On The Hazards Of Not Monitoring In HDR & ACES From The Outset

Look Development in Documentary Filmmaking, Camerimage.

Panelists:

James Kersley-Cregeen – Production Technologist, Netflix

Ross Baker – Head of Colour, Molinare

Jack Jones – Senior Colourist & Co-owner, Roundtable Post

Daniele Siragusano – Image Engineer, FilmLight

On the hazards of not monitoring in HDR & ACES from the outset

James Kersley-Cregeen: “I have one anecdote coming from another colorist who said they spent, it was a two-day HDR grade and then they had half a day for the SDR Dolby Vision trim pass. The first day of the grade – it was the first time anybody had seen anything in HDR, first of all, which is fairly normal, but also it was the first time they’d seen it using ACES as the color pipeline, and it had more saturation, more contrast than what they were expecting. They said it was too contrasty, too much saturation. And because they’d been looking at flat, log images in an edit suite for a year. So then they spent the first day at the grade taking all the contrast and saturation out. They then came in on the second day to review what they’d done the day before and went ‘it’s a bit flat, so let’s pull all the contrast and saturation back in’. And they basically ended up two days later having spent thousands of pounds to get back to where they started. None of that time was creative, none of that time was improving the product, none of that time was enhancing the look and feel of the show.”

Jack Jones showed how he created a color arc (or journey) for a Netflix documentary, not all that dissimilar to the dynamic range arc from a research paper published by Dolby we shared a little while back.