The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP062: GFX & VFX Workflows

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

In this episode we're discussing a question we got from viewer/listener Matt S. who in part wrote:'I’d love to hear your thoughts on working with GFX and VFX through color. I run a motion design studio in Denver and we are often delivering GFX to DI houses. We’ve gotten surprised a few times seeing how our material gets laid into a show, and sometimes heavily graded'Thanks Matt for writing in!  It's a deep topic, but in this episode we do our best to explore it.  Some of the specifics we discuss include:Understanding GFX vs VFX and why they're sometimes used interchangeablyThe importance of communication in a GFX/VFX pipelineWorking with GFX in a color pipelineContext & keeping GFX updated with the gradeWorking with VFX in a color pipelineThe benefit of working with mattes from VFXColor management and how it impacts GFX/VFX workflowsHDR and its impact on the pipeline If you enjoy the topics and discussion of The Offset Podcast you can join in the conversation with our new Discord communityCheck out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast.Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.  If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastSee you again in about two weeks for a new episode

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Offset Podcast, and this week we're exploring visual effects and graphics in a color pipeline. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Color Direct Connect volumetric autocal. Calibration of reference displays is critical in our industry, and there's no easier way to calibrate than by using Gaia Color, which is standard on DM, XMP, and XMP, C-C series monitors. Guy color calibration allows supported probes to be plugged in directly to the monitor for fast, accurate, and automated calibration with no computer or operator expertise required.

You can learn more about this powerful system at Flanderscientific.com. Hey there, everybody. Welcome back to episode 62, I believe it is, of the Offset Podcast. I am one of your host, Robbie Carman. With me, as always, is Joey Dana. Hey, everyone. Well, Joey, this week we are going to tackle another sort of viewer-submitted question. This one from one of our listeners, viewers, Matt Schultz.

And this one has to do with visual effects and working with graphics in a color pipeline. So there's a lot to bite off there. And I'll let you kind of recap it in just a second. But before we begin, as always, just some housekeeping. Remember, you can follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. just search for the Offset Podcast. Thank you to all of our followers. We just crossed the thousand,

the thousand follower mark on Instagram, which we're pretty excited about. So help us get to 1,500, 2,000 sometime soon. That would be great. We appreciate you guys all following us there. In other news, on our last episode, we announced that we launched our own sort of Discord for sent sort around the show.

And so far we've got about 50 or so of you in the past 10 days, two weeks or so, joining that Discord. As a reminder, it is an open public discord for all of our viewers and listeners. And if you want to have some fun conversations, it's pretty relaxed, pretty chill. Just this morning, Joey was going back and forth with a couple people about color management pipelines and aces and RCM and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of fun discussions to be had there. So you can join that Discord just by clicking on the link here on screen, answering a few questions.

The only thing that we really asked is that you just use your real name over on that Discord. And from there, it's just, you know, good old. clean, clean fun. So it's good stuff there. And as a last reminder, you can follow the show in all of our episodes and additional notes at offsetpodcast.com. All right, Joey, so let's jump into this today. This is a good one of our listeners, Matt Schultz. Why don't you kind of just outline kind of the basics of his question, and then we'll dive in. Yeah, just a quick summary of what Matt wrote us. He said that he'd love to hear our thoughts on working with graphics and VFX through color. He runs a motion design studio in Denver, and they are often delivering graphics to

DIY houses and getting surprised seeing sometimes how their material gets used, gets laid into the final show. Sometimes it's heavily graded. Sometimes it's color managed one way. Sometimes it's color managed another. I feel like he's, you know, he didn't say this, but I feel like he's coming from a position of both curiosity and somewhat frustration because as an art. If you send something out to another artist to work with, you don't expect it to be dramatically changed or maybe you do, but there's a communication that has to happen there.

You know, so I think part of this is really getting the colorist perspective on how we deal with external graphics and VFX renders. It is a deep topic and you're right. There's definitely an WTF undercurrent in the question. And honestly, you know, from the colors. And I think that's perfectly valid, Matt, you know. I have seen a lot of times and we'll talk about this in a little bit more detail how graphics and VFX can have their creative intent stepped on by a miscommunication, an over zealous colorist or some other kind of problem in the pipeline. And that's exactly what the kind of workflows we want to talk about are designed to prevent. because the one thing. And I would and I would say also just to not make it like sound like we're about to, you know, whatever, say it's all Matt's fault for doing whatever. Like you're right. Like there are plenty of colors in the world who don't do, and we'll get into this obviously, but don't ask the right questions. Don't do the right investigations. Make a lot of assumptions and the next thing you know, things are just broken. Now that's not to say that there's not responsibility on both sides of it, but just to sort of, you know, address Matt's general concern is that this. This. This. is a problem from both sides of the equation, right?

And it is something that if you've been working in the color game long enough, you've probably screwed up and encountered frustrating situations. Same thing on the motion graphics and visual effects side. You probably thought you're delivering something that's perfect, only to see it get messed up, and that's frustrating. So we kind of want to attack both of these things from both angles. And I think you're right to also say, Joey, that in 45 minutes to an hour, we can't be completest here because there are...

There's a ton and ton of details, especially as you start getting into the high-end visual effects work, where you're talking about very complicated LED walls and green and blue screens. You're talking about rig removal, motion tracking, all of that kind of stuff. So I would just be, you know, head those questions off of the past that our comments today are kind of general advice on these workflows. obviously like any post-production workflow, you know, your specific one is going to need some testing, some discussion, some back and forth. So I would hate for somebody to walk out of this going,

well, Joey and Rob said this is, no, everything is always a little bit, a little bit of a little bit. The big thing, I will say, out of the gate, for any artists working in any post-production pipeline, is that surprises are the enemy, right? Nobody should see the final product, whether it's the colorist, the VFX, the audio mixer, the client, the distributor.

