EP062: GFX & VFX Workflows

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:14:16
Robbie
Hey everybody! Welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. And this week we're exploring visual effects and graphics in a color pipeline. Stay tuned.

00:00:14:18 - 00:00:47:04
Robbie
Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Color Direct Connect Volumetric Autocal. Calibration of reference displays is critical in our industry, and there's no easier way to calibrate than by using Gaia Color, which is standard on DM, XMP, and XMP C series monitors. Gaia Color calibration allows supported probes to be plugged in directly to the monitor for fast, accurate, and automated calibration with no computer or operator expertise required.

00:00:47:08 - 00:01:03:07
Robbie
You can learn more about this powerful system at Flanders Scientific. Com. Hey there everybody! Welcome back to episode 62. I believe it is of The Offset Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Robbie Carman. With me, as always, is Joey D’Anna. Hey, Joey, how are you?

00:01:03:10 - 00:01:04:22
Joey
Hey, everyone.

00:01:05:00 - 00:01:23:01
Robbie
Well, Joey, this week we are going to tackle another sort of viewer submitted question, this one from one of our listeners, viewers, Matt. Matt Schultz and this one has to do with visual effects and working with graphics in a color pipeline. So there's a lot to bite off there. And I'll let you kind of recap it in. Just a question.

00:01:23:04 - 00:01:43:20
Robbie
Just a second. But before we begin, as always, just some housekeeping. You remember. You can follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for The Offset Podcast. Thank you to all of our followers. We just crossed the thousand 1000 followers on Instagram, which we're pretty excited about. So help us get to 1500 or 2000 sometime soon. That would be great.

00:01:43:20 - 00:02:05:02
Robbie
We appreciate you guys all following us there. In other news, on our last episode we launched, we announced that we launched our own sort of discord for centered around the show. And so far we've got about 50 or so of you in the past ten days, week or two weeks or so. Joining that discord as a reminder, it is an open, public discord for all of our viewers and listeners.

00:02:05:02 - 00:02:24:13
Robbie
And if you want to have some fun conversations, it's pretty relaxed. Pretty chill. Just this morning, Joey was going back and forth with a couple of people about color management, pipelines and ACS and aACM and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of a lot of fun discussions to be had there. So you can join that discord just by clicking on the link here on screen, answering a few questions.

00:02:24:13 - 00:02:43:22
Robbie
So the only thing that we really asked is that you just use your, your real name over on that discord, and from there it's just, you know, good old clean, clean fun. So it's good stuff there. And as a last reminder, you can follow the show in all of our episodes and additional notes at offset podcast. All right, Joey, so let's jump into this today.

00:02:44:02 - 00:02:52:13
Robbie
This is a good one from from one of our listeners, Matt Schultz. Why don't you kind of just outline kind of the basics of this question and then we'll we'll dive in.

00:02:52:14 - 00:03:21:03
Joey
Yeah. Just a quick summary of what Matt wrote us. He said that he'd love to hear our thoughts on working with graphics and VFX through color. He runs some motion design studio in Denver, and they are often delivering graphics to dye houses and getting surprised, seeing sometimes how their material gets used gets laid into the final show. Sometimes it's heavily graded, sometimes it's color managed one way, sometimes it's color managed another.

00:03:21:04 - 00:03:44:08
Joey
I feel like he he's you know, he didn't say this, but I feel like he's coming from a position of both curiosity and somewhat frustration because as an artist, if you, you know, send something out to another artist to work with, you don't expect it to be dramatically changed. Or maybe you do, but there's a communication that has to happen there, you know?

00:03:44:09 - 00:03:51:14
Joey
So I think part of this is really getting the colorist perspective on how we deal with external graphics and VFX renders.

00:03:51:14 - 00:04:02:01
Robbie
It is a deep topic. And you're right, there's definitely an undercurrent in the question. And honestly, you know, from.

00:04:02:01 - 00:04:27:21
Joey
The and I think that's perfectly valid, Matt. You know, if I have seen a lot of times and we'll talk about this in a little bit more detail, how graphics and VFX can have their creative intent stepped on by a miscommunication and overzealous colorist or some other kind of problem in the pipeline. And that's exactly what the kind of workflows we want to talk about are designed to prevent.

00:04:27:22 - 00:04:28:13
Joey
Because the one.

00:04:28:13 - 00:04:49:12
Robbie
Yeah. And and I would say also just to not make it like sound like we're about to, you know, whatever say it's all Matt's fault for doing ever. Like you're right, like there are plenty of colors in the world who don't do. And we'll get into this, obviously, but don't ask the right questions. Don't do the right investigations, make a lot of assumptions, and the next thing you know, things are just broken.

00:04:49:12 - 00:05:09:00
Robbie
Now, that's not to say that there's not responsibility on both sides of it, but just to sort of, you know, address Matt's general concern is that this is a problem from both sides of the equation. Right. And it is something that if you've been working in the color game long enough, you've probably screwed up and counter frustrating situations.

00:05:09:00 - 00:05:47:22
Robbie
Same thing on the motion graphics and visual effects side. You probably thought you were delivering something that's perfect only to see it get messed up, and that's frustrating. So we kind of want to attack both of these things from both angles. And I think you're right to also say, Joey, that in 45 minutes to an hour, we can't be completist here because there are there's a ton and ton of details, especially as you start getting into the the high end visual effects work where you're talking about, you know, very complicated LED walls and in green and blue screens, you're talking about rig removal, motion tracking, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

00:05:47:22 - 00:06:10:21
Robbie
So I would just be, you know, head those questions off of the past that our comments today are kind of general advice on these workflows. Obviously, like any post-production workflow, you know, your specific one is going to need some testing, some discussion, some back and forth. So I would hate for somebody to walk out of this going, well, Joe and Rob said, this is no everything is always a little a little bit.

00:06:10:22 - 00:06:40:22
Joey
The big thing I will say out of the gate for any artist working in any post-production pipeline, is that surprises are the enemy, right? Nobody should see the final product, whether it's the colorist, the VFX artist, the audio mixer, the client, the distributor, nobody should ever see the final product and be like, whoa, what? You know everything. Expectations should be set and there should be communication throughout the whole process.

00:06:40:22 - 00:06:43:10
Joey
And that's one of the things we're going to dive into.

00:06:43:10 - 00:07:08:00
Robbie
All right. So here's where I want to start. I want to start with the idea about sort of making a line in the sand and discussing discussing graphics, motion graphics and visual effects, kind of how they are lumped together but have different use cases and different needs because I think that's and we'll get into each one. But I want to just kind of start there because I think they're generally like people like, oh, visual effects.

