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Color Correct: Avid Symphony vs. DaVinci?


Ben Hayflick

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Hello, I am about to do color correction on a short shot on Super 16mm, telecined to DigiBeta, and the finished output will be DigiBeta.

 

My question is, should I do the CC on an Avid Symphony or a DaVinci? My film doesn't need major CC work, just some cleanup here and there. The DaVinci is more expensive (by around $100/hour), is this price increase justified? I believe the Avid will handle uncompressed footage too (please correct me if I'm wrong!) so that shouldn't be a factor. So is there a big difference?

 

Any other advice? (I also realize the colorist is probably 90% of the equation.)

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Hello,

 

You shouldn't have too many problems grading on symphony. If you are grading from your video masters (rather than from the original film) then both the symphony and davinci will have similar restrictions.

 

Persoanlly, I prefer grading on a complete post solution rather than just a colorising tool because there are more options available to create a "look", other than just color changes. As long as the operator is a little more creative than saying "is that bright enough"!

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Thanks David. Yes I will be grading from the video masters. In the initial telecine, which was a best light, they went for maximum latitude to allow for best results in the event of a tape to tape CC finish. So hopefully the end results will still be handsome.

 

Actually, is there an advantage of a "tape to tape" cc method, as opposed to the other option of doing all the cc in Avid before spitting back the assembly to DigiBeta (what would it be called - perhaps an "online color correct")? Am I confused about my two options here?

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Hello,

 

You seem to have done everything right for either option - tape to tape or "online grade", in terms of your initial telecine.

 

You should be able to achieve pretty well anything you like during your online symphony session, before spitting out your final masters. The only advantage to using a tape-to-tape session would be that the operator you would use does nothing else all day than create "looks" and change colors. You would therefore hope they are quite good at it. However, any experienced online symphony operator will have also spent many hours grading.

 

You mentioned that your film didn't need major correction, so my suggestion would be do it in symphony, knowing that if you can't get exactly what you want you can go into a tape-to-tape session later - possibly with just the shots you were having difficulty with. This would be the most efficient way, provided the symphony operator is reasonably quick.

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Hello, I am about to do color correction on a short shot on Super 16mm, telecined to DigiBeta, and the finished output will be DigiBeta. 

 

My question is, should I do the CC on an Avid Symphony or a DaVinci?  My film doesn't need major CC work, just some cleanup here and there.  The DaVinci is more expensive (by around $100/hour), is this price increase justified?  I believe the Avid will handle uncompressed footage too (please correct me if I'm wrong!) so that shouldn't be a factor.  So is there a big difference?

 

Any other advice?  (I also realize the colorist is probably 90% of the equation.)

 

Here's the difference:

Someone who's career is as a professional colorist vs. an editor who knows how to use the controls in an Avid. It's more expensive because it's better quality and you have someone with a trained and critical eye helping you. It's the small adjustments, like you require, that neccessitate a more skilled operator.

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Here's the difference:

Someone who's career is as a professional colorist vs. an editor who knows how to use the controls in an Avid. It's more expensive because it's better quality and you have someone with a trained and critical eye helping you. It's the small adjustments, like you require, that neccessitate a more skilled operator.

 

 

I would recomend the professional colorist working from the original film material. Remember the DigiBeta is compressed and the reduced SDI color space

 

Stephen Williams DoP

Zurich

 

www.stephenw.com

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Hi,

 

> Remember the DigiBeta is compressed

 

Yeah, but not very much.

 

> and the reduced SDI color space

 

The colour space is similar, or at least similar in chromatic resolution, to any other 10-bit medium, such as a DPX film scan. The spatial resolution is reduced, not the colourspace.

 

Phil

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> and the reduced SDI color space

 

The colour space is similar, or at least similar in chromatic resolution, to any other 10-bit medium, such as a DPX film scan. The spatial resolution is reduced, not the colourspace.

 

Phil

 

YUV anyone?

 

-k

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The original post makes it clear that a best light telecine has already been done, so any grading will be from digi beta source whether in online or tape-to-tape davinci. So all the color space and YUV points are largely irrelevant because whatever system is used, the source is already YUV digi beta.

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Hi,

 

> Remember the DigiBeta is compressed

 

Yeah, but not very much.

