Color Correction

[Guest parallax]

I am doing a tapeless transfer at Bonolabs (10 bit uncompressed 1080-P) from my 35 mm neg. I want to make both a D.I. and an HD Master for DVD's. I will provide the D.I. facility with an FCP edited master on hard drive, so I never have to touch tape. The facility making my D.I. prefers a flat transfer so they will have maximum lattitude in color correcting for the film-out, but they say they can work with a best-lite if necessary. I am thinking a best-lite will also be easier for me to color correct the HD master. Here are my questions: 1) Would I be compromising the D.I. facility significantly by providing a best-lite transfer, or even fully color corrected material, as opposed to a flat transfer? 2) Would it be much more difficult for me to color correct a flat transfer?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

This is a slightly confused situation for me because you are not making it clear what's a technical correction and what's an artistic grading operation. There will be things you have to get right for the transfer to be technically acceptable, and there will clearly be other things you want to do artistically to get the image quality you want.

 

The output facility are asking for a flat transfer. This makes sense if you are going to go and supervise grading at that facility before the material is shot out to film. It makes less sense if you are not, because you don't then have any control over what they're going to do with it.

 

Alternatively, if you are intending to grade on your desktop system, that's entirely workable if you can deal with the render times, but then you will not be providing a flat transfer to the output house; you'll be providing a fully-graded edit, which should only go through a few lookup tables to satisfy the technical requirements of the output device.

 

So what's the situation here?

 

Phil

[Guest tylerhawes]

...I am thinking a best-lite will also be easier for me to color correct the HD master

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Do you think it would be easier because you wouldn't be starting from scratch? Or for some other reason?

 

In our case, we can create a "best light" LUT in our DI grading system when working with the "flat" files and grade through it, so that we're not starting with the washed-out flat transfer image on each scene, but a contrast and gamma adjusted image. However, because this is a LUT loaded in our display system, it is non-destructive and is not throwing away any information that would keep us from going anywhere you might want to with the look. Once the work is complete, the display LUT is baked into the render.

 

That is only one way of working, but may accomplish what you're looking for in terms of getting the picture in the ball park before you get to the DI suite, therefore saving time/money. The same LUT can be applied to your dubbs so that you're editing with the look you'll see when you first step into the DI suite.