you can spot things, but the best colorists are the ones that understand that all human vision is fallible. Yeah, and we can take steps, intentional steps in our workflow to minimize that. That's how you get the best results. Now, I'm not saying that I have not been victim to just pushing through and getting something done and it's midnight, one o'clock, whatever, and I'm just, I got to get it done.

but nine times out of 10 probably 9.5 times out of 10 the play that I would suggest for everybody including us is at a certain point go home go to bed come back the next day fresh eyes new feeling you break that adaptation but if you don't have that time even taking that five-minute break walking around coming back and this is actually a big one when you come back into your room like give yourself a few minutes to just kind of get settled before you buy it back into it because if you're like outside grabbing lunch or in the hallway and there's tungsten lights and it's bright or whatever and you sit back down in that room for that first few minutes until you kind of get used to that environment again you're going to be making similar bad decisions right so that's that's a bad thing as well um another one that's related to all of this that i see and we talked a little bit about this in our myth-busting episodes about the skin tone line but I think that new colorists and new people getting into this game have been brainwashed to a certain degree that if the scopes look right, that means that I have a good looking image, right? And I have this really funny anecdote about this that I did years ago, I was leading the class and I had this exercise where I, hid the viewer basically so nobody could see it right and I just showed them the

showed them a scope and said tell me about this shot right and just you know to visualize this for our listeners and our viewers think about a vector scope being pushed heavily towards yellow red right and the waveform had you know a big peak right kind of in the middle that was a little clipy right and I said what what are we looking at right and they're like, oh, well, we're looking at, you know, it looks like it's warm, it looks like it's bright. It's probably, you know, people on the beach at sunset, right? And I'm like, okay. And so people kept guessing about what it was.

And I turned the viewer on and they go, oh, right? And it was this guy sitting in a desk chair with a big tungsten light that was clippy, right, and had this big orange thing, right? And I said, what do you think now? like, well, that's not what I was expecting. And so I bring that up because people look at scopes thinking that it tells 100% of the story. All a scope does is give you information that you as the user need to interpret and adapt to how you want the image looking at it.

So to play that out further, if my client brief was, I want everything to be cool and blue or whatever, right? like you look at the scopes and you go that's not the story that I'm telling and you just push everything blue guess what like it could look terrible because you're not actually looking at the image you're looking at scopes and you're going well this is perfect skin tone this is perfect contrast this is perfect flow now I just think that's a mistake I used to be of the attitude of like oh yeah I can do anything with scopes and more and more and more and more like I just I don't even like look at my scopes all that often I mean I do I do technical things like if you're doing something in the hdr i'm trying to hit a thousand minutes or i'm trying to hit exactly a brand color or something like that but to me the bigger thing is that that feel and that flow works it's less about perfect skin tone perfect contrast that kind of thing so to me i'm a little bit different in my attitude here because i do look at the scopes constantly if i am grading something and i don't have the scopes up the second i make an adjustment i feel uncomfortable because i don't see it changing

in a scope. But to me, the scope is a tool to visualize those perceptive things where your brain is playing tricks on you. And that's it. Right. So when I'm grading a shot, I'm looking at the image and then maybe out of the corner of my eye watching the scopes to see how big of a percentage change I'm making and just feeling that out. So when I go to the next shot, I can kind of match it. You know what I mean? It's all relative generally. I certainly agree with that part. I'm not saying that like I don't use scopes like and shot matching is a perfect example right you're trying to match contrast between two shots

you're trying to match peak luminance saturation and that kind of stuff I'm just saying where you get into trouble is like I have to hit 100 right have to hit zero I need to have this ratio between this to this to this and that has no validity at all in anything to make an image look like but

again like the skin tones up a good one like the zero to 100 is a great is a great example I just think that people get so dogmatic about what a perfect image looks like, that they use that as a crutch to the destructive thing that they're doing to a shot. It's also if a perfect image, if all perfect images looked the same on the scope,

if all the best images had the same scope output, there would be no artistry in this, right? We'd all be robot. I think the other thing that bothers, uh, I think bothers new colorists and people that are getting into this is that sometimes, the intent of, especially when it comes to color balance, but also somewhat to contrast as well,

the intent sometimes if you are not on the same page as the people in production, right, that the idea of intent can get lost. And I think that that comes into a couple ways, right? I think that people have been conditioned that neutrality is correct and, you know, a shift towards a particular hue or saturation or whatever can be incorrect. So like I give you, you know, let's say you get a shot and it's really, really, really warm and yellow, or you get a shot that's really, really cool and blue and purple, right? I think the new user is going, well, that is not neutral. I need to fix that, right?

