What’s My Flow: Color Correction

Rick Unger
DI colorist
Milagro Post
Southfield, MI

What I Do

Color grade 30-second spots in shot order at film resolution

How I Do It

I have spent the last 20 years working as a colorist with telecines and linear-based color correction platforms, and I’ve been waiting with much anticipation for more of the nonlinear color correction process to evolve for commercial video post applications. This DI work environment has been in use for some time now in the feature film world, and it shows in the quality and complex looks that these films have. Quantel IQ has been used on an incredible list of features.

The idea behind this relatively new technology is to offer commercial filmmakers choice and flexibility. Imagine: the film is color corrected and scanned at real time on the Spirit 2K, and from there the images are 2K files that are stored on hard drives. Those 2K images, 10-bit log files, are now ready to be accessed by a variety of devices in my my room once the Quantel IQ brings them in via 4 GB Ethernet real time.

After the cut has been built off-line, I load the EDL, build the conform, do a little dust busting and it’s time to get down to some color correction. I’ve always wanted to grade commercials in shot order at film resolution. It just gives that process much more of the creativity and quality for color grading it deserves. With the IQ and Quantel Pablo I have the choice of grading images in 2K or film resolution. And color grading on the Pablo has been a dream for an old-time colorist like me.

Pablo’s color grading tools are simply awesome. The random access of images from the drives is a very intuitive way for me to respond and work. I like that I can create intricate windows around individual subjects that can be color graded differently than other areas of the shots. All kinds of HSL keyers for color isolation are available as well.

After grading a 30-second spot, I can easily create another color version from the same spot. Clients can leave with several color versions, giving them choices that were not possible in a traditional color suite. And, throw in the fact that Pablo has full-blown editing and compositing tools available at the end of your pen, giving you all the bells and whistles for finishing.

I recently worked on a commercial spot for Bush’s Baked Beans, for which we combined recently shot footage of talent with food footage shot two years ago. I was efficiently able to scan these images, conform the EDL, do some spilt-screen compositing of talent shots, color grade and reposition some shots all in one room. Then I could do my final record to any format that was required by the client.

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