Color Studies
Prores Faceoff
Just how lossy is Prores LT compared to Prores HQ? On the surface level, the images look almost indistinguishable to the human eye. Here’s two. Click the images to get the high-res if you don’t believe me.
With the help of Chris Noth, we’ll see how degraded these images become after extracting several keys that one might be asked to do in a color grading session. Sorry Chris, but it’s in the interest of science.
I took the same Canon 7D clip and converted it to both HQ and LT from the “raw” H264 the camera natively shoots to. I pulled a key on the HQ footage and then applied that key to the LT footage to compare how each image fared. Obviously, the HQ would give us better results as it runs at a higher bitrate, but I wanted to see how different the LT would be.
I first selected Chris’ stylish leather jacket. I didn’t take any time refining this key, I just wanted to see what would happen when I pulled some of the data with Resolve’s color picker. I knew this one would be pretty dirty and inexact as there’s a lot of black in the picture already. Sure enough, his black hair and his dark shirt went with it. Click the images to see the full grunge.
Next I went for a skin tone extraction, something I do many times on pretty much every job. If this wasn’t a test I would refine the key and then blur it, and in this case likely vignette and track his face and hands if I didn’t want to affect the bricks.
Click the images to geek out on the high-res images.
Here’s a closer view of both Chris’ face and the floor, the latter of which you’ll particularly notice the blockiness of the LT compression.
I liken the Canon workflow as being similar to dubbing a VHS to a DVD; that is, the DVD won’t make the VHS image quality look better, but there is no reason not to use the highest bitrate when encoding that DVD, as loss can still be introduced, even if your starting image is shot on a compressed format to begin with.
With a DSLR workflow, an assistant typically converts once to a flavor of Prores at the start of the job and that stands as the final Quicktime format for grading. Converting to LT saves hard drive space but makes my job harder when it’s time to really delve into the image past primary corrections.
I was surprised that, under the hood, the images from both codecs would be so different since they looked identical when converted from the original. Is Prores LT a total dealbreaker? Not necessarily. I could probably refine the skintone key in LT and get it looking pretty good, especially when blurring to include more values that the key didn’t get, but why not work with the best quality possible? Hard drives are cheap.
Pepsi - Approaching the Grade
The contemporary Pepsi graphic is very vibrant, and I decided that this spot, gorgeously shot on the Alexa, wanted to look closer to the graphical world that occupies the end of the spot. The client’s decision to feature Kevin McHale cued me into the demographic as well who might favor a bright, saturated look.
Before I arrived at the session I dialed in a quick grade over the rough cut that punched some dark blue in the black areas, a great area to bleed some subtlety into the grade. I like to send stills to the client to begin the creative discussion. The client thought the look would be a great way to proceed with the grade.
Two Shots in One
During the spot, Kevin McHale walks through a rack of wardrobe clothing and magically changes into a suit. When I arrived at the grade the shots were already seamlessly composited together.
Regardless of the fact that the shot used two shots, my client still thought the left side of the frame was too dark. Utilizing Resolve’s incredible tracker, I was able to track the top left metal corner of the wardrobe rack and use that as a basis for splitting the shot back into two shots. I then created a window that used the tracking data to affect the left and right sides of the images separately.
RJD2 - Approaching the Grade
The first time I met director Brad Hasse was during the color correct for another music video he directed for Homeboy Sandman. It was a joy to work with Brad again for the RJD2 video and as the editor for this video as well I had long been thinking about how to approach the grade as we were cutting it.
Part of my process as a colorist is getting to understand whatever brand I am working with, be it a musician, a corporate client, or a product. For this video, which relied solely on the talents of America’s Best Dance Crew, Quest Crew, I visited the site and began poking around. The color purple factored heavily into their branding, and sure enough, during the video a lot of purple was worn by the dancers.
I decided that bringing this out would not only help drive their brand forward, but it was an interesting way to vary the “Pleasantville” look of complete desaturation with one color popping. To heavily saturate the purple color and desaturate the other colors, while not completely but certainly severely, at once was unnatural and stylized. But the dancers themselves are pulling off moves that mere mortals couldn’t! And the video is completely reversed! So it actually made sense to pursue this line of logic.
Additionally, I didn’t want this video to have a very DIY look and feel to it. There are hundreds of videos that already exist of just kids performing tricks to the camera. An aggressive grade was also a way to separate ourselves from that kind of “YouTube” aesthetic.
