Senior Colorist: The Worst Practice In The Industry

“Some of the worst practices I’ve seen in this industry have been people dumbing down the HDR [grade] because a DP comes in the room and says they don’t like highlights, so they put their highlights at 200 nits. And then now they’ve basically graded SDR on an HDR display. And I don’t care if vou’re doing HDR 10 dual pass, if you start with a master that’s got such low contrast, the CMU is going to see that and be like ‘What do you want to do here?’ and it’s going to give you a pretty flat, muddy picture. So, that’s why, when I start a project, and somebody comes in for that first HDR pass, I sit them down and just explain the technology. I usually ask, ‘Have you done an HDR show before? Have you done Dolby Vision?’ What’s your experience?’; get to know them a little bit, if I haven’t worked with them before, that is. And then, once that happens, [I] say, ‘Okay, this is how it goes: we do this HDR pass, it’s a wider color gamut, you capture more colors, you capture more dynamic range, it’s going to be more than you’re used to seeing, so if that bothers you, look at this display here.’ And I show them that and explain that one is derived from the other, and if I take the HDR and make it look all flat and soft the way you want to see it, that’s going to track down your SDR. [Then] there’s always the whole, ‘I don’t know why you would want to do Dolby Vision then, because I can do HDR10 and I don’t have to deal with that. I can just grade one and then grade the other to my liking.’ And my answer to that is, ‘Then you have two reviews. Here we are now, and you can see what your master is, and one’s derived from the other one,’ and generally, I’ve found that after we do that, and we look at it a while together, that they end up seeing the benefits of grading and just doing the full. And if we get to the point where they’re just not happy, the bottom line is, they’re the creatives, they’re the ones that have been involved, they’re the ones who were in that first table read; I wasn’t, and whatever product they want, we do – but at least I want them to be aware of what the technology is doing and why it looks that way.” – Tony D’Amore, Senior Colorist and Director of Creative Workflow, Picture Shop