Nobody should ever see the final product and be like, whoa, what? You know, everything, expectations should be set, and there should be communication throughout the whole process, and that's one of the things we're going to dive into. All right, so here's where I want to start. I want to start with the idea about sort of making a line in the sand and discussing graphics, motion graphics, and visual effects,

kind of how they are lumped together, lump together, but have different use cases and different needs because I think that's, and we'll get into each one, but I want to just kind of start there because I think they're generally like, people like, oh, visual effects and they're talking about like a lower third. And I'm like, yeah, to me, that's not really, that's not really visual effects, right? So here's my, here's my graphics could mean everything. Right, exactly. So here's my quick and dirty, 50,000 foot definition of, of these things, right?

So when I think about motion graphics, I think about things like lower thirds, like title cards, credits, things that are going to either be static or animate or otherwise fade up or transition on the screen. Most of the time, these are things like text elements. Most of the time, I would say probably 75% of the time when I mean graphics. I mean text elements. But it could also be things that are full screen, things like information graphics, bars and, you know, charts and graphs, uh, maps, things of that nature that you didn't necessarily create, but are going to be full screen implemented. So I think that's kind of the first, uh, differentiation point I make with and then you have texted maps. So you get a little bit of a hybrid.

Right. I would make that distinction between things that are on screen with video content that's under your control underneath in some shape or fashion, right? And then differentiate that from things that are full screen, right? But from a workflow point of view, they're, they're similar for us the colorist to get those motion graphics, those full screen maps, etc. Because most of the time, other than just making sure that they get placed correctly, we can generally assume that they're more or more or less fun. There's some caveats to that that we'll get to with HDR, color management pipelines, et cetera. But yeah, it's more of, hey, you got those titles? Cool. I'll throw them on top. We're done, right? Now, straight visual effects work, man, this is a really open-ended book.

I think of what it means because especially now that in the color room in a color suite, we can do so much of this. The line between visual effects and grade is very, very, very soft and blurry now, right? I mean, it used to be, I remember like, you know, if there was a spot on the lens, you're sending that off to visual effects, right? If there was a license plate that needed to be blurred, you were sending that off to visual effects. I would venture to bet that probably, I don't know, 80, 85% of, especially resolve users, where that tool set is a little more robust than some other platforms,

are probably doing a lot of that type of work, obfuscification, you know, concealment, basic lens smudging stuff, you know, that kind of basic stuff in app rather than sending to visual effects. I think the visual effects stuff starts to get interesting when we talk about more complex keying. situations, rig removals, things like reflections, product, like tracking. And I think, again, some of this stuff you can do easily in some tool like fusion. I'm curious, Joey, because you are the visual effects guy in our team, right? Like you can, you know just conceptually a lot more about it. How would you make that separation between like both these things, graphics and visual effects?

but really what are we talking about when we talk about visual effects? Really, visual effects can be, like you said, anything from a simple green screen composite, all the way to deep integration of CG elements into real footage. It can be rig removal. It could be paintwork. It can be tracking. And yeah, we can do a little bit of that in resolve.

I like to think I do maybe a tiny bit above average with that stuff. But I try to be very. cognizant of if I am telling a client, yes, I can do your license plate blurs. I can do your green screens. I test it first with the client and I make sure that it's a simple enough job that I can do it to the level the client needs. And if it's not, my first answer is always, hey, this is beyond what we can do in the color session. You've got to hire a VFX group to do this. And that's where this kind of interplay of how do we get things to and from VFX or graphics if we're just talking about graphics. We do.

And I just want to talk about kind of first before we get into graphics and VFX workflow specifically, a couple of overall concerns I think apply to both when you're dealing with an outside vendor for both graphics and both VFX. Because they might be the same vendor. They might be different. You might have one vendor doing graphics. You might have one vendor doing VFX. You might have multiple vendors doing VFX. And then workflow becomes really important because you need consistency across vendors.

Communication and planning is the most important thing across the board. We've literally said this for every workflow episode we've ever done, but it does apply here more than anything. Nothing that we say is going to be this is the right workflow for everything. You need to discuss it with the client, discuss it with the vendors, and come up with a plan. And then next, test the work. workflow through the entire process, whether it's just doing one test shot through every vendor to make sure, you know, everything comes through and everybody's getting the expected result, test it.

Because if you find a little hiccup in this workflow where, oh, we were going to do everything ACE's CCTV, but that's a problem for this one guy over here. And now every shot we do, we need to do a workaround. That becomes a management problem way down the road. where you don't want it to be. You want to find all those little problems in a test environment first. The next thing I want to say is always keep the client in the loop. You know, if you're communicating directly with VFX vendors as a colorist to come up with this workflow, let the client know, you don't have to get into the absolute technical details, but make sure the client is up to speed with the entire process that's going on. So there's no surprises from them, right? We don't to surprise the client at the end of the show and be like, hey, we're ready to deliver.

And the client's like, but wait, didn't we need to do a bunch of VFX stuff? And you'd be like, oh, we already did it or we didn't do it. We thought we were going to do that later. You know, all of that should be established in advance before you really start getting into the meat of the project. Yeah. So I agree with 100% of all that. And let's back up just one quick thing to the communication part of that.

One of the things that I think that is severely lacking. and I understand why it's lacking because people don't have time often to do this kind of thing, but it's documentation, right? And I think that that is, it's a key thing when both sides of this equation, what do you want, what do you need? Here's what we want. Here's what we need. Right?

So like, just for example, when it comes to like simple titles and graphics, like, you can work up a one sheet that's sort of like, okay, here's what we need. We need, you know, pro-res 444 with a straight alpha channel, you know, at, at, at, you you know, at project frame rate, project frame size, and that's it. Like, it's one paragraph, right? Or if it's something more complicated, as we'll get into a little bit with color management, like explaining exactly, like, okay, here is the render without the look baked on it. Here's a separate lot for you to apply, like, whatever the case may be, documenting what you're handing off, what you expect to go back. And I think that pertains not only to the final finishing color company, but also the motion graphics and the visual effects companies could get the hang of that kind of too.