And I think that goes back into some of the engineering thing that we're talking about a little bit before, like that kind of stuff, right? Like, if I get an image that is really blue, my first question, is, hey guys, this was intentional, right? And nine times that 10, yeah, yeah, that's, we were going for this, like, cool morning thing, like whatever. Okay, cool. I'm going to enhance that what you got. I'm going to go with it. I think a lot of new people try to correct those things that they see out going, assuming that it was a mistake that was made in production, bad white balance, but nobody in the monitor is bad. They're chasing that before, after feeling.

Right, exactly. They're chasing that before and after feeling. And so they're doing, things that are destructive to that image to give them, because it's a little uncomfortable, I get it, right? Like, if you're looking at your vector scope and everything is hanging out over here on the left hand side of the vector scope, and nothing's in the center of the scope, you're going, well, cool,

I have a, you know, yellow wash on the image, but, like, think about some of the color over the past, you know, decade that has had the, you know, rave reviews and people just love, right? I'm thinking the Blade Runner 2049 stuff when they're out in Vegas, right? And, you know, Deacon's lighting this with a

million sky panels and everything is freaking orange, right? Could you imagine the color is just going, okay, we're just going to slide to the right here. White balance is, you know, the best colors in the world. Right, because you have a cool, you have a cool before and after now.

It was yellow. Now it's not. Just like we've been talking about, less is more. I promise you that if you were to open up that project, there's probably less going on in those grades than you might initially think. I'm not saying that there wasn't a lot of effort put into it, but

I bet you if you did your little before-after that we keep talking about, you'd be surprised how much of that was intentional creativity on the... 100%. So I think the other thing that really gets people, like, kind of stopped in their tracks when they get into color. And we, I mean, we, I mean, it's like ad nauseum is not even the right description of this. But, like, the idea of, like, monitoring and what's good enough and all that kind of stuff. And I don't want to debate the merits of different technologies. the point. My whole thing about this when I talk to new users is simply use the best monitor that you possibly can at that point in time of where you're at, right? Yes, you can talk to

purists who will argue and it will say things so you're like, you'll never get good results on your LG OLED or whatever, right? Like, I get it. There's certain things that are limitations of certain display technologies and there's certain things you might not see. Like, at the very high And yes, we want to have true reference. It'd be 100% accurate in every measurement that we can possibly give. But to the new user, I wouldn't let this be a crutch, right? You can make nice looking images on displays that are maybe not perfectly referenced. iPads come to mind.

LG OLEDs come to mine, that kind of stuff. More so than the actual brand, monitor, et cetera, used, calibration and environment are the two biggest parts. of this, right? You can make great-looking images on not a perfect reference monitor if it's pretty well calibrated and you're in an environment where you're

not being influenced by that environment. I mean, it would surprise a lot of people that some of the, you know, biggest top grossing films were in rooms that are just kind of so-so. If you want to go look at like, you know, simply specs about what a color room should be or whatever, they're kind of like, ah, all right, and they still make

images. So like, I just don't think, I think people get too caught up in this part of the discussion Not that I'm not discounting it. It's important. But the fact is, is that like, don't let the technology be a crutch to creating nice images either. Yeah. And you can do this not completely on the cheap, but you can do this smartly, right? If you have a decently high quality monitor, you will get better results if you maybe higher professional calibrator to come calibrate it for you than if you just spent more money on a more expensive monitor.

