The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP026: Managing Review Sessions

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

In this episode of The Offset Podcast, we’re discussing strategies for managing client review sessions - both in person and remote.  The review session sounds straightforward on paper, but it can be a complicated balancing act of moving things along, addressing changes, and keeping everyone happy.  Some of the specifics we discuss in this episode include:Managing both in-person and remote review sessionsThe importance of ‘knowing’ the show - content, characters, etcModulating small talk and reading the roomLeveraging markers & notes for remaining tasks to accomplish & notes to selfAnticipating problems, tangents, and pushbackSetup your grading pipeline to make changes and comparisons easy for the clientThe power of making choices and changes visual Documenting and tracking changes for consistency and completion Making sure the technology works - audio, networking, lighting, passwords etcHaving a backup strategy  - rendering out intermediate masters, duplicate projects/timelinesHaving clearly defined goals for the review session & a post-review plan You can submit show ideas and find show notes by visiting www.offsetpodcast.com. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube - just search for The Offset Podcast

In today's episode of the Offset podcast, we're talking about managing review sessions. 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. Okay, welcome back to another installment of the office. set podcast. I am one of your hosts, Robbie Carmen, and that is Joey Deanna. Hey, Joey, how are you, man? Good. How are you? I'm good. Well, welcome to 2025. Our first recording session of 2025.

This probably won't be the first episode released in the new year, but it feels good to be back, back on the horse, doing some new episodes for sure. Yep. So today, we want to talk a little bit about something that we've been, if we're being completely honest, have been percolating for a couple of weeks or even probably a couple months on how to best present because we were sort of thinking like, oh, we'll do something on remote reviews, we'll do something on in-person reviews, and then we were like, why not just combine these topics? So today we're going to be looking at sort of our top five-ish, and I say ish, because we always have a tendency to, oh, yeah, one more thing to add into the end of these. But sort of our top tips about sort of managing

review sessions and to be clear, those review sessions can be in person, sort of the traditional review session with clients attended in the room, or in the, you know, where we find ourselves today after the past, you know, five, six, seven years, where remote sessions have become more common for a lot of people. And by remote sessions, I mean, mainly I mean streaming sessions with somebody on the other end, streaming content to them. We'll mix in some tips that are germane to those kind of review sessions as well. But of course, if you have any things that we missed on our list today, feel free to get in touch with us.

You can always go over to the offsetpodcast.com, follow us on social media, or if you follow us on YouTube where we post the video versions of these shows, you can leave us a comment there as well with some additional things that might come to mind about management review sessions. All right. All right, so Joey, let's dive in. And we'll start with kind of your number one thing about reviewing with clients, whether that's in person or remote. And one more thing before we begin.

Actually, I was going to start on number five and go down. Hey, let's do it that way. I like that even better. We'll get to the best as we as we wrap it up. We'll also add one more thing that, you know, in the topic, in the course of doing this, There's a lot of tangents that we can go down that touch other areas. Client communication, you know, room set up. There's a lot of other stuff.

So if something sounds a little more complex than we let on in this episode, chances are we might actually already have an episode on that. I'm thinking of an episode we have on client communication. We have episodes on room management. So go back through our library and check out some of those episodes too if you want a little deeper dive on some of the things that we discussed today. So with that said, Joey, kick us off from number five. Yeah. So, you know, just to kind of talk generally, when we're doing review sessions, it's kind of the make or break moment for a project oftentimes.

Right. So you really need to be on your game and you need to keep the client happy. You need to keep the session flowing, right? You don't want them to be sitting there waiting. You know, you don't want them to lose confidence in you. It's kind of a, the real-time aspect of it is a big. challenge and offers a lot of pitfalls and places where you can go wrong. So that's kind of what we want to focus on today. And my, I'm going to call it my number five, but these all, you know,

have various levels of, uh, hard to rank them. Yeah, hard to ring. Uh, is to be what I like to consider a hundred percent ready with the content of the show. Know the show or the project as well as you possibly can. And what I mean by that is your client's going to come in. having been with this project drastically longer than you. They know every character's name. They know every interview subject's name. They know what order the scenes are in off the top of their heads, right? So even if it means making some notes to yourself, writing down people's names,

sitting there in advance before the session and just watching the whole show down to refresh your memory, you want to be able to respond in real time to what the client says. If the client says, hey, I feel like Jim Bob's interview, from back there, you know, five, ten seconds ago was looking a little red. You don't want to be like, who's that again? What's, you know, and then kind of scrubbing through the show trying to find it. Now, granted, there's always going to be some kind of back and forth. You're never going to know the content as deeply as a producer or director of the film or project will.