Like, this is what we prefer. Like, I've worked with visual effects people who, you know, this is a little bit of a surprise when I first encountered this. But like, because you'd always think that they, you know, we'd want the most flexibility later on in the grade, etc. But I've had visual effects people who are like, just give me the final rendered version and that will be easiest for me, right? And I'm like, yeah, because they don't want to deal with the Lutz and like, you know, I'm like, as long as, and that's fine. as long as it's discussed, understood, the workflow is accepted on both sides, there's lots of ways to do this kind of process, but you're right. It has to be communicated so there are no surprises.

We worked on a show last year where we were dealing with a motion graphics vendor who, no matter how many times we said, we need something with an alpha channel, right? Every single time, we got it different. Like literally like sometimes it was straight sometimes it was pre-multified sometimes there wasn't any Sometimes we just video versus full levels right sometimes we just got the alpha channel and we didn't get the fill right it's like It shouldn't be that complicated if everybody on both sides is communicating properly and documenting properly and the important thing especially documentation's a great idea Take screen grabs write it all up because that's easy to do now when you're just thinking about and can conceptualizing and planning when the VFX company has 50 shots on their list to get done and you're

trying to get through 1500 shots of a grade, that's when things can break down because you're trying to move fast. And that's when it's like, oh, let me just check my document, you know? Yeah. And there's a reason also when you think of, you know, the marvels, the DC comics, the big action movie. I mean, that's why if you look in those credits, there's, you know, dozens of visual effects producers involved because it can get really complicated and I think that's another overarching point here too is that like depending on the like for a simple title workflow that's not what we're talking about but if you have 500 shots that are getting revised constantly in a 2,000 shot film it is a lot to keep track of it's not just the technical

back and forth it's things like versioning was it approved did they comment on it oh does this have the glow that we're supposed to have or whatever. And that workflow needs to be just as standardized and planned in advance as what kind of files we're doing. Yeah. So I think that if you're getting to the point where you have a project, and I think this affects a lot of time, you know, that's easy to think about that just as the high end. But there's some ripple down, you know, trickle down, that's the word I was looking for,

that can happen from those high end workflows to smaller projects. And I don't think I've ever heard anybody say, we were organized. too much. Like it doesn't happen. You know, so like the more documentation or organization you can do on any of these workflows is going to be key. The last thing I will say on that is a reply all email chain is not organization and is not workflow. Do better than that. Yeah. Actually, let's stop there for a second because I think that that parlay is into you're keeping your client in the loop. I think that that kind of real deep technical discussion, we've talked about this in other episodes. Like, you can think that you're doing the right thing by doing this really

detailed technical back and forth with, you know, stakeholders and everybody involved. And that's true, I think, with the operators a lot of time. You're doing your due diligence, making sure everything. But when clients see that, they can get confused. They might read subtext that's not really there. Oh, this is broken? Like, what's wrong? And like, do yourself a favor. Have the technical conversations with the people that need to have the technical conversations. Have the recap conversations with the clients, and they're two separate things. Just want to let you know, I talked to, you know, Sally over here, and we worked out all the technical details. Everything's good. This is what I'm waiting on. This is what she's waiting on. We're moving forward. But your

conversation with Sally is getting into the weeds about, you know, XRs and full range and legal range and lots and all that kind of stuff. The client doesn't necessarily have to be involved in all those details. And a lot of times, it can get confusing for them and it can erode confidence on either side. So just choose that conversations wisely and how much extra technical stuff you lump in sometimes with clients. I agree on that. Support for this episode comes from conform tools. Conform tools allows you to convert timelines between Premier, Resolve, and other NLEs while automatically solving common issues that normally need to be fixed by hand. Avoid time-consuming trim and transfer issues and securely send large media files to collaborators at a fraction of the

size in minutes instead of hours. With a growing toolbox of features, let conform tools handle the tedious stuff so you can focus on the creative. Built by post-prof professionals, conform tools helps editors, colorists, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Learn more at conform. Tools. All right, Joey, let's start our conversation in depth about this stuff leading in with graphics. When I think graphics, I think of things like lower thirds, on-screen text cards, identifications, I think of credits. I also think of things like maps and other like infographics that might appear on screen, things of that nature. Tell us some of the complications with graphics and things to look out for. Yeah, so starting with the easiest, right, your simple titles, just.

lower thirds, maybe text, text that comes up on screen, that stuff from the colorist perspective, we need to take a little bit more seriously now in the world of color management and multiple formats and stuff like that. Because in the old days, it was usually just, here's a file, drop it on the timeline, it's done. Right. But for our workflow, we need to be a little bit more cognizant of where our output transform is being done. And the reason I mentioned this is because let's say, you know, the simplest solution, we're doing a rec 709 show, right? We're using color management, but we're getting these overlay graphics,

these text graphics, have these really elaborate alpha channels with maybe different layers of opacity and really nice blending, and the artist has done a lot of work in figuring out the blending and the fading and the transparency. We might throw that into our timeline that has, for example,

a ACES-CCT output transform at the timeline level, and we might throw an input transform on our graphics, to bring the fill of those graphics into the right space. But what a lot of colorists don't realize is in that case, in, for example, a node-based Aces pipeline, you're not really color-managing the Alpha Channel. And there's not a great way to color-manage Alpha Channel.

So how this actually behaves is, and this is probably a big frustration for graphic artists, there's a possibility, depending on the complexity of the Alpha Channel, where we might throw it in and say, our color management is technically right. We're taking our graphic. We're going from 709 to ASICCT. We're going from ASS CCTV to REC709 on the timeline level.

But guess what? That timeline node is happening to the entire image. And our track-to-track blending is still happening in like the default gamma space. So the result being the opacities are wrong. And you get weird gradations of grays in places where it doesn't really work. We did a project, you remember this one, where we thought, like, we had a client sitting in the room viewing on a W-O-LED, and they were really attuned to this. And we thought, like, we thought there was something up for a while with the actual W-O-Led. And we were trying to

rationalize this. This is years ago, I mean, probably 10 years ago at this point. But we were, we were like, oh, it's not happening on LED. It's not really there. The long story, short, of it was it was an AIS project. The pipeline was a little off. We hadn't managed some of these overlays. We hadn't, sorry, we had managed some of these overlays and putting them in the AIS space. And you're right.