00:07:08:00 - 00:07:15:02
Robbie
And they're talking about like a lower third. And I'm like, yeah. To me, that's not really that's not really visual effects. Right. So yeah, here's my, here's.

00:07:15:02 - 00:07:17:08
Joey
My graphics could mean everything.

00:07:17:12 - 00:07:44:14
Robbie
Right. Exactly. So here's my quick and dirty 50,000ft definition of of these things. Right. So when I think about motion graphics I think about things like lower thirds card like title cards, credits, things that are going to either be static or animate or otherwise, you know, fade up or transition on the screen. These are most of the time these are things like text elements.

00:07:44:14 - 00:08:05:00
Robbie
Most of the time, I would say probably 75% of the time when I mean graphics, I mean text someone's. But it could also be things that are full screen things like information, graphics, bars and, you know, charts and graphs, maps, things of that nature that you didn't necessarily create but are going to be full screen implemented. So I think that's kind of the first differentiating point I make.

00:08:05:06 - 00:08:08:14
Joey
And then you have texted maps so you get a little bit of a hybrid.

00:08:08:15 - 00:08:36:23
Robbie
Right? I would make that distinction between things that are on screen with video content that's under your control underneath in some shape or fashion. Right. And then differentiate that from things that are full screen. Right. But from a workflow point of view. They're similar for us, the colorist, to get those motion graphics, those full screen maps, etc. because most of the time, other than just making sure that they get placed correctly, we can generally assume that they're more or more or less fun.

00:08:36:23 - 00:09:03:11
Robbie
There's some caveats to that that we'll get to with HDR, color management, pipelines, etc. but yeah, it's more of, hey, you got those titles? Cool, I'll throw them on top. We're done right now. Straight of visual effects work. Man. This is a really open ended book. I think of what it means because especially now that in the color room in a color suite, we can do so much of this.

00:09:03:14 - 00:09:23:19
Robbie
The the line between visual effects and grade is very, very, very soft and blurry now, right? I mean, it used to be. I remember like, you know, if there was a spot on the lens, you're sending that off to visual effects, right? If there was a license plate that needed to be blurred, you were sending that off to visual effects.

00:09:23:22 - 00:09:48:23
Robbie
I would venture to bet that probably, I don't know, 8,085% of especially resolve users who where that toolset is a little more robust than some other platforms are probably doing a lot of that type of work. Observation, you know, concealment, basic lens smudging stuff, you know, that kind of basic stuff in app rather than sending to visual effects.

00:09:48:23 - 00:10:15:22
Robbie
I think the visual effects stuff starts to get interesting when we talk about more complex Keane situations, rig removals, things like reflections, product like tracking. And I think, again, some of this stuff you can do easily in in a tool like fusion. I'm curious, Joey, because you are the visual effects guy in our team, right? Like, you can, you know, just conceptually a lot more about it.

00:10:15:23 - 00:10:24:19
Robbie
How would you make that separation between like both of these things, graphics and visual effects? But really, what are we talking about when we talk about visual effects?

00:10:24:21 - 00:10:58:14
Joey
Really visual effects can be, like you said, anything from a simple green screen composite all the way to deep integration of CG elements into real footage. It can be rig removal, it could be paintwork, it can be tracking. And yeah, we can do a little bit of that in resolve. I like to think I do maybe a tiny bit above average with that stuff, but I try to be very cognizant of if I am telling a client, yes, I can do your license plate blurs, I can do your green screens.

00:10:58:15 - 00:11:24:21
Joey
I test it first with the client, and I make sure that it's a simple enough job that I can do it to the level the client needs. And if it's not, my first answer is always, hey, this is beyond what we can do in the color session. You've got to hire a VFX group to do this. And that's where this kind of interplay of how do we get things to and from VFX or graphics.

00:11:24:21 - 00:11:43:09
Joey
If we're talking about graphics, we do. And I just want to talk about kind of first before we get into graphics and VFX workflow specifically, a couple of overall concerns that I think apply to both when you're dealing with an outside vendor for both graphics and both VFX, because they might be the same vendor, they might be different.

00:11:43:09 - 00:12:05:18
Joey
You might have one vendor doing graphics, you might have one vendor doing, you might have multiple vendors doing VRF. And then workflow becomes really important because you need consistency across vendors. Communication and planning is the most important thing across the board. We've literally said this for every workflow episode we've ever done, but it does apply here more than anything.

00:12:05:19 - 00:12:27:11
Joey
Nothing that we say is going to be this is the right workflow for everything. You need to discuss it with the client, discuss it with the vendors, and come up with a plan. And then next test the workflow through the entire process, whether it's just doing one test shot through every vendor to make sure you know everything comes through and everybody's getting the expected result.

00:12:27:15 - 00:12:53:07
Joey
Test it. Because if you find a little hiccup in this workflow where, oh, we were going to do everything asked. But that's a problem for this one guy over here. And now every shot we do, we need to do a workaround that becomes a management problem way down the road where you don't want it to be. You want to find all those little problems in the test environment first.

00:12:53:08 - 00:13:12:20
Joey
The next thing I want to say is always keep the client in the loop. You know, if you're communicating directly with VFX vendors as a colorist to come up with this workflow, let the client know. You know, you don't have to get into the absolute technical details, but make sure the client is up to speed with the entire process that's going on.

00:13:12:20 - 00:13:28:03
Joey
So there's no surprises from them, right? We don't want to surprise the client at the end of the show and be like, hey, we're ready to deliver. And the client's like, but wait, didn't we need to do a bunch of VFX stuff? And you'd be like, oh, we already did it, or we didn't do it. We thought we were going to do that later.

00:13:28:04 - 00:13:36:10
Joey
You know, all of that should be established in advance before you really start getting into the meat of the project.

00:13:36:11 - 00:13:58:08
Robbie
Yeah. So to to I agree with 100% of all that. And let's back up just one quick thing to the communication part of that. One of the things that I think that is severely lacking, and I understand why it's lacking because people don't have time often to do this kind of thing. But is documentation right. And I think that that is it's a key thing when, when both sides of this equation, what do you want?

00:13:58:09 - 00:14:17:21
Robbie
What do you need? Here's what we want. Here's what we need. Right. So like just for example, when it comes to like simple titles and graphics, like you can work up a one sheet that sort of like, okay, here's what we need. We need, you know, ProRes 444 with a straight alpha channel. You know, at at at project frame rate, project frame size.

00:14:17:21 - 00:14:37:01
Robbie
And that's it. Like it's one paragraph. Right. Or if it's something more complicated as we'll get into a little bit with color management like explaining exactly like okay, here is the render without the look baked on it. Here's a separate LUT for you to apply. Like whatever the case may be, documenting what you're handing off, what you expect to go back.