Right. You'll spend less money hiring somebody to do a proper calibration, and then also you'll get a report knowing how close to reference you are. You know, so you don't need to learn calibration techniques and everything initially because you're trying to learn to color grade, right? You're not learning to be a display calibrator. Just hire someone to calibrate the best display you can afford, but get it calibrated. The next thing is think about your environment. You don't want color or stimulus in your environment. You want a neutral gray wall, you want a bias light, and you want no colors anywhere and not a lot of any, no light intruding from the outside world, like you said, with the sun changing color and stuff like that. There's lots of information about, you know, building color neutral rooms. In fact, we've talked about it a lot in previous episodes talking about room design. But I'll say this, the room you're in and how it affects your person goes so much further to how good.

good of a grade you're going to get out of it than the last five to 10 percent of perfect reference calibration and listen i mean i'm i'm guilty of this i mean i i i i mean i'm really bad with my ocd about this that like i chase perfection a lot of times of it like you know i talk to calibrator friends or display you know people in the display space and i'm like well you know i have a you know point point four average delta e it'd be great if i could get that down to point two and they look at me like like, you can't even see that. Like, stop it. And so, yeah, I agree with all that. And I think the other thing, too, is that the fact of the matter is that you can only, like,

even the best rooms with the best technology and the best colorists can only get so far into what's going to be seen in the wider world, right? We've talked a lot about how wanting to work for reference and why reference. and why reference is important, and I'm not discounting that, right? But the idea of that quarter percent difference or whatever the percentage is as a game-stopping kind of thing, I disagree with it. I think that there's plenty of people who- That doesn't change shot to shot, right?

We get this with clients all the time, right? How are you sending things to a client if they're not looking at it on a reference monitor? No, they might not be looking at it on a reference monitor, but within reason, if you have a rapport with that client and they trust you, they're looking at it. it on the monitor that they're used to, right? So if they say this one shot is super red, can we adjust that? They're probably right. Reference or not, that shot is probably super red. If they say, why is everything super red, then it's a monitoring issue, right? But people are used to the wrong that they're used to. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that room matters, I think,

more than anything else, because the room having stuff in it that will affect your perception will change the way you're looking at the image shot to shot right yeah a calibration on a monitor that isn't a hundred percent is not going to change shot to shot yeah right if you're if your monitor is you know is at 107 nits versus a hundred nits you know the tangible difference between that and getting a good grade and a bad grade is not because your monitor is doing 107 nits versus 100 nits you know no but if you have the window if you have the window not blocked and the sun changes 180 degrees in the time that you're grading over the day, you're going to be in a really, really, really bad place, even if you have the most calibrated

in the world, perfect monitor. Totally. I think related to that is, and I think this is a relatively new thing since we've seen the introduction of color management pipelines in tools. And this kind of is related a little bit to node structure and overcomplicating things. and that kind of stuff. But I see a lot of people getting into the unbelievable amount, like in the weeds, like just whatever analogy you want to give, like getting into it with color science pipelines, that number one, they fundamentally don't actually understand

how they work. OTF. These seven people said these seven things on these seven Facebook groups. I'm going to put them all together. Why isn't it working? I mean, I mean, I read one the other day and it was just like, well, the guy's like, well, I turned off the OOTF and then I inverse that. And then I did that, you know, it's like, dude, if you don't understand what's going on with these sliders and these buttons, like don't touch them, right? Like, I just see these people getting so overcomplicated. And it's just like, it's like we mentioned before, the tools and being, you know, some tools are more destructive than others, that kind of thing. The same is true with a color, color pipeline, right? If you don't have an understanding of what. the color science is doing, then you're not, I think this is a hard one for a lot of people to understand because you're not under any requirement to be in a scene referred color managed pipeline at all, right? For 30 years, 40 years, everybody was in a display referred pipeline, and guess what? You, the colorist, were the color management pipeline, right? You were looking at a screen, the CRT or whatever, going, okay, I'm making decisions. You can still work that way. And a lot of

times, you know, I get people asking questions about like, oh, well, what pipeline and what, you know, what, oh, you know, OOT or whatever, ODT or whatever did you use? And oftentimes I'm like, I didn't, I just, I just graded it. And they're like, they're like, they're like, what do you mean? You just graded it. And I'm like, well, like, I didn't know what the cameras were being used. The client was in a super rush. It was a mess. So yeah, I just graded it. And it's almost like this look of like, oh, you second class citizen. Like, what are you doing, right and then you start talking to the same people and then you're like okay well tell me how you would have done it they're like well i would have first transformed this into i would have transformed this into i would have transformed this into linear and then i would have taken it from linear and put it into

like a cmy k node and like i'm like i don't have time for that dude like you might be getting paid for every like nuance that you're doing this i'm getting paid by busting it out and finishing the job and having the client give me the thumbs up right and so i think a lot of time when it comes to color science stuff people know enough to be dangerous which is part of this, but people also insert color science as a complication layer that might not be needed for what they're doing.