The Alpha Channel is not something that that doesn't math the same way. And we were getting weird glows and weird artifacts from text fading up. So this film had a lot of long fades. So it looked really. Yeah. So if you see the fade kind of at the wrong rate, that's a blending problem.

And what, you know, People oversimplify this, but at the end of the day, we have as colorists been saying, scene referred, scene referred, seen referred for every bit of our lives because we love it for a color workflow. Alpha channel blending kind of usually needs to happen in a display referred space, right? Yeah, so easy way to handle this, right? I think you have a couple choices. I think for those of those of us who, you know, work, seen referred, and how we kind of system-wide or a node-based kind of management,

especially with node-based management, it's a lot easier to handle. You could simply move that output transform from a timeline level to, say, an adjustment layer, right? That's one way to handle it. Or use a nested timeline or per-rub. Or use, yeah, exactly. Groups are a great way to handle this, too. You could have, you know, only your video footage have that output transform. There's a lot of ways to take it off the global timeline as well, you know, of course, as well.

The other thing I would mention that's interesting about those, that simple kind of graphics, besides the color management stuff, and I think you skipped over this because I had mentioned it earlier, but I just want to put it out there again. I am constantly, constantly amazed by people's lack of understanding of what transparency in Alpha Channel actually is and means, right? And we get into this conversation more times than you would expect about straight Alpha channels, pre-multipy, Alpha channels, all of that kind of stuff. And I think that one of the things that has to have a discussion at the top of any motion graphics discussion is, how are your titles generated? Right. And I asked that because if they are something that was generated inside of the app, like, say,

a Premiere Pro title generator, oftentimes the better decision is just to take that responsibility out of the editor's hand or the motion graphic person's hand. and just say, give us the Premiere Pro project, and the font, we'll take it from there, right? Because now we have... Right, and do our export. Right, and do our... Because now we have control over handling how that alpha channel works,

make sure it's the right, you know, alpha channel type, that there's no weird, you know, softening or all the weird things going on. But, you know, if they say, hey, listen, I made all these in After Effects, they're all separate files, and I'm just going to drop them in. My next question is, okay, tell me about your Alpha Channel, right?

And that's a real, you'd be surprised because a lot of the problems that people see in graphics and stuff are not the problems with the graphics. They're having to do with alpha channel interpretation, right? Things of like seeing a border along the edge or some weird ghosting or something like that. And if you're not paying attention to those things, they can just kind of squeak by. So having that conversation too about, hey, okay, you've made these things, they're self-contained. What is the alpha channel? And if they're not self-contained, if you didn't make them, you know, have them built like that, just, Give us a project and we'll handle it from there.

Yeah. Now, this is a big one. And I think we really need to talk about this because it was something that Matt specifically mentioned is something we run into all the time. Full screen design graphics, infographics, maps, graphs, stuff like that. Yeah. Do we grade them? And the answer is maybe, right? Oftentimes, you know, if they are.

approved, clients happy with them, whatever, no. In an ideal world, we shouldn't touch them. I think that's very true. And the concern here is, number one, the integrity of the original designer's vision, right? And how they work with the client, client approved their work. We don't want to be messing with that. But there are a couple exceptions to this because they might not have the full context of the grade. So when we cut to a map, for example, if we were doing film grain and a little bit of a print look, we might want to apply some of that to the map.

This is where that communication is so important because we need to talk to the client, say, hey, we think that we can just, you know, maybe do a very small grade on these graphics, but we want to make sure that that's okay with you. That's okay with the graphics vendor. And here's the biggest thing that is, we got to. think as colorists, not as the be-all end-all of the workflow, because there's so much else around us. So let's just say, I'm the colorist, I get a show, I get all these maps in, and I'm like, these are too bright and too pale. I'm going to fix them because I'm the best, right? And we just do it. Great. Client might not even notice. They might just think, hey, you know, this looks great. We just watched through the whole thing. It's approved. Two months later, the distributor says,

oh, we're going to make the French version of this. We're going to make the Spanish version of this. So they pull their textless renders that they got from the graphics vendor. They start translating the text and making new versions of the graphics. They put it into the show. They look at the reference of the original master. They say, why do these graphics look totally different? Because we did something in the grade we shouldn't have done

and nobody knew about it and it got through. And then we weren't thinking about maybe this needs to go to versioning. regioning. There's so many other things that happen, especially with modern shows that have these long life cycles that we might not be thinking of, but are essential to the success of the project. And then what happens, it becomes an email chain of, why are the textless wrong? Why is the color wrong? And then it becomes kind of a finger pointing game that could have completely been eliminated with just a little bit of communication between the color, the client and the graphics vendor. And it became, this is what happened. I think this is, you know, to fall on the sword for colorists worldwide here, it's something that we can very easily make a mistake and do and just be like, oh, I'm just gonna fix this real quick because I think it's better that way.

And we might be right, but we're not looking at the entire context of the job and we need to communicate that. And that's where, again, like Matt said, He might see something on air that he made and look completely wrong because somebody thought, I'm going to do X or Y to make it better, but they didn't know the entire creative process that went into that graphic. You know, they might have done, I'm going to put my film print emulation on it, but now the blues on this graphic are completely inaccurate to what we were trying to portray. And, you know, just that, sorry to go on a complete rant about this.

You're worked up about this. I get it. I see it from two sides. There is a importance to grading full screen graphics, maps, etc., in context, so they flow as well as possible with the show sometimes. There's also, it's a very prickly thing that you need to be very careful about and very, very transparent about before you just go rogue. This is where the colorist can go really wrong and mess things up,

and that's what we need to avoid. I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. There's a lot to unpack there. So from an operational point of view, where I encountered this the most, is not like I'm all of a sudden making big, gigantic sweeping changes to those full-screen graphics. Most of the time, it's actually relatively small stuff for, as you said, shot-to-shot flow in context, because oftentimes what happens is an editor is building a sequence. They put in a placeholder that's like map graphic here, right?