00:14:37:01 - 00:14:53:22
Robbie
And I think that that pertains not only to the final finishing color company, but also the motion graphics and the visual effects companies could get the hang of that kind of too, like this is what we prefer. Like, I've worked with visual effects people who, you know, this is a little bit of a surprise when I, when I first encountered this.

00:14:53:22 - 00:15:10:22
Robbie
But like, because you'd always think that they, you know, we'd want the most flexibility later on in the grade, etc.. But I've had visual effects. People were like, just give me the final rendered version and that will be easiest for me, right? I'm like, really? And they're like, yeah, because they don't want to deal with the Luts and like, you know, like as long as and that's fine.

00:15:10:22 - 00:15:36:18
Robbie
As long as it's discussed, understood. The workflow is accepted on both sides. There's lots of ways to, to to to do this kind of process. But you're right. It has to be communicated. So there are no surprises. We worked on a show last year where we were dealing with a motion graphics vendor who, no matter how many times we said we need something with an alpha channel, right?

00:15:36:19 - 00:15:45:20
Robbie
Every single time we got it different. Like literally like sometimes it was straight, sometimes it was, sometimes there wasn't any. Sometimes we.

00:15:45:22 - 00:15:47:16
Joey
Know versus full levels, right?

00:15:47:17 - 00:15:58:12
Robbie
Sometimes we just got the alpha channel and we didn't get the fill. Right. It's like it shouldn't be that complicated. If everybody on both sides is communicating properly and documenting properly.

00:15:58:15 - 00:16:25:12
Joey
The important thing, especially documentation, is a great idea. Take screen grabs, write it all up because that's easy to do now when you're just thinking about and conceptualizing and planning. When the VFX company has 50 shots on their list to get done, and you're trying to get through 1500 shots of a grade, that's when things can break down because you're trying to move fast, and that's when it's like, oh, let me just check my document, you know.

00:16:25:14 - 00:16:47:21
Robbie
Yeah. And there's and there's a reason also when you think of, you know, the Marvel's the DC comics, the big action movie, I mean, that's why if you look in those credits, there's, you know, dozens of visual effects producers involved because it can get really complicated. And I think that's another overarching point here too, is that like depending on the like for a simple title workflow, and that's not what we're talking about.

00:16:47:21 - 00:17:07:17
Robbie
But if you have 500 shots that are getting revised constantly in a 2000 shot film, it is a lot to keep track of. It's not just the technical back and forth, it's things like versioning. Was it approved? Do they comment on it? No. Does this have the the glow that we're supposed to have or whatever?

00:17:07:18 - 00:17:13:08
Joey
That workflow needs to be just a standardized and planned in advance as what kind of files we're doing.

00:17:13:11 - 00:17:30:00
Robbie
Yeah. So I think that if you're getting to the point where you have a project and I think this affects a lot of time, it, you know, that's easy to think about that just as the high end. But there's some ripple ripple you know trickle down. That's the word I was looking for. That can happen from those high end workflows to to smaller projects.

00:17:30:00 - 00:17:43:12
Robbie
And I don't I don't think I've ever heard anybody say we were organized too much like it does. It doesn't happen, you know. So like the more documentation organization you can do on any of these workflows is going to be key.

00:17:43:14 - 00:17:53:05
Joey
The last thing I will say on that is a reply all email chain is not organization and is not workflow. Do better than that.

00:17:53:07 - 00:18:15:19
Robbie
Yeah, actually, let's stop there for a second because I think that that that parlays into your keeping your client in the loop. I think that that kind of real deep technical discussion, we've talked about this in other episodes, like you can think that you're doing the right thing by doing this really detailed, technical back and forth with stakeholders and everybody involved.

00:18:15:21 - 00:18:36:16
Robbie
And that's true, I think, with the operators, a lot of time you're doing your due diligence, making sure everything. But when clients see that they can get confused, they might read subtext that's not really there. Oh, this is broken. Like, what's wrong? And like, do yourself a favor, have the technical conversations with the people that need to have the technical conversations, have the recap conversations with the clients.

00:18:36:16 - 00:18:59:00
Robbie
And there are two separate things. Just want to let you know I talked to, you know, you know Sally over here and we worked out all the technical details. Everything's good. This is what I'm waiting on. This is what she's waiting on. We're moving forward. But your conversation with Sally is getting into the weeds about, you know, exercise and full range and legal range and Luts and all that kind of stuff.

00:18:59:01 - 00:19:14:20
Robbie
The client doesn't necessarily have to be involved in all those details, and a lot of times it can get confusing for them and it can erode confidence on either side. So just choose that conversations wisely. And how much extra technical stuff you jump in sometimes with clients. I agree on that.

00:19:14:21 - 00:19:43:02
Joey
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00:19:43:03 - 00:19:53:15
Joey
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00:19:53:17 - 00:20:18:02
Robbie
All right, Joey, let's start our conversation in depth about this stuff leading in with graphics. When I think graphics, I think of things like lower thirds on screen text cards, identifications, I think of credits. I also think of things like maps and other like infographics that might appear on screen. Things of that nature. Tell us some of the complications with graphics and things to look out for.

00:20:18:04 - 00:20:38:07
Joey
Yeah, so starting with the easiest, right. Your simple titles just lower thirds, maybe text text that comes up on screen, that stuff from the colorist perspective, we need to take a little bit more seriously now in the world of color management and multiple formats and stuff like that, because in the old days it was usually just, here's a file, drop it on the timeline.

00:20:38:07 - 00:21:05:15
Joey
It's done right. But for our workflow, we need to be a little bit more cognizant of where our output transform is being done. And the reason I mentioned this is because let's say, you know, the simplest solution, we're doing a wreck 709 shell. Right? We're using color management, but we're getting these overlay graphics. These text graphics have these really elaborate alpha channels with maybe different layers of opacity and really nice blending.

00:21:05:15 - 00:21:34:15
Joey
And the artist has done a lot of work in figuring out the blending and the fading and the transparency. We might throw that into our timeline that has, for example, a output transform at the timeline level, and we might throw an input transform on our graphics to bring the fill of those graphics into the right space. But what a lot of colors don't realize is in that case, and for example, a node based Acis pipeline, you're not really color managing the alpha channel.

00:21:34:15 - 00:21:57:02
Joey
And there's not a great way to color manage alpha channel. So how this actually behaves is and this is probably a big frustration for for graphic artists, there's a possibility, depending on the complexity of the alpha channel, where we might throw it in and say our color management is technically right, we're taking our graphic, we're going from 709 to act.