But the more effort you put in to be able to speak the client's language with referring to the content of their show, the more your session's going to move quickly, the more there's going to be less back and forth, and the more your client's going to have competence in your abilities because you're really showing that you've taken some ownership of the project. Yeah, no, those are all great points. And a couple, and I know you'll get to this a little bit about some of your other things, but like one of the things that I like to do is, you know,

we use a lot of groups because we work on a lot of docs and a lot of things with interviews and stuff. And we've joked about this in the past where, you know, I'm like, I name things. like, you know, red tie guy or like brown hat guy or whatever, you know, or, you know, blue dress woman. And, you know, I think that goes to that same vein of what you're talking about, at least being able to quickly identify people. Like, one of the problems that I have that you pointed out was with, like, people's people and character names. I'm really bad at that. Like, and it's like a New Year's

resolution this time around. They're like to kind of go, okay, I got to really learn characters' names because that happens to me all the time where clients like, oh, well, Jill said, I'm like, which one is Jill, you know. And one quick tip for that, by the way, especially for docs, keep your client's graphics reference. Usually it'll send you a reference, whether it's to check your conform

or just to see the show with graphics on it. Scroll through that, it'll probably have lower thirds telling you who people are, and you can use that to leave notes for yourself. Yeah, and we'll get to this a little later some other uses of markers and stuff, but I do think the one you mentioned about,

like, scenes and like knowing when acts start and end, and quickly being able to navigate to those points, great use of markers or even playheads to just drop those there. So when they say, hey, let's go back to the top of scene three or go to the end of, it's right at the end of Act 4 or whatever, you can quickly navigate. Because as you said, one of the things about a review session

is it's kind of like the make-a-break thing and you want to show competency that you know how to get around, how to navigate, how to find things really quickly. So those are really good. My sort of bottom-in-the-list thing, but again, not really in any particular order, is this idea of modulating the small talk and kind of like being adjustable on your focus. And what I mean by this is that every set of clients that have ever had come in a room or jump on a remote session has been a little different, right? Some people want to kind of like talk about the weather and sports and, you know, world news or whatever for a few minutes to kind of break the ice.

Others are way more serious and just want to like focus just on getting whatever they need to get done, you know, and being very serious about the show. And I think that takes a little while to learn, but you have to do it pretty quickly. And I think that one of the mistakes that I think a lot of people make is a lot more chit-chat than might be necessary in the session, right? And like slowing it down. So what could take an hour to review ends up taking two hours.

And I say this just because, you know, your clients and you have other things to do. So reading that room about what sort of the talking expectations or kind of what the vibe is like with kind of making it. Because it's a balance act, right? You wanna be familiar, you wanna be comfortable, you wanna make it relaxed. But at the same time,

If you're like, oh, so tell me more about where your kid goes to college, like probably not all that germane to what you have to do that day in the room, right? So, like, trying to judge that and make it, you know, congenial and friendly, but at the same time, move things along and don't get caught up in a lot of extraneous chit-chat would be one of my tips. And I only say this because, how should I say this? I'm a very chit-chatty kind of guy that it's gotten mean in trouble before, and it's one of those things that I know that I can prove on. Yeah, and sometimes it goes the other way.

Sometimes the clients are too chit-chatty, and you need to kind of bring them back to focus. And part of that can also be kind of timing it, right? Spread the chit-chat around. So when you've got a render cache going, you kind of bring up, oh, you know, you mentioned such and such earlier, and you're kind of, you're formatting the time of the session

to what suits the client best. And that actually kind of takes me into my next thing, which is, you know, use markers and other. notes to keep the session flowing. And what I mean by that is you don't want to get as bogged down in the details as you might if you were working on a show unsupervised. So a lot of times a client might have feedback of, hey, you know, this interview, the right side of her face needs to be windowed and tracked and adjusted, you know, and it might take some time to do that, you know, drawing windows, tracking windows, doing keyframes, stuff like that.

The client's really not going to be super interested in. So what I'll usually do is I try to be very honest with the client about this too. I'm like, hey, cool. Let's do one shot of that. I'm going to leave myself markers. And kind of when we're done with the first overall pass, let's go back and revisit those sections and we'll leave markers for each one and we can check them after we make it through our first watchdown.

And the other thing in that same vein is when I'm watching the thing down, if I see something and it's not major, I'll just leave myself a marker and when we get through maybe an act, I'll be like, so what did you think of that to the client? Let them have an opportunity to mention anything that they didn't stop the playdown for and then mention, hey, I noticed one or two spots where it was a little too bright.