Somebody talks to a motion graphics person. They build a map graphic completely isolated on an island outside of context of how the show is developing around it. Right. So, you know, it might be a dark, moody, you know, recreation scene in a history doc. And then all of a sudden, this graphic pops on screen with everything pegged to, you know, know on 100% and it's like whoa it's an attack on your eyes so what do i do as the colorist i just gain that down right thinking that it's flowing better and now it's like you get you know the motion graphics going what's wrong with these whites they're at you know 80% now not at 100% and so i think

there's a couple ways of attack this problem number one it is i think editorial workflows can do a better job with handoffs to motion graphics teams and i think that's oftentimes giving them, just like we get as colorists, where we get a reference cut, giving those motion graphics guys accurate and more importantly, up-to-date reference cuts of the sections where those graphics are going to appear. That way, they can view things in context. And I say up-to-date, kind of underlining that, because I can't tell you how many times, it's not just the technical stuff.

It's literally the timing stuff that sometimes gets people, like, we're like, well, this is, you know, 28 frames short or something like that. How could that happen? Because the editor, they did a handoff to motion graphics. They made some changes. They made a handoff to us. And so it's like, again, it's one of those things that we always talk about. Keeping everybody's timeline in sync has to happen regardless.

And I think that in those situations, it is one of those prep kind of conversations, too, as you alluded to earlier. Hey, listen, I want to give you some guidelines for this. this is a pretty dark, deep show or whatever, I'm trying to keep my highlights right around this level. It would be great if you didn't peg everything to 100%, or 255 or whatever, you know, whatever metric you want to use. And then I think the other thing that is at play there is when you, as the colorist, feel the need to do that adjustment,

as you said, making that adjustment just because can get you in a lot of trouble, I don't think it's that hard for especially these days for you go, hey, here's that 20 second section. I'm just going to throw that off to the motion graphics. Explain what I did real quick, why I did it. You want to just give me the thumbs up on that. Chances are they'll go, thanks, appreciate you working for, you know, making this work, and that's it. You know, in the worst case scenario, they'll go, you're right, I see what you're talking about that. Let me give you a new map or a graphic or whatever.

And then it's like, then it's fine. And the last leg of that communication is the client, because like I said, there's all of this other stuff that happens afterwards. Let's say, you know, that example I brought up of the textless and the regionalization, the easy solution of that is, we need you to grade all the textless elements too to match. But if they didn't know, they would have never asked you. Yeah. And I mean, I've gotten in that problem. The text and textless situation is a really good asterisk to put in this conversation. because if you're responsible for the deliverable

and the packaging of stuff, that matching is something you have to pay attention to. It's not even just like levels and stuff like that. It's like you'd be surprised how often it happens where you get a texted graphic and then you get a textless version, but there's something shifted about it, right? Like the timing is not exactly right or whatever.

It gets flagged in QC and then it's your problem as the colorist. So like those kind of issues flagging them as early. as possible is important. All right, along the same lines. Let's talk, we talked, I was griping earlier about Alpha Channel. Let's talk a little bit about some of that keyable elements kind of thing because I think to me, sometimes this requires a little bit of preparatory work from the colorist to make it work.

And what I mean by that is when a designer is working on their own, on an island, maybe with an offline cut of the show, you. You'd be surprised all of the choices that are made with an ungraded out of context shot that they might have in hand. And then when they get the graded shot, they're like, well, this is hard to read now or it's not in the right place or whatever. Describe that back and forth a little bit too because I think one of the things that people often, producers especially try to do is have parallel paths of work. Like, okay, motion graphics doing, mixes doing its thing, colors doing its thing, right? but oftentimes there's a intermediate road that could save everybody a lot of time and hassle right I'm going to give you a graded section of this where you're doing all these motion graphics so you can have everything in context is a question or is a workflow step that often gets ignored and it causes problems later yeah and this is really something that happens with graphics that are integrated with footage and this is kind of like VFX junior right because when we get into heavy VFX we're talking about

about whole shot with multiple elements and compositing and everything is going to be one thing, whether they get plates from color, whether they get a lot from color, and they give us back a whole plate. But what kind of the junior version of that is we're going to do titles, for example, that track with footage. And in that case, we're not going to get the whole thing back from the graphic artist. We're still going to get a keyable graphic, but it has to line up with our footage. And a real great way to attack that is at the beginning of the project, you might not have your final grade. Grade those sections first. Send them to the VFX or the graphics artist.

So they are working with an approximation of what the grade will be for their approval process and for their design process. Does that mean that that grade has to be identical when you get back those keyables? No, but it's close. And the beauty of that is, now we can bring in the graphics. We don't need to grade or adjust the graphics, like we just said for all those reasons why we generally shouldn't do. But we can still grade the image underneath to perfect it. We can give the graphics artist our first pass. They handle everything in terms of tracking, integration with the footage, stuff like that.

Give us back a keyable. then we can drop that onto our final grade, and in most cases, works great. In a little bit of cases, we might adjust our grade a little bit to make the graphic blend exactly how we want it. Maybe a little bit of a power window here on the footage or a little bit of an overall gain adjustment

or something like that. But just that one step of giving them a pre-grade, if you will, is going to smooth out that whole process. Uh, yeah. And that works, I think, for keyable elements with footage. Uh, that process does not work for what we're going to talk about next, which is, you know, full deep VFX. Yeah. And one more, one more sort of workflow note.