00:21:57:06 - 00:22:21:01
Joey
We're going from A to 709 on the timeline level. But guess what? That timeline node is happening to the entire image, and our track to track blending is still happening in like the default gamma space. So the result being the opacities are wrong and you get weird gradations of grays in places where it doesn't really work.

00:22:21:01 - 00:22:44:19
Robbie
We did a project, remember this one where we thought we had a client sitting in the room viewing on a w OLED, and they were really attuned to this, and we thought, like, we thought there was something up for a while with the actual W OLED. And we were trying to rationalize this. This is years ago and probably ten years ago at this point.

00:22:44:19 - 00:23:04:22
Robbie
But we were we were like, oh, it must it's not happening on LED. It's not really there. The long story short of it was it was an Aces project. The pipeline was a little off. We hadn't managed some of these overlays. We hadn't, sorry. We had made some of these overlays and putting them in a space. And you're right, the alpha channel is not something that that doesn't math the same way.

00:23:04:22 - 00:23:14:03
Robbie
And we were getting weird glows and weird artifacts from text fading up. This film had a lot of long fades. So it looked really?

00:23:14:03 - 00:23:37:04
Joey
Yeah. So if you see the fade kind of at the wrong rate, that's a blending problem. And what, you know, people oversimplify this, but at the end of the day we have, as colorists been saying, seen, referred, seen, referred, seen, referred for every bit of our lives because we love it. For a color workflow, alpha channel blending kind of usually needs to happen in a display referred space, right?

00:23:37:05 - 00:23:37:08
Joey
Yeah.

00:23:37:08 - 00:23:58:06
Robbie
So easy, easy way to handle this, right? I think you have a couple of choices. I think for those of those of us who, you know, work seen referred and how we kind of system wide or know a node based kind of management, especially with node based management, it's a lot easier to handle. You could simply move that output transform from a timeline level to say, an adjustment layer.

00:23:58:07 - 00:23:59:17
Robbie
Right? That's one way to handle it.

00:23:59:18 - 00:24:02:03
Joey
So your next a timeline or preview.

00:24:02:05 - 00:24:22:13
Robbie
Or use. Yeah, exactly. Groups are a great way to handle this to you could have only your video footage have that output transform. There's a lot of ways to take it off the the global timeline as well, you know of course as well. The other thing I would mention that's that's interesting about those that simple kind of graphics besides the color management stuff.

00:24:22:13 - 00:24:48:09
Robbie
And I think you skipped over this because I had mentioned it earlier, but I just want to put it out there again. I am constantly, constantly amazed by people's lack of understanding of what transparency and alpha channel actually is and means. Right? And we get into this conversation more times than you would expect about straight alpha channels and alpha channels, all of that kind of stuff.

00:24:48:09 - 00:25:19:22
Robbie
And I think that one of the things that has to have a discussion at the top of any motion graphics discussion is how were your titles generated? Right. And and I asked that because if they are something that was generated inside of the app, like, say, a Premiere Pro title generator, oftentimes the better decision is just to take that responsibility out of the editor's hand or the motion graphics person's hand and just say, give us the Premiere Pro Project wheel and the font.

00:25:19:23 - 00:25:21:23
Robbie
We'll take it from there, right? Because now.

00:25:21:23 - 00:25:23:07
Joey
We are export, right?

00:25:23:08 - 00:25:40:12
Robbie
And do our because now we have control over handling how that alpha channel works. Make sure it's the right, you know, alpha channel type that there's no weird, you know, you know, softening or other weird things going on. But you know, if they say, hey, listen, I made all these in After Effects, they're all separate files and I'm just going to drop them in.

00:25:40:13 - 00:25:58:21
Robbie
My next question is, okay, tell me about your alpha channel. Right. And that's a real you'd be surprised because a lot of the problems that people see in graphics and stuff are not the problems with the graphics. They're having to do with alpha channel interpolation. Right? Things of like seeing a border along the edge or some weird ghosting or something like that.

00:25:58:21 - 00:26:15:12
Robbie
And if you're not paying attention to those things, they can just kind of squeak by. So having that conversation to about, hey. Okay, you've made these things, they're self-contained. What is the alpha channel? And if they're not self-contained, if you didn't make them, you know, have them built like that. Just give us a project and we'll handle it from there.

00:26:15:14 - 00:26:31:05
Joey
Yeah. Now, this is a big one. And I think we really need to talk about this because it was something that Matt specifically mentioned. It's something we run into all the time full screen design, graphics, infographics, maps, graphs, stuff like that.

00:26:31:08 - 00:26:31:21
Robbie
Yeah.

00:26:31:22 - 00:27:01:17
Joey
Do we grade them? And the answer is maybe. Right. Oftentimes, you know, if they are approved clients, happy with them, whatever. No. In an ideal world, we shouldn't touch them. I think that's that's very true. And the concern here is, number one, the integrity of the original designers vision. Right. And how they work with the client. Client approved their work.

00:27:01:17 - 00:27:20:10
Joey
We don't want to be messing with that. But there are a couple exceptions to this, because they might not have the full context of the grade. So when we cut to a map, for example, if we were doing film grain and a little bit of a print look, we might want to apply some of that to the map.

00:27:20:10 - 00:27:45:14
Joey
This is where that communication is so important, because we need to talk to the client and say, hey, we think that we can just, you know, maybe do a very small grade on these graphics, but we want to make sure that that's okay with you, that's okay with the graphics vendor. And here's the biggest thing that is we got to think as colorists, not as the be all, end all of the workflow because there's so much else around us.

00:27:45:14 - 00:28:03:21
Joey
So let's just say I'm the colorist, I get a show, I get all these maps in, and I'm like, these are two bright and two pale. I'm going to fix them because I'm the best, right? And we just do it. Great. Client might not even notice. They might just think, hey, you know, this looks great. We just watched through the whole thing.

00:28:03:21 - 00:28:24:08
Joey
It's approved. Two months later, the distributor says, oh, we're going to make the French version of this. We're going to make the Spanish version of this. So they pull their text less renders that they got from the graphics vendor. They start translating the text and making new versions of the graphics. They put it into the show. They look at the reference of the original master.

00:28:24:08 - 00:28:51:11
Joey
They say, why do these graphics look totally different? Because we did something in the grade we shouldn't have done, and nobody knew about it, and it got through. And then we weren't thinking about maybe this needs to go to versioning reasoning. There's so many other things that happen, especially with modern shows that have these long life cycles that we might not be thinking of, but are essential to the success of the project.

00:28:51:11 - 00:29:12:06
Joey
And then what happens? It becomes an email chain of why are the text less wrong, why is the color wrong? And then it becomes kind of a finger pointing game that could have completely been eliminated with just a little bit of communication between the colorist, the client, and the graphics vendor. And it became this this is what happened.