 

> and the reduced SDI color space

 

The colour space is similar, or at least similar in chromatic resolution, to any other 10-bit medium, such as a DPX film scan. The spatial resolution is reduced, not the colourspace.

 

Phil

 

 

Phil,

 

IMHO would still go back to the original the original neg to grade.

SDI is 4:2:2 , Digi Beta is about 2:1 compressed.

Film has a greater color range than 10 bit DPX in any case.

 

Stephen Williams DP

Zurich

 

www.stephenw.com

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IMHO would still go back to the original the original neg to grade.

 

The original poster does state that he doesn't need major correctional work. So it is highly doubtful whether it is worth the extra money to pull the neg and re-telecine. While it is true that there are more options when grading from film, if you don't need any of this extra range then there is very little point in going to the expense of a re-TK.

 

But if we forget all about budget, then I guess he should just reshoot on 65mm! :rolleyes:

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But if we forget all about budget, then I guess he should just reshoot on 65mm!  :rolleyes:

 

IMHO If you have a good colourist then you can do a lot in 1 Hour! I find the slight adjustments made in Flame are nothing like as good as a final TK. The TK option is often cheaper as a good colourist is very fast.

 

Stephen

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well flames are 12 years old and not at all designed for any color grading. Personally, I think they should have been committed to a museum some years ago.

 

More recent systems are designed for grading. For example, we visited a facility in Madrid that has a spirit connected to a Mistika for grading. That is, the online / compositing device was selected over pogle for the color correction stage. You'll see more of this over the next months and years - having a scanner such as a sprit transferring to disks and then graded by a Misika , Lustre, Baselight type thing. Actually thats not such a new concept.

 

Although I wouldn't place a symphony in the league of a Mistika in terms of overall ability, its color grading facilities are reasonably capable. But you are right about the operator. You do need an operator that can grade quickly, although as I mentioned in an earlier post, grading in an online scenario is now very commonplace and most operators will be very experienced at grading.

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well flames are 12 years old and not at all designed for any color grading. Personally, I think they should have been committed to a museum some years ago.

 

 

Flame is a compositing system, not a grading system. Museum...? I don't know, a 4 CPU tezro delivers quite some performance (whether its worth its price... dunno, depends).

Problem with grading in Flame is that you probably got in via Digibeta (compressed YUV) and graded in 8 Bit colorspace. If you had 10bit log files well converted to 12 bit and grade in 12 Bit the flame should (qualitywise) really not fall behind a TK, however you can do freeform masks, track them, build complex looks, etc.

Problem is the workflow, which is for compositing not for grading. I'd rather take the smoke/fire or better the lustre in that cases...

 

 

-k

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Flame is a compositing system, not a grading system. Museum...? I don't know, a 4 CPU tezro delivers quite some performance (whether its worth its price... dunno, depends).

Problem with grading in Flame is that you probably got in via Digibeta (compressed YUV) and graded in 8 Bit colorspace. If you had 10bit log files well converted to 12 bit and grade in 12 Bit the flame should (qualitywise) really not fall behind a TK, however you can do freeform masks, track them, build complex looks, etc. 

Problem is the workflow, which is for compositing not for grading. I'd rather take the smoke/fire or better the lustre in that cases...

-k

 

Yes, agreed completely. Flame is all wrong for the job. Also it constantly converts from YUV to RGB for processing and back again for layoff, and that causes all sorts of banding if you look too close. As for SGI Tezro, after 9 years of running on SGI we are on the brink of becoming an SGI-less facility. They are too expensive and support has never been acceptable to me. We just had a demo of Mistika running on a pretty standard Linux box, and it ran 6 times faster than an SGI octane 2. It is also able to process seemlessly across multiple linux boxes, and you can get lots (and lots) of those for the price if a $70,000 tezro!

 

Bye Bye SGI.

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Thanks to all for the replies and advice. David was right to bring up budgetary restrictions; while ideal it's simply not feasible to do something like go back to the negs for another round of TK.

 

However a new option has been presented to me for the same job - to do the online and CC on a 10-bit uncompressed Final Cut Pro HD system, with Color Finesse tools and 32-bit floating point color (which may be culled directly from the apple.com marketing copy but at least it sounds fancy).