I left myself markers. Let's go back and look at those real quick. So you can kind of leave yourself marker. in the timeline as you're going and use that to, you know, spread out the duration of your work to keep the live session flowing, where you might not normally do that if you're working on supervised, right? If you want to bog down, you know, you want to buckle down and focus on one problem, you know, that's fine if there's not a client sitting there waiting for the next bit of playback, whereas if you leave yourself some markers and come back at the end of the

session, it can really keep things moving. And in that vein, I usually kind of make a version of my timeline for the review and clear it of any extraneous markers from previously in the process. And then I kind of know I have a clean slate of markers related just to that review. You could also do that with color coding. If you didn't want to blow away all your markers, you could have like a color code of markers just for the review. However, you kind of feel best about organizing it. But really what you're doing is using markers, using notes to spread out the session so no one task is dominating the client's focus in time. Yeah, so a few things unpacked there. Again, all great stuff. I 100% agree on the markers for things that you notice but don't

want to bog things down or call attention to. You know, it might be, oh, you noticed a lower third was two frames over a cut point or something like that as you're watching down. So just leave a marker and be done with it. If you look at a lot of my markers in review sessions, they're exactly what you described earlier, where it's like, I'll do a marker and the marker will be called something like ripple to the rest or something like that, right? Where it's like, I'll try to execute the change in the fix,

visually, as much as I can for the client, but then say, hey, every time you see this guy from here on out, it's not going to have the change yet because it's going to take me some time to ripple that down. And just that brief explanation, goes, oh yeah, okay, so you're aware of it, you're going to make that fix. And inevitably, they'll be like, you get to a shot that, you know, they're like, that's not fixed right.

You're like, yep, nope, I'll ripple that from before and get that down. I just didn't want to waste your time. We'll move that right along. And the marker color thing, too, I also do. I forget, I think it's white or cream or something, whatever the furthest right marker color is in the resolve marker dialogue box. That's the one that I always use for client notes, because that way I can just really quickly filter my marker list and just show me all of the things that came up that day.

I do like the idea of duplicating your sequence. I tend to not do that because it worries me about things like groups and render caches and stuff like that. But if you're confident and you can test that out, 100%. Those are all really good ones. My number four thing is a little nuance. And forgive me if it takes me a second to kind of like, explain it fully. But I'm calling this anticipate tangents, pushback, and problems. And I mean a few

things by this, right? So as you're going through a show, and everybody's probably had this experience that's watching or listening, you'll discover things that are problems, right? And those might be things that the client knew about and told you about, or they might be things that you just discovered, like, oh man, I'm seeing some banding on this wall and it's just like it's a problem, right? So I'm of two minds of this kind of thing. One, I call these kind of things out as we're reviewing if the fix is just magical and I need to buy some good feelings in the room, right? So if I have something that I'm like, God, man, I really knock this out of the park. I will show them that, call it out before and after, but you have to be very careful about how you do this. Because if you're like, I just saved

your crappy project, that's not the vibe. you want to go for in the room, right? But if you're like, hey, you know what? I noticed this problem. I don't know if you guys saw it. And I came up with a pretty good fix. What do you think? And kind of spin it positively.

That can ingratiate yourself to a lot of people in the room. But the flip side of that is calling out things that might be already pain points and are like, yeah, Rob, we get it. We know that's a problem. We can't fix that. And all you're doing at that point is like twisting the knife in a little harder. right? So you have to be a little careful with that balancing point, that balancing act between, hey, I'm a hero and oh, hey, this is your crappy thing that we still can't fix, right?

Related to that is I generally, you know, prior, when I'm doing my last watchdown prior to, you know, reviewing with the show, one of the marker types that I mark from, leave for myself is anticipation of, hopefully they don't call this out, but I want to be aware of the problem. So I'll make a marker fully knowing that hopefully they won't call it out. But I leave those markers for myself and often with notes to be able to give a detailed explanation of what's going on at that point in time if it stopped. If they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on there? I can be like, oh, yeah, thanks for noticing that.

I actually had a note to myself, again, doing what you said earlier, kind of making it, you're aware of the show, you're familiar with the show, and then go on to explain the problem. And I found that that, again, ingratiates yourself to, oh, you are looking out for us because you notice this problem, but, you know, don't call it out unless you really need to. And I think that's one kind of related thing. I think a lot of colorists can do better, us included, is, you know, don't go out of your way to call out problems, right? Like if it's something that's noticeable, they'll say something.