00:29:12:06 - 00:29:32:14
Joey
I think this is, you know, to fall on the sword for colorists worldwide here. It's something that we can very easily make a mistake and do and just be like, oh, I'm just going to fix this real quick because I think it's better that way. And we might be right, but we're not looking at the entire context of the job.

00:29:32:14 - 00:29:58:18
Joey
And we need to communicate that. And that's where again, like Matt said, he might see something on air that he made and look completely wrong because somebody thought, I'm going to do X or Y to make it better. But they didn't know the entire creative process that went into that graphic. You know, they might have done I'm gonna put my film print emulation on it, but now the blues on this graphic are completely inaccurate to what we were trying to portray.

00:29:58:22 - 00:30:04:16
Joey
And, you know, just that sorry to go on a complete.

00:30:04:18 - 00:30:06:05
Robbie
You're working you're worked up about this, I get.

00:30:06:05 - 00:30:33:20
Joey
It, I see it from two sides. There is a importance to grading full screen graphics, maps, etc. in context so they flow as well as possible with the show. Sometimes there's also it's a very prickly thing that you need to be very careful about and very, very transparent about before you just go rogue. This is where the colorist can go really wrong and mess things up, and that's what we need to avoid.

00:30:33:21 - 00:31:04:02
Robbie
I think there's a lot, a lot of truth in what you're saying. There's a lot, lot to unpack there. So from an operational point of view, where I encountered this the most is not like I'm all of a sudden making big, gigantic, sweeping changes to those full screen graphics. Most of the time, it's actually relatively small stuff for, as you said, shot to shot flow in context, because oftentimes what happens is an editor is building a sequence.

00:31:04:02 - 00:31:34:21
Robbie
They put in a placeholder that's like map graphic here, right? Somebody talks to a motion graphics person. They build a map graphic completely isolated on an island outside of context of what the how the show is developing around it. Right? So, you know, it might be a dark, moody, you know, recreation scene in a history dock. And then all of a sudden, this graphic pops on screen with everything pegged to, you know, 100%.

00:31:34:21 - 00:31:54:10
Robbie
And it's like, whoa, it's an attack on your eyes. So what do I do as the colorist? I just gain that down right, thinking that it's flowing better. And now it's like you get, you know, the motion graphics going, what's wrong with these whites? They're at, you know, 80% now, not at 100%. And so I think there's a couple of ways to attack this problem.

00:31:54:10 - 00:32:17:23
Robbie
Number one, it is I think editorial workflows can do a better job with handoffs to motion graphics teams. And I think that's oftentimes giving them just like we get as colorists where we get a reference cut, giving those motion graphics guides accurate and more importantly, up to date reference cuts of the sections where those graphics are going to appear.

00:32:17:23 - 00:32:41:15
Robbie
That way they can view things in context and I say up to date, kind of underlining that because I can't tell you how many times it's not just the technical stuff, it's literally the timing stuff that sometimes gets people like, we're like, well, this is, you know, 28 frames short or something like that. How could that happen? Because the editor, they did a hand off to visual to motion graphics.

00:32:41:15 - 00:33:03:05
Robbie
They made some changes. They made a handoff to us. And so it's like, again, it's one of those things that we always talk about. Keeping everybody's timeline in sync has to happen regardless. And I think that in those situations, it is one of those prep kind of conversations to as you alluded to earlier. Hey, listen, I want to give you some guidelines for this.

00:33:03:10 - 00:33:33:09
Robbie
This is a pretty dark, deep show or whatever. I'm trying to keep my my highlights right around this level. It would be great if you didn't peg everything to 100% or two, 55 or whatever, you know, whatever metric you want to use. And then I think the other thing that is at play there is when you, you as the colorist, feel the need to do that adjustment, as you said, making that adjustment just because can get you in a lot of trouble.

00:33:33:09 - 00:33:51:13
Robbie
I don't think it's that hard for, especially these days, for you to go, hey, here's that 22nd section. I'm just going to throw that off to the motion graphics, explain what I did real quick, why I did it. Yeah. You want to just give me the thumbs up on that. Chances are they'll go thanks. You working for, you know, making this work and that's it.

00:33:51:14 - 00:34:01:10
Robbie
You know, in the in the worst case scenario, they'll go, you're right. I see what you're talking about. That let me give you a new map or a graphic or whatever. And then it's like then it's fine. I think.

00:34:01:15 - 00:34:21:15
Joey
The last leg of that communication is the client, because like I said, there's all of this other stuff that happens afterwards. The easy, let's say, you know, that example I brought up of the text list and the regionalization, the easy solution to that is we need you to grade all the Texas elements to to match. But if they didn't know, they would have never asked you.

00:34:21:17 - 00:34:48:11
Robbie
Yeah. And I mean I've, I've gotten in that problem that the text and textile situation is a really good asterisks to put in this conversation, because if you're responsible for the deliverable and the packaging of stuff, that matching is something you have to pay attention to. I it's not even just like levels and stuff like that. It's like you'd be surprised how often it happens where you get a texted graphic and then you get a Texas version, but there's something shifted about it, right?

00:34:48:12 - 00:35:10:16
Robbie
Like the timing is not exactly right or whatever. It gets flagged in QC and then it's your problem as the colorist. So like those kind of issues, flagging them as early as possible is important. All right. Same along the same lines. Let's talk. We talked I was griping earlier about Alpha Channel. Let's talk a little bit about some of that cable elements kind of thing.

00:35:10:16 - 00:35:43:15
Robbie
Because I think to me sometimes this requires a little bit of preparatory work from the colorist to make it work. And what I mean by that is when a designer is working on their own on an island, maybe with an offline cut of the show, you'd be surprised. All of the choices that are made with an ungraded, out of context shot that they might have in hand, and then when they get the graded shot, they're like, well, this is hard to read now, or it's not in the right place or whatever.

00:35:43:17 - 00:36:02:18
Robbie
Describe that back and forth a little bit, too, because I think one of the things that people often producers especially try to do is have parallel paths of work, like okay, motion graphics, doing mixes, doing its thing, colors doing its thing. Right. But oftentimes there's an intermediate road that could save everybody a lot of time and hassle. Right?

00:36:02:19 - 00:36:16:11
Robbie
I'm going to give you a graded section of this where you're doing all these motion graphics. So you can have everything in context is a question or is a workflow step that often gets ignored and it causes problems later.

00:36:16:13 - 00:36:38:22
Joey
Yeah. And this is really something that happens with graphics that are integrated with footage. And this is kind of like VFX junior. Right? Because when we get into heavy VFX, we're talking about whole shot with multiple elements and compositing, and everything is going to be one thing, whether they get plates from color, whether they get a lot from color and they give us back a whole plate.