 

I balked when I heard about this - because FCP for color correct??? - but the colorist I spoke with assured me that for my workflow, this system can easily handle even HD resolutions and color depths et al with no quality loss. Remember that I am working from DigiBeta source tapes, and want to have a cc DigiBeta master to finish. The colorist further said the trouble with doing cc in FCP is usually that the colorist isn't that good or experienced. But this person has experience on other, more dedicated cc systems (Smoke, Avid systems, DaVinci), and would be applying his knowledge and experience as a colorist.

 

So unless you guys raise some red flags, I like the sound of this. For me this FCP workflow presents a real advantage - namely that everything would be done in FCP which is what I cut the project in. No EDLs to mess with, which I'm guessing would save time on the assembly.

 

How does all this sound? Compared with the DaVinci or Symphony options discussed above?

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Yes, agreed completely. Flame is all wrong for the job. Also it constantly converts from YUV to RGB for processing and back again for layoff, and that causes all sorts of banding if you look too close. As for SGI Tezro, after 9 years of running on SGI we are on the brink of becoming an SGI-less facility. They are too expensive and support has never been acceptable to me. We just had a demo of Mistika running on a pretty standard Linux box, and it ran 6 times faster than an SGI octane 2. It is also able to process seemlessly across multiple linux boxes, and you can get lots (and lots) of those for the price if a $70,000 tezro!

 

Bye Bye SGI.

 

This is slightly OT:

 

SGIs MIPS / IRIX will be gone soon, anyway. I feel like discreet is ready to make the jump to intel/ linux (as they partly already did). Now with the production of the Onyx being stopped (for inferno) it's really time for a change. Rumours are we'll know more at NAB ;-)

 

CPU performance (as right now the only important one for grading (lets not talk about bandwith here, thats too complicated)) has been a weakness on SGI since years. However moving around a hundred of HighRes layers interactively in space (compositing / screen design) is still much faster on an inferno / flame than on any other box.

 

 

Again, is that worth the price? I guess not long anymore...

 

 

-k

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Thanks to all for the replies and advice.  David was right to bring up budgetary restrictions; while ideal it's simply not feasible to do something like go back to the negs for another round of TK.

 

However a new option has been presented to me for the same job - to do the online and CC on a 10-bit uncompressed Final Cut Pro HD system, with Color Finesse tools and 32-bit floating point color (which may be culled directly from the apple.com marketing copy but at least it sounds fancy).

 

I balked when I heard about this - because FCP for color correct??? - but the colorist I spoke with assured me that for my workflow, this system can easily handle even HD resolutions and color depths et al with no quality loss.  Remember that I am working from DigiBeta source tapes, and want to have a cc DigiBeta master to finish.  The colorist further said the trouble with doing cc in FCP is usually that the colorist isn't that good or experienced.  But this person has experience on other, more dedicated cc systems (Smoke, Avid systems, DaVinci), and would be applying his knowledge and experience as a colorist. 

 

So unless you guys raise some red flags, I like the sound of this.  For me this FCP workflow presents a real advantage - namely that everything would be done in FCP which is what I cut the project in.  No EDLs to mess with, which I'm guessing would save time on the assembly.

 

How does all this sound?  Compared with the DaVinci or Symphony options discussed above?

 

Can any of the resident senseis take a hack at my latest question? Don't want it to get buried.

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My non-DaVinci color-correction experiences have been limited but I did not enjoy them. There were two times I didn't color-correct tape-to-tape in a DaVinci (they were HDCAM projects); once was on an AVID DS system and the other on some version of Lustre. Both cases it was an editor doing the color-correction, not a colorist.

 

In the case of the AVID DS color-correction session, the time it took to input Power Windows effects and then render them to look at the effect made me give up on Power Windows after awhile because it was taking the guy too long.

 

In the second case, I simply was dealing with an inexperienced person doing the color-correction.

 

And in both cases, I later got reports from post houses saying that the person doing the color-correction probably did not calibrate their monitors and system correctly. In the case with the guy with the Lustre, the whole color-correction had to be redone elsewhere. And in both cases, neither person used a CRT HD studio monitor; I had a hard time judging corrections on a computer LCD screen.