100%. Now, I'm going to contradict you a little bit here because we are talking about the new colorist. And I do think in most cases, new colorists are going to find advantages in working scene referred. Working scene referred when done right helps a lot of things, right, and makes it easier to focus

on the actual grade. But that is to say, go back to less is more, you don't need a huge node tree. If you've seen any of my node trees and you're just getting started, don't emulate them, go nowhere near them.

I do some crazy stuff. But you understand what's going on. Right. Camera space, intermediate space, output transform. Those three things, nothing has.

else is necessary for a very, very, very solid scene referred workflow. Keep it to that simpleness so you can, you know, have all the advantages of working scene referred. Having it handle things like the input transforms and the balance and the matching and stuff like that so you can focus on the grade. But do not go trying to break that workflow apart and reinvent your own unless you are really advanced at not just color grading, but color pipeline. and management specifically, right?

There are terrorists who are some of the absolute best creative colorists in the world who know nothing about color management because they have a team of color scientists that handle that for them and they let them do their job and they come in and they make the most incredible grades you'll ever see because they're just focused on that creative. You do not need to dive into massively deep color science immediately. Just like I said, you don't need to dive into being a display calibrator immediately or ever, right? Focus on the creative and technical aspects of grading instead of trying to learn 50 other disciplines that are related, but not the actual grade at the same time. Yeah. And I think the last thing I'll say in this conversation is that it sounds like it sounds like we don't allow for time to,

experiment and try things or whatever. And I actually think that that is a great way to kind of end this discussion is that to get into color as a new user or somebody who wants to be doing it more, you do actually have to allow time, the way that you get better at this stuff and the way that you understand things like node tree structure and color pipelines and all that kind of stuff is to actually allow for some experimentation time and to build that, build that, into your flow, right? Because the reality is, is that when you're stuck in the thick of it

with a client and a project and it's deadline driven, we all tend to go with what we know, right? And we can get in big trouble when we want to experiment. I mean, I remember a project where I brought somebody on to work on the project and they did everything in,

what is it called? LAB mode, lab mode, right? just because like it seemed cool, right? And they painted themselves into such a corner that it was just like, well, how do I get out of this, right? That time for experimenting with stuff like that, I mentioned linear before in those workflows, color,

color management pipelines. Like the time to do that is when you're not being hammered by a client to deliver something. And you can really get a feel for what works, what you like about it, what you don't like about it. Great pace. And people are like, well, you know,

top end colors don't. don't do that. They just work. No, it's not true at all. Where, where they do it often is in their downtime, maybe regrading a project that they've already graded so they're comfortable with what the end result was. Can they get to that? Can they get to that end result in a different way? Or like, I think you and I do this all the time, right? Big software release, new tools come out. Well, over on my assist station, I'm going to install that new software, play with those new tools, get familiar with them, get the pitfalls of them, that kind of stuff. Before I put it on my main work station to put it in reality. And part of that process too is figuring out where, how, when you can use

new tools, new parts of the pipeline. You're under, like, I had this discussion with somebody the day, Joey, it's really funny. I'm actually curious if you've used this. So somebody was like, well, I used the color warper and everything. And I said to them, I was like, I don't think I've ever used the color warper. I've never used it. And they looked at me like, what do you mean? How could you have never used the color warper? It's a new tool and resolve. And I'm like, yeah, I know what it does. I understand how it works, I just, I just never found it good for me. And they were, and that goes to big moves first, because the color warper is a very targeted adjustment. Right. But they were flabbergasted that just because of new tools there that I haven't

like inserted it already into my workflow in my pipeline. And I'm like, it just doesn't work for me and what I need to do. I depend on other ways of doing similar, similar things that I have muscle memory, whatever. Not to say that I'm poo-pooing the color worker. It's just an example, just one example of this. But I think it's important. as you discover new tools to also understand that a lot of these tools and a lot of these workflows, there's a tremendous amount of overlap, right? There's more, you know, there's more ways to do something in modern color correction tools. Like, there's not just one way to do it. You could accomplish what the color warper does with other tools, right? With, you know, secondary curves or whatever. Like, there's not a way you can insert in there.