00:36:38:22 - 00:36:58:12
Joey
But what kind of the junior version of that is? We're going to do titles, for example, that track with footage, and in that case, we're not going to get the whole thing back from the graphic artist. We're still going to get a keyboard graphic, but it has to line up with our footage and a real great way to attack.

00:36:58:12 - 00:37:22:06
Joey
That is at the beginning of the project. You might not have your final grade. Grade those sections first, send them to the VFX or the graphics artist, so they are working with an approximation of what the grade will be for their approval process and for their design process. Does that mean that that grade has to be identical when you get back those cables?

00:37:22:07 - 00:37:46:15
Joey
No, but it's close. And the beauty of that is now we can bring in the graphics. We don't need to grade or adjust the graphics like we just said, for all those reasons why we generally shouldn't do, but we can still grade the image underneath to perfect it, right? We can, you know, give the graphics artist our first pass.

00:37:46:20 - 00:38:23:08
Joey
They handle everything in terms of tracking, integration with the footage, stuff like that. Give us back a cable, then we can drop that onto our final grade and in most cases works great. In a little bit of cases, we might adjust our grade a little bit to make the graphic blend exactly how we want it. Maybe a little bit of a power window here on the footage, or a little bit of an overall gain adjustment or something like that, but just that one step of giving them a pre grade, if you will, is going to smooth out that whole process.

00:38:23:09 - 00:38:33:10
Joey
And that works, I think, for cable elements with footage, that process does not work for what we're going to talk about next, which is, you know, full deep VFX.

00:38:33:11 - 00:38:59:12
Robbie
Yeah. And one more one more sort of workflow. Note and I don't know if I'm the only one who does it this way. I don't know if I've ever really, really told you this, but I'm sure you do something similar. And that is it's a really simple workflow thing using in this case some of the resolve tools to help me, and that is I generally those sections where there's a lot of motion graphics or titles, I will generally color code those clips underneath that section.

00:38:59:12 - 00:39:32:17
Robbie
So visually it's very easy to go, hey, it's these seven shots that are affected by this title. The other thing I'll do, and this is something I'm in the habit of doing for a lot of reasons, just to check progress. You might not be aware of it, but in the Resolve Clips menu, there's a modified section and you can look at modified by 1 hour or 2 hours, you know, 12 hours, whatever you can even set a custom filter of it is that if I am, if I've done a hand off to to a visual effects vendor, just going about my thing, grading the rest of the show, you know, sometimes you'll bounce back and

00:39:32:17 - 00:39:53:10
Robbie
forth, you'll make changes. You're not even aware of it. One of the nice things you can do is use that modified function and go, oh, look, my yellow coded color coded clips that are for motion graphics. I've changed those today. Oh crap. I changed them significantly. That's another hand off just as another reference cut. And I do that same kind of thing by the way for like mix two.

00:39:53:11 - 00:40:11:04
Robbie
Like if there's something where I'm like, oh, I had to fix a problem and I had to slow down this clip to make this to make this work or whatever. I'm not sure if they're sound design on that. I'll do the same kind of thing and just color code that check by modified reexport a section if needed, which is which can be helpful.

00:40:11:06 - 00:40:45:01
Joey
So let me jump to kind of the biggest, hardest one because this is where it all comes together. Things like alpha channels, things like mattes, things like color space, color management, back and forth coordination. That is when you're dealing with real heavy VFX. I'm talking green screens, I'm talking compositing in virtual environments, CG elements, rig removal stuff where the VFX artist is going to be working with a full res plate and giving you back a done, full raised image.

00:40:45:01 - 00:41:20:06
Joey
And you need to be able to. Either maintain the grade through that whole process, or maintain your ability to grade through that whole process. That's where it becomes. We get into things like color spaces and interchange and mattes and things like that. And a couple just overall guidelines. I want to start out with using a standardized color space, whether that is, like you said earlier, for some jobs it's you send me the Dunn grade and I'm going to work off of that, if that's how that's a little bit limiting in a lot of ways.

00:41:20:07 - 00:41:22:21
Joey
And for some things that's okay.

00:41:23:01 - 00:41:43:04
Robbie
Yeah. And it's mostly limiting. It's mostly limited from a flexibility point of view. Not that it can't be done or it makes the job. I mean, it can make the job technically harder. It's more limiting for something is in progress. There are subject to change. Now we're making decisions on basically baked in images. That's where it gets a little more.

00:41:43:05 - 00:41:59:21
Robbie
But like if the grade has been approved from the client and all you're doing is throwing in, you know, a graphic that's tracked in a TV set or something that can be done on log footage or not. You know what I'm saying? That's not that's not one of the situations that's totally dependent on having that flexibility.

00:41:59:23 - 00:42:35:02
Joey
But I'll say of this, my favorite workflow generally is the following. We give completely ungraded clips in a standardized color space to the VFX artist that in my world is usually aces. So we say we're going to work in. Asked. There's also ACG, which has its own concerns, and we've done some stuff with actually with full computer generated jobs, but for footage, usually we want to stay in a log space.

00:42:35:03 - 00:43:06:14
Joey
It makes it makes everybody's life a little bit easier. So we will give to VFX. And again this is one workflow. This is not every workflow. We will give them. Color, space transformed ACS, CCTV footage. No grade on it. It's just okay. Maybe shot A is red shot B is Alexa. We're transforming both of them into A. The reason is we give them this pile of plates that they're going to be integrating and compositing together.

00:43:06:15 - 00:43:30:00
Joey
We also give them a overall preview LUT. That is the general look of the show that LUT is expecting, asked and outputting whatever our deliverable display format is, they can put that on the top of their comp work. Underneath of it, they if they oh, we need to composite this sky into this shot. We're going to adjust the color of the sky to fit in context.

00:43:30:01 - 00:43:50:19
Joey
Right. They're going to be able to do that because they're going to be looking at it in the correct display space. All of the sources are uniform. They don't need to be like, oh, I need to take the sky layer and transform that from log C to this or that. Right? They can all work in A underneath the display transform.

00:43:50:19 - 00:44:06:04
Joey
Then they can give me back in ACS image that I drop exactly into my pipeline and it just works. So it looks exactly right when I put it under the show. Look, I can grade it like it's any other shot.

00:44:06:06 - 00:44:06:23
Robbie
There's one caveat.

00:44:06:23 - 00:44:07:23
Joey
That lines up.

00:44:08:01 - 00:44:29:18
Robbie
There's one caveat that you skipped over, though, is that when they render that back for you. They are not baking in there to their preview display transform like they're basically giving you back the same thing that you gave them, right? They are giving you a now comped but color decisions in terms of output, transform, etc. not baked into that.