If it's not something you notice, totally fine, just you knowing about it, fixing it, you know, independently and moving on kind of thing. Yeah, agreed. And, you know, a lot of times, sometimes you kind of feel, oh, I want some extra glory here and to be the hero. But you don't want to do that at the expense of being condescending or insulting. even though I know you probably most people that that fall into this trap myself included never plan for it to come off that way right but sometimes it does so just kind of well yeah like if you I mean I see I see color you know if you look at you know sometimes I read like forum stuff right and everybody's you know moaning about you know eight bit cameras and you know crappy codex and whatever like when you're in the color suite doing a review of your final color like you're not going to be able to solve all the production problems that were brought along the way. And chances are the client already knows about it. So like if you can improve those things, great. But you don't have to stand up and go, look at me. I'm awesome. I fixed your problem. And because the opposite, you know, the opposite effect is you just

make them feel worse about the problem that they probably already know about. And then they're going to hyper focus on it. Totally. 100%. 100%. All right. Next in my list is set up your project, your node tree, your timeline, however you feel like working, to make comparisons easy for the client. And what I mean by that is you always want to be in a position to say, this is where we started, this is where we are with your change. And I don't mean this is the original footage. This is the grade now. I mean, we watched it down.

You said, make it a little bit warmer. Here it is on and off. just that change, just that one change, because that can allow the client to focus on exactly what their feedback is at that moment. And you can dial in that change. And then in most cases, the way I do this is I have blank nodes in my node tree for this reason. So I'll use one of my blank nodes that I make sure not to touch during my normal first pass grade on supervised. And I'll do all the changes for one note. basically one piece of feedback on a single node so I can toggle that node on and off.

The great thing about that technique is that you can then take that change and copy and paste it to other shots, and it will, for the most part, unless that shot is drastically different, work. So it's kind of two birds of one stone. It makes managing your change is easier, but it also makes it really easy to communicate the before-after of a subtle change with your client. because we've heard the stories a million times where you're tweaking, you're adjusting, and then you kind of go back to your original.

The client's like, oh, yeah, that's better. I like it. Because all of this is so subjective and switching between the grade being on, the grade being off, the previous shot, the next shot, and jumping back and forth can really kind of throw both your eyes

and the client's eyes kind of out of focus a little bit. And it's very easy to trick yourself into thinking that this change is working when it's not. And it's very easy to overdo a change because you want to see that big shift. Right. So being able to isolate each change, whether that's with nodes, whether that's with versions. You know, there's a bunch of different technical, logistical ways to do it in whatever software you're using. And we talked about a lot of that stuff in our grade management episode.

I was going to call it out. Yeah, for sure. Those kind of techniques, I think what I really hear you saying is like, you know, build it out whether it's versions, nodes, whatever. So you're not painting yourself into a corner because the worst feeling that you have is that besides being able to demonstratively show something is you don't also want to go, oh, well, I did 27 steps

and now we just want to go backwards and kind of work your... That can be, again, confidence... A confidence destroyer if you have, like, well, I just overrode everything we did. Crap. Now, like, I can't get back to the original. Yeah, and that's why also I tend to discourage the use of the previous MIM button,

which will toggle between your current pile of changes to the whole node tree and what the shot was when you entered it. Because if you do that a couple times, then you make a couple more changes, then you do that a couple more times, you make a couple more changes. It can kind of get to the point where you lose your original. And you might not want that.

And then you might end up reinventing the wheel. So I like to split it out to nodes. Like we said, you could use versions of a number of other techniques. The main focus here is make comparisons, easy for both you and the client, because again, you want to be able to keep that session moving. You don't want to spend time tracking, okay, this 10-step minute detail of the changes I made to this individual shot.

Yeah, I can't agree more. It's actually kind of funny because my third thing on my list is also about making things visual. And I'm going to explain it slightly different. I look at this as making explanations and choices visual, right? Because I think about a review. what's the benefit of having a review session, right? Is that you have that communication and that dialogue with your clients about what they like and what they don't like. And if you're trying to do that in a purely conversational way or do it, you know, worst case, you know, text or, you know, email or something like that, it can get really convoluted.

It can get really hard to explain. And you might mean something super simple, but it gets really misunderstood, right? So what I try to do every time I have clients in the room, and it's kind of riff on what you were saying, is to make things as visual as possible, right? And so let's just say that I'm making a change to somebody's skin tone, right? And maybe I'll, you know, I tend to do this. You could do this with nodes, but I tend to do this with versions because of what I'm about to explain. So let's say, you know, they go, I don't know, this person looks terrible. So you do push some more warmth or red or whatever into the face, right?

Then you do another version where you maybe a little more, a little less magenta or whatever it is. You end up with two or three versions, right? What I like to do in those situations is I love to use split screens with version set. So I can just simply, because that outputs to SCI. I can simply bring up real quick. Here's one, two, and three. Which one do you like the best? And have them literally point at the monitor.

