Remote Grading Media Transfer

[Mitchell Priebe]

I'm looking to get started with remote color grading and would like to know more about how I would get the media from my client for the color grade and then send the completed grade to them once I am done. I've been researching this topic and one colorist wrote that he recommends using a cloud storage service to transfer media for shorter projects with less footage and having the client mail the colorist a hard drive if there is a lot of footage, such as in a feature film. I would like to know if there are any colorists here who do remote grading and if so what cloud storage services you use to send and receive media and what your general workflow looks like in terms of sending and receiving media for remote projects. I anticipate most of the work I will be doing is grading short films. For reference, I am running the current version of DaVinci Resolve on a PC workstation. I would greatly appreciate someone sharing their knowledge on remote grading with me. 

[Satsuki Murashige]

I just went thru a remote grading session last week with Color-A-Gogo for a short corporate project that I shot back in early March. Don’t know all the details of how the raw footage was delivered, but I can give you the basic workflow rundown from the DP perspective. 

So first, the director started an email thread with himself, the colorist, and I. I sent them jpeg reference frame grabs with the look I was going for. We then had a conference call to go over the general look, and we picked out several hero frames that the colorist worked on and uploaded to Frame IO.

We then had another conference call to discuss, and then he went back to work on his Version 1 pass. He uploaded the Prores file to Frame IO, the director and I made comments on the timeline, with further reference frame grabs via email if the direction was unclear. Then another conference call to go over the comments.

This went back and forth several times until we were all happy. I believe the final export was uploaded via FTP back to the editor for conforming.

Maybe there is a more real-time solution for higher budget projects, I don’t know. But personally, I found the ability to give comments, send stills, and talk over the phone to the colorist and director was really important. It would be cool if Frame IO could do all of those things, instead of having to jump back into email to send stills.