00:44:29:18 - 00:44:48:04
Robbie
So then when you get it back, you can just reapply your grid. And the other caveat about that that's great. You're right. It reapply your grade. It's like you just did magic and all of a sudden everything's online and it all looks the same. You mentioned earlier giving them just the show look. I mean, it depends on how far along you are in your grade process too, right?

00:44:48:05 - 00:44:55:07
Robbie
If this is something where you've already done a lot of per shot color work, you could hand off to them.

00:44:55:11 - 00:44:56:02
Joey
A lot.

00:44:56:04 - 00:45:19:02
Robbie
Actual the actual shot grade to just be aware that that is not going to be it's going to suffer the same limitations that any sort of hand off lookup table like that is going to suffer from, right? Like your, you know, 27 layers of tracking and all that kind of stuff and your texture and all that jazz. Not going to make it into that LUT, but the general color decisions, mood, etc..

00:45:19:03 - 00:45:20:09
Robbie
Yes, that will make it into there.

00:45:20:09 - 00:45:43:09
Joey
And the beautiful thing about this working kind of VFX scene referred is the artist. The artist can manipulate color where they see fit, right? Like like the example I said of a sky, they're going to make that sky line up exactly to be in context with their VFX work. All of that's still going to apply underneath of our grade.

00:45:43:09 - 00:46:13:18
Joey
So basically, proportionally everything in the VFX shot render is going to be right amongst itself. And then we can grade along with that. Now the next step from that is depending on what type of VFX we're doing, if it's integrating CG elements, for example, we can ask the VFX artist to also give us mattes, give us pre-rendered mattes of the robot that's coming in and killing all the people or the sky that you replaced.

00:46:13:18 - 00:46:22:22
Joey
In case we need to tweak it a little bit, we can bring those into our node tree and use that to have really accurate secondaries. That's kind of a bonus of this workflow.

00:46:23:01 - 00:46:42:13
Joey
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00:46:42:15 - 00:47:07:20
Robbie
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting workflow because I think that once you start getting into things like exercise with mattes attached, crypto mattes, etc., that is a level of sophistication that almost by definition, requires some further discussion with the person that you're working with. Because like, you know, one of the things that can happen is like, okay. Are these mattes labeled or not labeled?

00:47:07:21 - 00:47:38:23
Robbie
Right? What order? What order are they in? Are they, you know, this channel? That channel, whatever. And I think that can get confusing. But if that workflow is really spelled out, like last summer, I think it was, you did a project that had a lot of extra attached mattes. And I think from your I think you would say it was well handled, well organized, and it made the grade significantly easier because instead of you having to cut and track really sophisticated edges and things of that nature, it's just baked in.

00:47:38:23 - 00:47:42:11
Robbie
So you're like, cool blue. Yep. Orange. Right. And it was.

00:47:42:13 - 00:48:09:17
Joey
That was a job that was 100% CG originated. And that's where you talk about using ACS. CG because ACG is designed to work in linear floating point, which is what you render and are as so for footage stuff. And again, for the 18th time, not every workflow, but in general for footage stuff where we're going to give you camera plates I prefer to work in.

00:48:09:17 - 00:48:37:02
Joey
Asked give them CCTV log plates. They give me back CCTV log footage. Everything's copacetic. But for fully CG originated stuff, we want to keep as much kind of bit depth precision as possible. We don't want to trim down our renders to be, you know, ten bit log when they're coming out of the computer generated pipeline as 32 bit floating point.

00:48:37:03 - 00:48:52:16
Joey
Right. In that case, we specify ACS, CG, EXR with crypto mattes and huge files. But the end result means I get the absolute highest quality of the CG render into my color grade.

00:48:52:17 - 00:49:15:02
Robbie
There is a hubris that I think happens with modern color correction tools that like, they're sort of like all in one platforms that can do a little bit of everything. And that's true. But I think one of the things that's also at play here, too, is that as a you especially but there's others, probably some of our listeners that are like this as well that, you know, hey, I'm a great colorist.

00:49:15:02 - 00:49:43:01
Robbie
I know enough about visual effects to be dangerous. There's a level of complexity that you built into your life that you don't necessarily need to. I'm thinking, for example, of I've watched YouTube videos, people are spending like hours and hours and hours designing like glints on car rims and reflections on hoods and stuff like that. Right. Like that car was built probably in Unreal Engine by, you know, a 3D designer and a 3D compositor.

00:49:43:01 - 00:50:07:09
Robbie
And guess what? They have all of this lighting, all of these lighting tools, they have all of these texture tools. Why make your life 800 times harder, like in those kind of situations, interacting with a visual effects person who can hand off in layered EXR or crypto mattes or whatever, those reflections and those layers like it's just it's a, it's a let the people who do this well.

00:50:07:09 - 00:50:08:17
Joey
And they're going to look better.

00:50:08:22 - 00:50:35:02
Robbie
Do that work, and then you collect it on the end to make small final in context tweaks. I think a lot of people have this idea that like, no, no, no, no, I can just do it all myself. And I think at the at the medium end of things, that's more, more or less true. But when you talk about that extra level of polish and you wonder why a Mercedes-Benz commercial costs, you know, $10 million to make, it's this kind of thing, right?

00:50:35:02 - 00:50:44:00
Robbie
It's the it's the visual artifact. Artists working on creating the reflection as the card door moves for seven days is that kind of thing.

00:50:44:01 - 00:51:01:20
Joey
And like you said, the people who are good at the different things should be doing those different things. The colorist should be focused on making small adjustments for context and overall creative color design, not thinking about where does this lens flare come in and things.

00:51:01:22 - 00:51:39:02
Robbie
And that kind of and I think that's one of the things that it's intimidating for those who have never done that kind of workflow is that they're thinking that like, hey, exer, these mats, crypto mats, whatever, like are just another type of file. I like to think of them as a connection. They are a conduit to another application that I don't know how to use and I'm not that good at, but allows me to get funnel information from those tools in a live way into my application that allows me to work with it as a colorist, and that just you're going to get significantly better results if you understand those kind of workflows and how

00:51:39:02 - 00:52:07:12
Robbie
and how to deal with them. Now, I want to go back one second because you had you've mentioned probably ten times now you've mentioned, asked, occur, etc.. Right? I think this is a real big thing in the industry right now for the past probably decade. But it's gotten more complicated as ACS has developed, certainly. And then as everybody and their mom has created their own, you know, proprietary color management system.