This is the one that I like the best, right? By the way, this is also a great technique if you're doing something like short form, like a spot or something that might have a really heavy-handed kind of grade or look to it, you can do those various heavy-handedness and conversions and just bring that up and look at it. Also, this is a great example. I'm sure you've been in this situation. I know you have, and others have been too, where you're watching out of a show and be like, you know, just the flow of the show kind of like what's around something, somebody might go,

you know, this interview, he looks a whole lot warmer in this interview. Well, instead of having to, like, no, it's really the same. I promise. What I'll often do is just like I'll use split screens again in the group mode, bring up the whole group and be like, see, he's the exact, he or she is the exact same throughout the show. What's bothering you is the stuff around it and the flow in and out of it. Like we can adjust that. But every chance that I get to demonstratively show somebody, and by the way, that's another great reason in a review, this is kind of tentental, but in a review session, a lot of the stuff that I turn off in the UI while I'm working by myself.

I actually turn back on for review sessions, right? So things like on-screen windows and stuff like that. Because you know what? It's so awesome to watch a window tracking around somebody's face for a client to see. Oh my God, you can track that that fast and it does it morphs and all sorts of stuff. Or like when you're pulling a key, right, to like have that key output going on to the monitor so they can see. Oh, like, see, I'm just selecting this, you know, his shirt right here or whatever, right? All of that kind of interactivity and visualness in a session serves a couple purposes.

It keeps the room going and flowing because everything's changing and nothing's getting static. You always have something cool to look at. B, it kind of instills confidence that you more or less know what you're doing with the software to get the results that are being requested of you. And then third, where I started this off, it just makes it much easier for the client to go, yes, that one, no, that one. This is bad. That is bad and so on and so forth. And you can do this in a number of ways.

I mentioned versions. Split screens are a great way of doing this and wiping split screens on and off. I've even done it before with like, you know, somebody's bothered by like the flow. They're like, ah, this one seems brighter or not. I'll just on a new node desaturate the whole, you know, all those shots, right? And just watch it back in black and white. And they go, oh, that's so much easier now for me to see what you're talking about with, you know, those kind of things. So my point here, make it visual, make those choices visual, and not only can you have a conversation about that, you can more likely extract what you need from the client and their opinion much faster.

Yeah, and for me, we've joked about this before. I personally don't like the split screens. I don't know why they just kind of. Yeah, I understand. I don't know. I visually don't really respond to them well. But what I use a lot is playheads to jump between similar shots. or something that a lot of people don't realize you can do,

right click on any clip in the thumbnail graph and wipe to timeline clip. You don't need to grab a still. You can always wipe to a clip in your timeline. So if they're like, how does this compare to that setup from earlier in the scene, you can just grab it, wipe to that timeline clip without having to bother losing your spot in the timeline.

And to add on to that, and I know what I'm about to say is going to get a lot of eye rolls from a lot of color, right? But it's something good to have in your back pocket. And what I mean by that is, so a lot of, a lot of people, yourself included, when you bring in a reference, you tend not to bring it in as a reference file. You bring it as a regular file so you can drop it on a timeline, you know, and do like, you know, difference modes and stuff like that. One great reason to bring your reference clip in as a reference clip is that on your panel, you can actually choose that as part of the white mode when it's a reference clip. So I've had the situation where you like, you know, well, it was so much better in the reference file, whatever. And I'm like, oh, really? Watch my finger. Reference mode. And they go, oh, yeah, that's not, you're right. Yours is better. You know, whatever. At least, but like, that's also a good thing to like, you know, when you're dealing with like final, final reviews and

dealing with nuances like spelling, lower third to identify, like to really quickly be like, oh, I'm sorry, that matches the reference. And they're like, really? Bam, bring up the reference with the text on it and they go, oh, yeah, you're right. That's a mistake. And in the same vein, if you're doing anything advertising product, this kind of goes back with where I started with being 100% ready. If you have references for brand colors, if you have examples of products, if you have client photography of products, have those instills ready to go and have things like your scopes with targets set up to the brand colors. You could be like, yeah, okay, here's the brand color overlaid, you know, we were trying to keep people's wardrobe kind of close to that.

You can see where it compares to your actual brand color on the screen. And just having that at a moment's notice is part of the preparation that I think is really important. I agree. 100%. Next thing on my list, track your changes. I know everything I seem to say in this is all about leaving markers and taking notes. Well, say it organized, you know, sane organized. You know, earlier I talked about using markers.