And I, I don't know if I'm the only one who does it this way. I don't know if I've ever really really told you this, uh, but I'm sure you do something similar. And that is, it's a really simple workflow thing using in this case, some of resolve tools to help me. And that is, um, I generally, those sections where, there's a lot of motion graphics or titles, I will generally color code those clips underneath that section. So visually, it's very easily to go, hey, it's these seven shots that are affected by this title. The other thing I'll do, and this is something I'm in the habit of doing for a lot of reasons just to check progress, you might not be aware of it, but in the resolve clips menu,

there's a modified section, and you can look at modified by, you know, one hour, two hours, you know, 12 hours, whatever, you can even set a custom filter of it, is that if I am, if I've done a handoff to a visual effects vendor, just going about my thing, grading the rest of the show, you know, sometimes you'll bounce back and forth, you'll make changes, you're not even aware of it. One of the nice things you can do is use that modified function and go, oh, look, my yellow coated, color coded clips that are for motion graphics, I've changed those today. Oh, crap, I changed them significantly. that's another handoff just as another reference cut.

And I do that same kind of thing, by the way, for like mix too. Like if there's something where I'm like, oh, I had to fix a problem and I had to slow down this clip to make this work or whatever, I'm not sure if there's sound design on that. I'll do the same kind of thing and just color code that, check by modified, re-export a section if needed, right? Which can be helpful. So let me jump to kind of the biggest hardest one, because this is where it all comes together, things like alpha channels, things like mats, things like color space, color management,

back and forth, coordination. That is when you're dealing with real heavy VFX. I'm talking green screens. I'm talking compositing in virtual environments, CG elements, rig removal, stuff where the VFX artist is going to be working with a full res plate and giving you back a done full res image. and you need to be able to either maintain the grade through that whole process or maintain your ability to grade through that whole process. That's where it becomes we get into things like color spaces and interchange and mats and things like that. And a couple just overall guidelines I want to start out with

using a standardized color space. Whether that is, like you said earlier, for some jobs, it's you send me the done grade. And I'm gonna work off of that. If that's how, that's a little bit limiting, in a lot of ways. And it's, and it's mostly, things, that's okay.

Yeah, and it's mostly limiting, it's mostly limited from a flexibility point of view, not that it can't be done or it makes the job. I mean, it can make the job technically harder. It's more limiting for something is in progress. They're subject to change. Now we're making decisions on basically baked in images. That's where it gets a little more,

but like if the grade has been approved from the client and all you're doing is throwing in, you know, a graphic that's tracked in a TV set or something. That can be done on log footage or non-mog, you know what I'm saying? That's not one of the situations that's totally dependent on having that flexibility. But I'll say this. My favorite workflow, generally, is the following. We give completely ungraded clips in a standardized color space to the VFX artist. That in my world is usually ACEs. So we say we're going to work

in ACE's CCTV. There's also ACE's CG, which has its own concerns. We've done some stuff with ACE's CG with full computer generated jobs. But for footage, usually we want to stay in a log space.

It makes everybody's life a little bit easier. So we will give two VFX. And again, this is one workflow. This is not every workflow. We will give them color space transformed ACE's CCT footage. No grade on it. It's just, okay, maybe shot A is red, shot B is Alexa. We're transforming both of them into ACE's CCTV. The reason is we give them this pile of plates that they're going to be integrating and

compositing together. We also give them a overall preview Lut that is the general look of the show. that Ludd is expecting Aces CCT and outputting whatever our deliverable display format is. They can put that on the top of their comp, work underneath of it. If they, oh, we need to composite this sky into this shot. We're going to adjust the color of the sky to fit in context, right? They're going to be able to do that because they're going to be looking at it in the correct display space. All of the sources are uniform. They don't need to be like, oh, I need to take the sky layer and transform that from

log C to this or that, right? They can all work in ACES CCTV underneath the display transform. Then they can give me back an ACE's CCTV image that I drop exactly into my pipeline. And it just works. So it looks exactly right when I put it under the show look. I can grade it like it's any other shot. Now, there's one caveat that you did. There's one caveat that you skipped over, though, is that when they render

that back for you, they are not baking in their preview display transform. Like, they're basically giving you back the same thing that you gave them, right? They are giving you a now comp, but color decisions in terms of output transform, et cetera, not baked into that. So then when you get it back, you can just reapply your grade. And the other caveat about that, that's great. You're right. Reaply your grade, it's like you just did magic. All of a sudden, everything's online and it all looks the same. You mentioned earlier giving them just the show look. I mean, it depends on how far along you are in your grade process too, right? If this is something where you've already done a lot of per shot color work, you could hand off to them a lot per shot. The actual shot

grade too. Just be aware that that is not going to be, it's going to suffer the same limitations that any sort of handoff lookup table like that is going to suffer from, right? All like your you know, 27 layers of tracking and all that kind of stuff and your texture and all that jazz, not going to make it into that lot. But the general color decisions, mood, etc., yes, that will make it into that. And the beautiful thing about this working kind of VFX scene referred is the artist, the VFX artist, can manipulate color where they see fit, right? Like the example I said of a sky, they're going to make that sky line up exactly to be in context with their VFX work all of that's still going to apply underneath of our grade.

So basically, proportionally, everything in the VFX shot render is going to be right amongst itself. And then we can grade along with that. Now, the next step from that is, depending on what type of VFX we're doing, if it's integrating CG elements, for example, we can ask the VFX artist to also give us mats, give us pre-rendered mats of the robot that's coming in and killing all the people or the sky that you replace in case we need to tweak it a little bit, we can bring those into our node tree and use that to have really accurate secondaries. That's kind of a bonus of this workflow.

Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and the XMP 270 and XMP 310, the accessible, lightweight, and versatile monitors helping to bring HDR monitoring on set while also being very well suited to post-production work. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Yeah, you know, it's an interesting workflow because I think that once you start getting into things like XRs with mats attached, crypto mats, etc, that is a level of sophistication

that almost by definition requires some further discussion with the person that you're working with because it's like, you know, one of the things that can happen is like, okay, are these mats labeled or not labeled, right? What order are they in? Are they, you know, this channel, that channel, whatever, and I think that can get confusing. But if that workflow is really spelled out,

like last summer, I think it was, you did a project that had a lot of XR attached mats. And I think from your, I think you would say it was well handled, well organized, and it made the grade significantly easier because instead of you having to cut and track, really sophisticated edges and things of that nature. It's just baked in. So you're like, cool, blue.

