HD/SD Color Correction

What is the most important function of a colorist?

Here is a quick test to give you a hint: Metaphorically speaking, which of the following items best symbolizes a colorist?
a. Paintbrush
b. Stethoscope
c. Hammer
d. Magnifying glass

Answer: c, Hammer.

A colorist’s most important function is to solve problems, and hammers have solved more problems than anything else we can think of (cash being a possible exception!). Like colorists, hammers do lots of things outside of their primary purpose. But most importantly, a hammer can do some damage if you do not know what you are doing.

An experienced team you can trust.

The four members of our highly talented telecine staff are Dave Markun, Lauren Meschter, Clinton Simmons and Ted Snavely. All four Colorists contribute to help give our clients the best film-to-tape transfers, to your specifications. Our four colorists have over 70 years of combined experience and ten International Monitor Awards; we know what we are doing!

Problems happen at every stage of every project, but the color correction session is where a lot of them get solved.

The Color. Your colorist has more control over the color of the picture than you can dream of, from beautiful to bizarre and anywhere in between. Take your pick: warm and lovely, pale and depressing, gritty and aggressive, saturated and contrast.  Too many options can bog things down and knowing in advance what you are looking for will move the session along. You also have the option of doing a simple, normal color correction now and tweaking selected shots from tape after the edit.

The Stuff. In this business, there is stuff everywhere; on the grip truck, in the camera bag, in the editing session, at the post house. But not just regular stuff, complicated stuff that breaks a lot. Maybe the lens did not focus right, or the lights flickered, or the film stock was wrong, or the tape has a glitch, or the white balance was way off…whatever. A color correction room has tools to fix problems.

We can soften, sharpen, remove dirt and glitches, and reduce noise and flicker. We have ways to convert different time codes, to encode and decode hidden metadata in film transfer videotapes, to convert any format to any other format. We enhance logos and brighten faces, unless of course you want a logo smudged and a face hidden. We have made a picture look normal that had one of the three-color channels missing. We have made a picture usable that was nearly black from underexposure. We have made very important tapes usable that had disastrous flicker. After a special thermal camera broke down, we took a normal image and made it match the other thermal imaging footage. We have started with dropout-riddled tapes that had no color bars or time code, an image too dark to use, and more video noise than my wife’s VHS collection, and we made them suitable for broadcast. And I have not even talked about creative color correction yet.

The Story. There’s a place in every story where the pictures need to look special, and it’s a big problem if they don’t. Happy or sad, bright or dark, color correction helps bend the image to do the bidding of the storyteller. On the colorist’s palette are de-focus tools, area highlighting windows, selective color isolation, and unlimited control of every color. We use these tools to create moods, increase visual interest or simply make pictures jump off the screen.
➢ In a civil war recreation scene, we softened the picture and used a palette of only two tones—pinkish orange and union blue—this was a nice change from traditional sepia.
➢ For an 1800s shipwreck scene, we de-saturated the images and washed them with greenish blue. In a Pearl Harbor battle scene, we matched new photography to the look of 1940s Kodachrome stock footage.
➢ In a story about two submarines, we gave the similar looking sub interiors different tones to eliminate confusion; one was an eerie green glow, and the other was washed in red light.

The Stretch. Telling is the story is only part of the story.  Here is something we hear a lot: “We are starting post production, and we need to stretch the budget and stretch the workday.” Accomplishing this solves a big problem at a critical time for filmmakers. Obviously, everybody wants unlimited time to tweak the pictures to perfection, but budgets and schedules do not always cooperate. A benefit of having decades of experience like our colorists do is the ability to work fast and efficiently without getting tense: maximum tweak with minimum twitch. With several top colorists who have worked together for years and three superbly equipped suites, we can combine, overlap and extend shifts to get the most out of a day or week, and the results will be the better for it.

The Stream. Whether you are streaming video to the Internet or launching your program into the broadcast stream, your project must meet your client’s technical requirements. You do not need to understand everything on that “Tech Specs” document; just bring it to our colorists, we will know what to do. It is not enough for your pictures to look great…they have to do so without exceeding certain limits.

Yes, color correction is where we polish every facet until we have a shining diamond.  However, there is also a “video mastering” aspect of what we do, where we tailor the result for the particular demands of the intended environment…whether it be broadcast, HD projection, Internet or DVD. That’s why we use so many different types of signal monitoring tools right in our line of sight; so we can examine every line and pixel and be sure they are right!