to make sure you come back to things. Tracking your changes is similar to that, except you need to know where you skipped ahead and you said, okay, I'm going to come back to this later. You need to be extra sure that when you go back and you go through those changes, and this might even happen after the client leaves, just double check that you have been consistent

and you've gotten every instance where that change needs to be made. if that change needed to be adjusted shot to shot, you've done that. Everything flows nicely. You need to be able to make sure, and if this is using markers, taking notes for yourself, whatever,

basically any time that you've kind of kicked the ball down the road in the session saying you're going to come back to it later, which, as we said, is a great way to keep the session moving. It's also a dangerous way to let something fall through the cracks. So just like we want to keep the session moving by not focusing on those things after everything is said and done and you've gotten creative sign off on everything, whether or not the client is still there for this process or not, you want to go through and make

sure all those changes you made, still flow, still work, don't need any additional shot to shot adjustments, and didn't miss any spots, or I forgot to track it on this one shot, or I left a window open on this one shot. You know, just go in and take the extra time at the end to make sure, all of the little changes you made in the heat of the real-time session are as good and accurate and finished as they can be. Yeah, and I'll tack on to that. There are oftentimes that level of tracking changes, leaving notes to yourself, might not even be about stuff that you actually have to do in the grade, right? So it might be stuff like, you know, waiting for a new lower third render from the mograph person, the insert or whatever, or actually, you know, stock

not clipped, not approved, waiting for a swap out with a better higher-res version or something like that. Like all of those kind of things, and I agree with you. It's about making sure that things don't fall through the cracks, but it's not always necessarily about your grade. Like a lot, I think a lot of colorists will find themselves at the end of the pipeline, them having to, they're the ones who are doing packaging and delivery and so on and so forth. So you just want to make sure that all the other ancillary stuff doesn't fall through the cracks. Like, you know, tracking final credits is the classic example of this, right? You know, knowing that like, okay, we're on version 37 of the credits or this is, you know, we do a lot of deliverables for networks where there's a linear broadcast version and there's like a digital version.

And elements sometimes differ between those two, right? And like making notes of that kind of stuff so you can ensure that things are, you know, correct. Or, you know, slates have been updated, whatever may be. All those kind of things are really important. And one cool thing that I haven't dug into much yet, because I think it's new for just 19.1 of Resolve, is there is some new options in there for coloring nodes automatically based on the user who made the change,

and if the node has changed. So that could be a kind of cool way to verify, okay, I'm done with my review with the client. I'm going to go through the shots and look at any nodes that are colored a particular way, based on the settings I set with these new features and use that to double check and make sure nothing fell through the cracks. I haven't played that yet myself,

but it's something to look for in the release notes of the latest software because it's a cool new feature, I think. Yeah, agreed, agree. All right, my next thing is ensure the technology works and is tested. Okay, and this operates on a few different levels, right? So first case scenario is you have sessions, you know, clients in doing a session in the room and they're sitting there with you, right? So you want to make sure, obviously, things like audio is in sync,

your monitor is calibrated, showing the right color space and, you know, gamma and all that kind of stuff, right? But it's also more mundane things like, hey, make sure that, you know, the Wi-Fi password is accessible to the client so they can easily get online to do whatever they need to do, that they know where the key or the code is for the bathroom. You know, all of those kind of little like quality of life things, to make sure that that stuff works, right?

One thing I often stress to people in review sessions, you know, we're a different beast. We're so comfortable working in dark, dimly lit rooms that we can like see anything in the dark, right? Clients aren't like that, right? So one of the things I always make sure is set up and working properly is spotlighting for a client.

So they can turn on a light somehow, look at a sheet of paper, their laptop, or whatever, and do so confidently. So making sure that works. In regards to a remote streaming session, this is even more vital than I can stress, right? Making sure, okay, here's the correct password, here's the service, here's the link,

the room is open, the stream is open, they don't need to log in or whatever, all those steps that are involved in there. One extra thing, or I guess two or three extra things that I do for remote streaming sessions. One, I try to replicate the remote streaming session set up. So that often means putting an iPad or a laptop or something on the desk with me and having that set up to see what the stream looks like. This is important for a couple reasons. One,

it lets you spot any quality problems or dropouts or anything like that that might be happening on the stream. Two, there's no streaming service is 100% real time, right? You're going to get frames, maybe even a second or two, a delay. And knowing whether, you know, kind of judging where a that level of delay is from what a client might be seen is super useful. Especially if you're doing something a more fast-cutting, like a music video or a promo or something, where the timing might be off, it's good to see what the client is kind of seen too. And then I would also just say the same thing as germane to like the communication part of the client, like making sure that, okay, they're on the Zoom, we're not getting feedback from the speakers into the Zoom

or to whatever other platform you're using. Just make sure all of the technology works. And that's even true about your workstation, right? I can't tell you how many times I've done something like, oh, I thought I rendered cache this whole thing last night before I came in and sat down to watch the show. And, you know, like, that can be kind of embarrassed and be like, before we watch the show, sorry, I messed up.