Yep, orange. And that was a job that was 100% CG originated. And that's where you talk about using ACE's CG. Because ACE's CG is designed to work in linear floating point, which is what you render an EXR as. So for footage stuff, and again, for the 18th time, not every workflow. But in general, for footage stuff where we're going to give you camera plates, I prefer to work in ACE's CCTV, give them CCTV log plates. They give me back CCTV log footage.

Everything's copacetic. But for fully CG originated stuff, we want to keep as much kind of bit depth precision as possible. We don't want to trim down our renders to be, you know, 10-bit log. when they're coming out of the computer generated pipeline as 32-bit floating point. Right? So in that case, we specify ACE's CG, XR with crypto mats and huge files, but the end result means I get the absolute highest quality of the CG render into my color grade. There is a hubris that I think happens with modern color correction tools that,

like, they're sort of like all-on-one platforms that can do a little bit of everything. And that's true. But I think one of the things that's also at play here, too, is that as a, you especially, but there's others, probably some of our listeners that are like this as well, that, you know, hey, I'm a great colorist. I know enough about visual effects to be dangerous. There's a level of complexity that you built into your life that you don't necessarily need to.

I'm thinking, for example, of, I've watched YouTube videos. People were spending, like, hours and hours and hours designing, like, glints on car rims and reflections on hoods and like stuff like that right like that car was built probably an unreal engine by you know a 3D designer and a 3d compositor and guess what they have all of this lighting all of these lighting tools they have all of these texture tools why make your life 800 times harder like in those kind of situations interacting with a visual effects person who can hand off in layered ex or as cryptomats or whatever whatever, those reflections and those layers.

Like, it just, it's a, let the people who do this well. And they're going to look better. Do that work. And then you collect it on the end to make small, final, in context tweaks. I think a lot of people have this idea that like, no, no, no, I can just do it all myself. And I think at the, at the medium end of things, that's more or less true. But when you talk about that extra level of polish and you wonder why a Mercedes-Benz commercial cost, you know, $10 million to make.

It's this kind of thing, right? It's the visual artist working on creating the reflection as the card door moves for, you know, seven days. It's that kind of thing. And like you said, the people who are good at the different things should be doing those different things. The colorist should be focused on making small adjustments for context and overall creative color design, not thinking about where does this lens.

flare come in and things like that. And that kind of, and I think that's one of the things that it's intimidating for those who have never done that kind of workflow is that they're thinking that like, hey, XR, these mats, cryptomats, whatever, like are just another type of file. I like to think of them as a connection. They are a conduit to another application that I don't know how to use and I'm not that good at, but allows me to get funnel information from those tools in a live way into my application that allows me to work with it as a colorist. And that's just, you're going to get significantly better results if you understand those kind of workflows and how to deal with them.

Now, I want to go back one second because you had met, you've mentioned probably 10 times now. You've mentioned ACE's CCT, ACEs CG, et cetera, right? I think this is a real big thing in the industry right now for the past probably decade, but it's gotten more complicated as Aces has developed, certainly, and then as everybody and their mom has created their own, you know, proprietary color management system. Let's talk about that for one second.

So Aces, the Academy Color and Coding specification, has been around for a number of years now. We're now in Aces 2.0. That's a whole lot of extra development and things we don't have time to go in front of this episode. But why work, in a general sense, Why work something like aces for these pipelines rather than, say, resolve color management or baselines color management or whatever? I think I know the big picture, but I'm curious about your general feeling about that.

The overall idea is so everyone can speak the same language, right? Yes, we could do our grade in DaVinci Wide Gamut, but also send plates in like log C. But now we need to know to transform that at every stage. the process in and out because guess what the only thing that speaks da Vinci wide gamut is resolved the only thing that speaks baselight t-cam is bas-light aces was designed as a industry standard and now basically every application out there from da Vinci resolve to baselight to you know after effects premiere now is is getting functionality you know everybody is getting ACE's support and it's getting better and better, especially if you have open color I.O.

integrated into your app. You've got ACEs built in right there. That's how AfterFX handles it. It's very well done. It's a quick, easy way for everybody to speak the same language and eliminate variables. Is it the answer for everything? No. One other workflow that we've kind of mentioned, but I'm going to explicitly put it out here, is working your VFX in camera space. you know you could do if your whole film is shot on log c with maybe a couple elements that aren't log c right you can transform those elements that aren't log c into log c send everything to your vfx artists in log c

and get log c back give them a preview lot that's expecting log c the whole workflow works the same way because guess what everybody's still speaking the same language yeah it's just aces gives you that extra level of standard because, okay, let's say we didn't give them customized preview luts for everything, because we're not at that stage yet. It's standardized. They can at least get it into a display space by saying ACE's CCTV to Rec 709.

Yeah. And I think there's a couple things about that. Number one, I think that you're right about sort of the translation from system to system, artist to artist. That, you know, because one of the things is like, yeah, we might both be working in, say, log C for example in a traditional pipeline but you know what for some reason

I'm working with a true transform you're working with a lot and they're slightly different and we can't figure that out why they're slightly different right things of that nature I agree with you generally speaking about but it's not the other thing I would point about this and what you're

when you were talking it brought to mind is that I also think there's a level of complexity that people sometimes graft on to project that don't need that level of complexity, right? True. Like, if you're getting just basic white, you know, lower thirds or identifiers, you really don't need to overthink this and be doing, you know,

look up tables and transforms and aces and whatever, like, just get it, right? I think where this, this buys, the aces in the color management system really buys us is the more complicated the work is, and the more involved it is, it takes the onus of a single place to view out of out of the equation right so in a lot of times it's like okay we got to come into the color suite to view everything no no we don't have we have artists in india we have artists in australia we have artists in europe whatever it may be right like you need to be able to go to those shops and be like yeah this is more or less what we're going to see in the color suite and a standardized system like aces doesn't always work this way but at least it gives you a fighting