And so I just think that a lot of new users need to build time to experiment and find what works for them. but also just not feel that overwhelming requirement to use the new hotness, right? You know, just because something's new and cool, like, I've been experimenting a lot this past week with in Resolve 19 with the new node layer stack kind of thing, right? And I'm sort of like, eh, it's cool. I'm not sure if I'm going to integrate this yet into my workflow. I'm going to use the absolute crap out of that,

but I need to sit down and really figure out how to integrate it to my workflow. Right, and the time to do that, The time to do that is for a real job until I've done 10 experiments with it to try to iterate myself into a good workflow. Yeah. And so I think the new, the end point here, the bottom line for the new user is build that time into your flow of a week, right? 20 minutes to experiment with this, 30 minutes to experiment with that. Try some different shots. But don't be, don't paint yourself into a corner by feeling I got to use this new tool. I don't understand. I read on the internet says I have to use it and then automatically put, because that's where like you, you. You end up ruining your images.

You get bad results. You get clients. And it's a confidence killer. And I think at the end of the day, Joey, that's the end of the story here, is that a lot of colorists that I know, you know, and I think a lot of our listeners and viewers know, they're good at their jobs. But they're one thing that defines all of those top colors. And that is confidence in what they do, right?

that they never present this idea of, well, I don't know how to handle that situation or I don't know how to get to what you want, right? Color is largely about confidence. It's about communication with people and extruding confidence and displaying confidence. And so I see a lot of the top end colors in the world who might not know anything about XYZ tool or color pipelines or whatever, as you mentioned. But God damn, they can exude confidence and make those clients. happy doing what they know how to do.

And that's a big part of it to new clients. If you haven't already go back and take a listen or watch to our episode on Assistance because we talk a lot about this kind of thing, confidence, communication, and that kind of stuff with new users. Because that's part of it for a new user, I think, for sure. Yeah, I think just to kind of close out with my last final tip, and we've mentioned it on probably almost every every episode of this podcast, and I mentioned it every chance I can get.

All of the technical stuff aside, all the creative stuff aside, this is still a people business first. And always be aware of that, always be aware that how you communicate, how you talk about these technical things, how you discuss ideas and present things to your clients matters so much. Just never lose sight of the fact that this is a people business and all of the other things that that entails. Absolutely. Very cool. Well, for those who are new users, hopefully this has helped you get a little, some ideas percolated in your head about things you need to consider as you're diving into color. I just think that, you know, the democratization of color tools is like is amazing for creativity, for doing amazing things. And, you know, as you get into it, you know, efficiency, workflow, all of those things are important, but also just like have fun with it. I see so many people getting so

caught up with having to play by the rules and being dogmatic about it. Like there's, again, I know I said there, you know, we talked about the scorecard earlier, but there really is no scorecard. The only thing you have to pay attention to is not making bad images. And if you can work on making bad images, there's no, there's no checkbox on what's correct. It's just not bad, right? That's really all I come down to. Like, you can have a really cool images.

It might not be my cup of tea. But as long as it's not bad, as long as it's consistent. as long as it flows, like you can make whatever you want. So it's very cool. For those of you who are new to the podcast, thanks for listening and checking us out on YouTube. You can always follow us on YouTube. Please like and subscribe there.

That always helps us out. The podcast is available on major podcasting platforms, including Apple Music, and Spotify, and Amazon, and Google Podcasts. So wherever you see it, please like it and subscribe, tell your friends about it. Every little like and subscribe goes a long way and really helps us out. You can also go over to The Offsetpodcast.com where you can find episodes. You can also find show notes. We don't talk about show notes ever, but that's another thing that really only appears on

the Offsetpodcast.com is various links out to show notes and other articles and stuff that we talk about. So feel free to go over there. We also have a submission button for new ideas, new topics, anything you want to add that helps us out. It actually goes right into a lovely Monday.com board that Joey designed, which we'll talk about on a future episode Monday for a small post. production businesses. Big thanks as always to our sponsor,

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thank you so much for checking out the show once again. Again, please tell your friends if you like the episode and you like the series. And yeah, we'll be back in a couple weeks with another installment. So for The Offset Podcast,

I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.