We have to wait an hour because I have to recash the show, right? Like all of those things, what I tend to do is, you know, the day or two before, the day before a review session, make sure, you know, everything's up and running in the room, streams work and whatever. But like, I'll remote in, even if it's at the office, for example, I'll remote in, okay, double check that, the render cache is done.

Let me make a file backup, you know, the night before. Like, all those kind of... Hold on, hold on. That's my number one. My number one coming up is make a file render. I love it. Okay, so riff on that for a second. But you see where I'm saying, like make sure that technology,

you make technology works and let's go into your top thing. You're, you're, have a back. I will add one more thing to your technology point because it is so important. When you're dealing with remote sessions, remote streaming, I think a lot of people don't think about this,

but there's so much crap running on computers, especially production computers these days. Dropbox, Google Drive, Backblaze, sync, all these things. If you know something might be a background bandwidth hog, pause that. Yep. You know, be aware of everything that's going on bandwidth-wise with your connection,

because, you know, if Dropbox halfway through your session, somebody posted something and now starts sinking, guess what, your client could be getting dropouts because your computer is now focused on that, or some other computer on your network is focused on that. So that's just one technology thing to check. Actually, one more thing there, and I know, I know this is going to give you a major eye roll.

avoid the temptation to roll your eyes at me about this, right? But call it OCD or whatever, I tend to restart my computer the day before or a couple hours before the review session because I have seen strange things go on with machines that just a simple restart will fix. I know you have definitive feelings about computers don't need to be restarted, but that's the side point.

I tend to also just kind of restart a computer before a review session just to make sure that any gremlins in the box that might be there have been flushed out. If your box is known to have gremlins that are solved by restarting, that's a great idea. None of mine have those. Of course not. Of course not. But yeah, like I said, my final number one tip. And the reason I wanted to record this episode actually, because this happened to me last week.

literally last week I was doing a review in person with a client hour long documentary pretty heavy grades a lot of render caching and the first thing I did when the client came in I made one accidental change on the timeline level hit undo no harm no foul right my sequence is fine all my render cache is just gone so no matter what if it's a 30 second spot if it's an hour long film If you're about to walk into a critical supervised review session, render out a master of your current grade as it sits. And what I'll usually do is I will put that as the top layer in my timeline.

So when I'm playing down, I'm watching a rendered done file. I have no risk of dropped frames, of issues of technical stuff getting in the way. I'm just looking at the render. And then if I need to make a change, I'll real quick on the slide go in and drop the clip above it in the timeline. Or if you don't want to actually drop in your timeline and you want to keep your whole timeline live, this is one of those cases where either I can do what you mentioned earlier, grab that rendered clip as a reference and then just play down the reference and then switch real quick if I need to make a change. Or sometimes I'll just keep it in the source view in the timeline and gang.

my source and record viewers. However you want to manage it, having a backup plan for when something goes wrong and your timeline won't play. What if today, you know, or yesterday your timeline was playing in real time, no problem, and you didn't see the need to render cache it. And today, you lost a drive in your raid and things are a little bit slower and now it's not playing real time, right? Having that baked file will completely save the entire session. I'll add on to that. The backup DRT or DRP is another one that can really save you. I had a situation a couple weeks ago. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why the timeline that I was working on was all of a sudden Fubar. I mean, like, I mean, it looked like somebody had, you know, color boosted, you know, times 10 on 20 different nodes. Everything, like, I was clearly something was screwed up. And I realized what had happened later, but in the heat. of the moment, I could not troubleshoot it fast enough because I was, you know, I was scattered, right? Eyes looking on me. When are you going to get this fixed? And I had essentially, you know, in that little

checkbox for a sequence to use project settings or use the individual timeline settings, right? I had unchecked project settings somehow. And now I was using like rec 2020 gamma 2.6 or something like that on the timeline. I'm like, what the hell is going on? Had a backup from the night before the review. session where I didn't had hadn't checked that box didn't have to you know sweat bullets trying to figure out what was going on just restored the project everything was back to normal and you know everything was good uh but you know I would have been I would have been scrambling and like really really really trying to figure out what was going on with eyeballs watching me if I hadn't had that DRP backup so uh you know this is just common sense you know just have backups of stuff before something big you know

next big event in a project happens but yeah it can it you know we say it like it's this conceptual thing but it can actually come you know to pay you know dividends sometimes yeah like I said I mean I saved myself an hour almost two maybe two hours or render caching with a client sitting there twiddling their thumbs because I hit the wrong button on the first shot right you know it's just one of those things where it's like you don't want to have to use it because it is a little bit more of a hassle to maybe play down a bake versus playing down your active

timeline, but having as many backup solutions to potential problems. It's like the Boy Scouts. You just come prepared. That's like really what it's about. All right. So my last thing kind of riffs on, I have a bonus thing, but so I'll throw these together in kind of the same light. But my number one thing is have clearly defined goals for the session, right?