chance to be able to do something like you mentioned a lot of times clients are trying to do this work simultaneously. Final color might not be anywhere close to being done when they start these VFX shots. If everybody's in a standard language, AISCCT or AISCG, we at least have set expectations from the beginning. So one last thing I want to talk about in this conversation, and that is the wild and wacky world of HDR when it comes to graphics and visual effects work. I think the visual effects work is actually a much easier discussion because I think if you're are truly involved in visual effects work, this has kind of become the new norm, color management systems and those pipelines, whatever. Where I see the problem more with HDR work is with motion

graphic designers who have, for the large part, never, couldn't even explain what HDR means to you, have never worked in those pipelines. And so they're just piping out, you know, SDR graphics, et cetera. Now you got this SDR graphic. And, hey, let's just say, for the sake of argument, assume that it's not just white text at 100. Maybe there's some color to it. There's some gradation. What is this red supposed to be? What could this red be? Right? That's where I think a lot of the creative arguments come in and some technical problems. I generally like to gauge the person I'm talking to to see if we have a fighting chance for them to understand the pipeline. If there's no chance that they're going to understand the pipeline, I'm going to say, do

your thing, I will handle it, right? And that's a, it's a, it's like a little bit of hubris in kind of a cocky spot to be in. But at the same time, it's like, cool. Like, I can take your 100% white text. I can place it at 203 or wherever it needs to go in context of the show and we're done. Nobody's the wiser. Where it gets a little more difficult is when you're making decisions, let's just generally call them volumetric decisions, right? Where I'm going to go, hey, I'm going to this bluer or deeper or darker or whatever, more saturated. Like those are questions where I think that you need to be careful that you're not stepping on somebody's toes.

I get why you did it. It was too much to explain the work for their capabilities. Their understanding wasn't enough. You were under deadline. You had to do it. But at the same time, like Matt's question here, he gives up something that now it's totally different. That's a spot you don't want to be in.

You got to work. Absolutely. Yeah. And all of those problems are multiplied by HDR by the fact that most of the time, and this is getting better, and I'm glad it's getting better, especially the apples of the world, embracing HDR workflows, monitors getting cheaper. I would love to see all of the VFX artists and graphic designers we work with have HDR capable monitoring, even if it's not reference quality, because then they can get an idea of where things sit levels-wise. because if we're working in a SDR graphics into an HDR pipeline, it becomes the colorist's creative job to figure out where these graphics need to sit brightness-wise.

And that's fine. I'm happy to do it. But like you said, that can get into some conflicts of they were looking at it in SDR. SDR has a concept of 100% white. There is no 100% white in HDR. So we've got to figure out proportionality and levels and dynamic range between the footage and the text, for example. it would be better in the world if everybody,

like we talked about with VFX, spoke the same language and all the VFX and all the graphics were being done with HDR monitoring. That's just not the state of the industry right now. So we need to understand. The client needs to understand that, and the artist needs to understand that. So the whole thing goes back to the very beginning, close that loop of communication.

So the artist knows, hey, I'm taking your 100-knit SDR graphics, and I'm going to place them in HDR where they fit with the footage. that's something that we just need to do for this workflow. For sure, for sure. So as we said at the top, this is a very deep topic. Matt, hopefully we've answered some of your general grievances and questions about this. But if not, please let us know.

And to be clear, we don't want, you know, the goal here is no surprises. Everyone's happy. Everyone gets their artistic lane and their creative decisions represented where they should be, right? the idea of maintaining artistic intent is the purpose of these workflows. It's just we got to step over some of these challenges as we go. And keep that attitude, you know? To that end, to that end, I would just say that, you know, as you do more of these kind of handoffs, there's a certain sort of checklist of things that you get used to asking all

the time. And I would just build up that list of questions. Honestly, like, what's the, what Alphacchanter are you using? Is it straight or is it pre-multiplied? Is this, you know, what working color space are you in? What types of Lutz can you accept? Like all those kind of questions. Is it HCR?

Is it S-T-R? Whatever. Like, you'll find that you get into a lot of the similar type of repetitive questions. And that's why I led off the discussion today talking about documentation. Because it's great. If you could just hand over, hey, we work in Nuke. Cool. Here's your instructions in Nuke, right?

Like, it might take you some work and some research and some development time to do that kind of stuff. But ask yourself, would you rather sit on a phone call or a Zoom call 30 times in a week handling, you know, asking the same questions or just go, nope, here's the documentation for it. Just follow these steps and you're good. So I would also argue, like, there's some lifting work that can kind of go on sort of pre-production. And as you do more of these type of projects from both, what sounds like Matt's a motion graphic artist, like from his side, as well as from the colorist side, that they can get on the same page.

So good stuff, Joe, good stuff. All right, well, as a reminder, you can always follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for the offset podcast. You'll find our logo right there, so you can, you know it's us. Also, as we mentioned at the top of the show, we launched a Discord server two weeks ago. We got about 50 or so people out there now.

It's an open server. We would love to have you join the conversation. It's a pretty simple, straightforward design. We got a lounge. We got a questions for. We got some show notes, things of that nature. But so far, so good. A lot of really cool people in there asking some good questions.

Just this morning, Joey was going on about color management ad nauseum. So it's that kind of view. If you need more of the discussion, that's the place to go get more of the discussion. You can also follow the show on YouTube where you get the video version and, of course, all the major podcasting platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And you can always head over to the offset podcasts for our entire library of shows. And last thing, we'd love it if you'd consider supporting the show by visiting this link on screen to buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Every dollar pledge there goes directly to supporting this show. So, Joe, yeah, good conversation as always, man.

This stuff gets deep. And I think that's one. My last point here is I just say, like, if you're ever feeling overwhelmed about these workflows, just trust that you're not the only one that's feeling overwhelmed about these workflows, right? they can get complicated. It's easy to talk yourself in circles. And so I think that my overarching point is just when you're in one of these situations, take a breath, think about the questions, ask the questions,

work through the problems, work through the tests, don't make assumptions, and you'll be more than halfway there of getting it right for whatever particular project you're working on. So, good stuff. So for the Offset Podcast, I am Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening. You know,