 

So now I am wary anytime someone suggests color-correcting a movie on an editing system or using someone who isn't an experienced colorist.

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Can any of the resident senseis take a hack at my latest question?  Don't want it to get buried.

 

Yes this sounds fine to. All of the previous discussions in this thread from all sides still apply. Just make sure you have an operator who is experienced at grading and that he has monitors that have been calibrated (otherwise you'll make something that looks great on those monitors, but not any others!

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Thank you kindly, both Davids. Immensely helpful forum this is.

 

Now for a potentially silly question: How can I tell if the monitors have been properly calibrated? And calibrated to what, standard color bars?

 

I am now steering back toward the Avid Symphony option, because the pricing is the best and because of other logistical convenience. However, am I right in saying, if the operator and/or results come out less than satisfactory, I could still take the assembled DigiBeta master from the Symphony, and do a more "legit" tape-to-tape cc on something like a DaVinci, without *any* loss of quality? Perhaps, to prepare for this option, I'd want to output 2 masters from the Symphony: one BEFORE any cc work (a "virgin" master), and one AFTER cc work?

 

Finally, does anyone know if Automatic Duck is *required* in order to successfully import (or export) a FCP HD generated EDL for use on an Avid Symphony?

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I am now steering back toward the Avid Symphony option, because the pricing is the best and because of other logistical convenience.  However, am I right in saying, if the operator and/or results come out less than satisfactory, I could still take the assembled DigiBeta master from the Symphony, and do a more "legit" tape-to-tape cc on something like a DaVinci, without *any* loss of quality?  Perhaps, to prepare for this option, I'd want to output 2 masters from the Symphony: one BEFORE any cc work (a "virgin" master), and one AFTER cc work?

 

If there's the possibility of it getting botched, why waste the money with someone who is not a colorist?

Like I said in my previous post:

"Someone who's career is as a professional colorist vs. an editor who knows how to use the controls in an Avid. It's more expensive because it's better quality and you have someone with a trained and critical eye helping you. It's the small adjustments, like you require, that neccessitate a more skilled operator."

 

Go read Dave Mullen's post again. Take advice from myself and others who have been through this. We have nothing to gain by suggesting a slightly more expensive route. Ask any colorist these days and they will tell you how a good percentage of indie stuff they do color for is fixing poor work attempted by an editor in a computer. Don't let websites fool you. They want to sell their product and don't care about your project.

Edited by Eric Steelberg
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Thanks Eric - actually I am giving full creedence to David Mullen and your posts, and I totally know there's no alterior motives in anything here. Which is why I love this forum.

 

What I haven't mentioned is I may have a special scenario, where I could do the Symphony assembly and cc, and if it's not satisfactory, get some of my money back and apply that towards a full DaVinci tape-to-tape cc (or perhaps a DaVinci cc of certain shots, which I think David Cox mentioned I could do earlier). So the economics of it still make sense - I'd effectively be paying a very good rate for an assembly and an attempted Symphony cc.

 

Believe me, I am still a skeptic about whether the Symphony operator and color correct will be good enough. And believe me, my priority at this point is not to save a few hundred bucks! But why not try it - seems to me my worst case scenario is I end up with an assembled non-corrected master, for a very good price, and then I need to cough up more for the DaVinci work with a dedicated colorist. What's to lose?

 

The important info that I'm looking for is whether the quality of my finished DigiBeta master would suffer in any way, because of any technological factors (e.g. compression, color depths, anything NOT related to the colorist), if I had to go with the above "worst case" scenario.

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The important info that I'm looking for is whether the quality of my finished DigiBeta master would suffer in any way, because of any technological factors (e.g. compression, color depths, anything NOT related to the colorist), if I had to go with the above "worst case" scenario.

I don't understand... you got your digibeta master which can't get any better or worse. So as long as you work uncompressed there should not be a huge difference qualitywise between those two systems ( the daVince might have a higher internal working bitDepth but that is probably not so much an advantage since you come from digiBeta anyway).

So i guess you're quite ok with that plan under the condistions you mentioned. Maybe you can do some more complex setUps in the symphony but honestly I don't know this system....

 

-k

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