And, you know, what I mean by this is that like, okay, is this a in process review? or is this a final review? Are we going to be making further changes down the line by posting another screener for you after this to look at and make more comments? Like just to understand what we have to do. Like, do we have to, you know, get sign off on everything today and it's perfect?

Or are we iterating from here on now? And this was just like, you're checking it out, giving me notes, we're going to come back together or I'm going to post something on frame or something like that. But it's even more specific than that, right? So, like, ostensibly you're there to review, right and make sure you're happy with the color but sometimes especially on long-form projects narratives you know feature length docs it can be a tremendous amount to

chew off in a single day to review a two-hour film in the way that a two-hour film should be reviewed right so sometimes it's like hey you know what let's just go through here and make sure all the interviews look the way that you want right and get that done or it might be let's have that let's do a pass where we're just evaluating the grain on everything. Or like maybe, you know, you're doing something where you're treating a lot of skies, sky replacements, grads in the skies, et cetera. Let's do, I'll do a group with all sky shots. Let's go through all those sky shots and make sure that they're correct, right? Same thing with sock shots. Do we have these all approved? Like, I don't care what it is, but having

clearly defined goals and steps, and then as we talked about throughout this episode, have the organizational ability to quickly show those things can you know you just keep checking things off the list like because i think if you sit down in front of a session you'd be like oh we have a two-hour film that we have to review the entirety of in all aspects it can be really intimidating but if you go into it going okay yeah this check that check that check and break it down into smaller chunks that you get the client to understand and buy off it can be like no dude we're done with that like we don't have to go back and revisit that. We already looked at that. We're good. Let's keep moving on. That can be great. And then likewise, I think it's important to have a post review plan.

Right. Like, okay, we just executed a whole lot of changes here. I would feel better if I gave you a new file to look at, you know, you don't have to watch the whole thing down per se, but just scan through, make sure everything we talked about was covered. And like, you do those things that are going to kind of cover your butt from the client business point. of you post review that the client's like, hey, I just need to look at those five shots one more time or whatever it may be, have a post review plan as well. And that can kind of pay you dividends. So, you know, the situation nobody wants to be in is you do a review session, you think it's great. And then five days later, they go, eh, I don't know, right? So you're trying to

head that kind of thing off at the pass where you have, you know, hey, we went into this with clearly defined goals. We left this thing with clearly defined goals. You signed off on those goals. We've done what we're supposed to do. Everybody's happy kind of thing. Yeah. And that, you know, a lot of the stuff we talked about in this episode has been about those communication methods. Yep.

Not just the technical stuff of how to manage all of these different changes and everything else. The communication with the client matters so much when you're doing a review session. And, you know, kind of like we started out with, it is the make or break for a project. And you could have done the absolute most amazing grade. You could have done just intricate, perfect work that in general the client might have been absolutely in love with and been super happy with maybe a couple changes here or there. And you can grenade that goodwill in a supervised review session very, very quickly. So hopefully some of these tips and techniques can kind of keep your review sessions moving and keep that, interaction with your client in a positive way. So, you know, not only are you doing a great grade

for them, they're leaving the end of the process happy and confident because the worst thing you ever want is an unhappy client or a client that's not confident with the creative finish of their project. This, you hit it on the head, man. This time that you spend with your clients, whether it's in person or not, is a showcase of your work and efforts. on a project, but it's also that place where you earn trust, you earn respect, you earn, you know, all of those intangibles that will pay off not only in the project you're in, but hopefully in future projects for people to come in back. I mean, like, I've had clients over the years say to me, like, you know, especially in clients,

you know, sessions with like, you know, agency types or a lot of people in the room, you know, people are like, your management of this session dealing with all the personalities is why, I come back to you. Like, you might not be the best colorist in the world, but like you're able to handle this flow and these people in the room, like that is part of it. And it's just like you can be the most technically proficient colorist,

but managing review sessions, making it visual, making it interactive, managing the communications. Yeah, is obviously a very key part of the game. So, Joey, I really like this episode. I think a lot of good, a lot of the good tips to share. As we said at the top, if anybody, if you're watching this on YouTube,

We're listening to this on major streaming platforms. You can give us some feedback, either in comments on YouTube, or you can head over to the Offset podcast and add some comments there, where we also have the ability to submit ideas for new episodes. We're trying to do more user-submitted shows in 2025. So if you have some things that you want us to cover, please go there and check it out. And, of course, you can follow us on social media, Facebook and Instagram. Just search for the show, The Offset Podcast. So good stuff, Joey.

I really like this one. Hopefully everybody out there does too. So for the Offset podcast, I'm Robbie Korn. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.