00:52:07:12 - 00:52:30:23
Robbie
Let's talk about that for one second. So ACS, the Academy Color and Coding specification has been around for a number of years now. We're now in ACS 2.0. That's a whole lot of extra development things. We don't have time to go in front of this episode. But why work in a general sense? Why work something like ACS for these pipelines rather than, say, resolve color management or base lights, color management or whatever?

00:52:30:23 - 00:52:36:05
Robbie
I think I know the big picture, but I'm curious about your your general feeling about that.

00:52:36:07 - 00:52:58:12
Joey
The the overall idea is so everyone can speak the same language, right? Yes. We could do our grade in DaVinci wide gamut, but also send plates in like log C, but now we need to know to transform that at every stage of the process in and out. Because guess what? The only thing that speaks to wide gamut is resolved.

00:52:58:13 - 00:53:26:12
Joey
The only thing that speaks base like T is base light. ACS was designed as a industry standard, and now basically every application out there from DaVinci resolve to base light to, you know. After effects premiere now is getting functionality. You know, everybody is getting ACS support and it's getting better and better, especially if you have open color IO integrated into your app.

00:53:26:12 - 00:53:51:05
Joey
You've got ACS built in right there. That's how After Effects handles it. It's very well done. You know, it's a quick, easy way for everybody to speak the same language and eliminate variables. Is it the answer for everything? No. One other workflow that we've kind of mentioned, but I'm going to explicitly put it out here is working your VFX in camera space.

00:53:51:07 - 00:54:13:02
Joey
You know, you could do if your whole film is shot on log C with maybe a couple elements in log C, right? You can transform those elements of log C into log C, send everything to your VFX artists in log C and get log C back. Give them a preview lot that's expecting log. See, the whole workflow works the same way because guess what?

00:54:13:03 - 00:54:35:08
Joey
Everybody is still speaking the same language. Yeah, it's just as is gives you that extra level of standardization because okay, let's say we didn't give them customized preview Luts for everything because we're not at that stage yet. It's standardized. They can at least get it into a display space by saying asked to 709.

00:54:35:10 - 00:54:54:15
Robbie
Yeah. And it's I think there's a couple of things about that. Number one, I think that you're right about sort of the the translation from system to system, artist to artists that, you know, because one of the things is like, yeah, we might most be working in, say, log, see, for example, in a traditional pipeline. But you know what?

00:54:54:16 - 00:55:22:05
Robbie
For some reason, you're I'm working with a true transform. You're working with a lot and they're slightly different. And we can't figure that out. Why that whether slightly different right. Things of that nature. I agree with you generally speaking about. But it's not. The other thing I would point about this when you were talking brought to mind, is that I also think there's a level of complexity that people sometimes graft on to projects that don't need that level of complexity.

00:55:22:06 - 00:55:53:05
Robbie
Right? True. Like if you if you're getting just basic white, you know, lower thirds or identifiers, you really don't need to overthink this and be doing, you know, lookup tables and transforms and ACS and whatever. Like just get it right. I think where this this buys the ACS in the color management system really buys us is the more complicated the work is and the more involved it is, it takes the onus of a single place to view at of out of the equation.

00:55:53:06 - 00:56:16:08
Robbie
Right. So in a lot of times it's like, okay, we've got to come into the color suite to view everything. No, no, no we don't have we have artists in India. We have artists in Australia. We have artists in Europe, whatever it may be. Right. Like you need to be able to go to those shops and be like, yeah, this is more or less what we're going to see in the color suite and standardized system like ACS doesn't always work this way, but at least it gives you a fighting chance to be able to.

00:56:16:10 - 00:56:35:16
Joey
You mentioned a lot of times clients are trying to do this work simultaneously. Final color might not be anywhere close to being done when they start these VFX shots. If everybody's in a standard language, ACS or ACS, CG, we at least have set expectations from the beginning.

00:56:35:18 - 00:56:53:12
Robbie
So one last thing I want to talk about in this conversation, and that is the wild and wacky world of HDR when it comes to graphics and visual effects work, I think the visual effects work is actually a much easier discussion, because I think if you are truly involved in visual effects work, this is kind of become the new norm.

00:56:53:13 - 00:57:20:07
Robbie
Color management systems and those pipelines, whatever, where I see the problem more with HDR work is with motion graphic designers who for the large part, never couldn't even explain what HDR means to you have never worked in those pipelines. And so they're just piping out, you know, SDR graphics, etc.. Now you've got this STR graphic and hey, let's just say for the sake of argument, assume that it's not just white text at 100.

00:57:20:08 - 00:57:41:11
Robbie
Maybe there's some color to it. There's some gradation. What is this red supposed to be? What could this red be? Right. That's where I think a lot of the creative arguments come in and some technical problems. I generally like to gauge the person I'm talking to, to see if we have a fighting chance for them to understand the pipeline.

00:57:41:11 - 00:58:06:18
Robbie
If there's no chance that they're going to understand the pipeline, I'm going to say, do your thing. I will handle it. Right. And that's a it's a it's like a little bit of hubris in kind of a cocky spot to be in. But at the same time it's like cool. Like I can take your 100% white text, I can place it at 203 or wherever it needs to go in context of the show, and we're done.

00:58:06:18 - 00:58:28:23
Robbie
Nobody's the wiser. Where it gets a little more difficult is when you're making decisions. Let's just generally call them volumetric decisions. Right where I'm going to go, hey, I'm going to make this bluer or deeper or darker or whatever. And we're saturated. Like those are questions where I think that you need to be careful that you're not stepping on somebody's toes.

00:58:29:00 - 00:58:46:23
Robbie
I get why you did it. It was too much to explain the work of their capabilities. Their understanding wasn't enough. You're under deadline. You had to do it. But at the same time, like Matt Matt's question here, he gives up something that now it's totally different. That's a spot you don't want to be in. You got you got to work.

00:58:47:01 - 00:59:11:09
Joey
And all of those problems are multiplied by HDR by the fact that most of the time and this is getting better and I'm glad it's getting better, especially the apples of the world embracing HDR workflows, monitors getting cheaper. I would love to see all of the artists and graphic designers we work with have HDR capable monitoring, even if it's not reference quality, because then they can get an idea of where things sit levels wise.

00:59:11:09 - 00:59:33:00
Joey
Because if we're working in a STR graphics into an HDR pipeline, it becomes the colorists creative job to figure out where these graphics need to sit, brightness wise. And that's fine. I'm happy to do it, but like you said, that can get into some conflicts of they were looking at an STR. SDR has a concept of 100% white.

00:59:33:01 - 00:59:54:02
Joey
There is no 100% white in HDR. So we've got to figure out proportionality and levels and dynamic range between the footage and the text. For example, it would be better in the world if everybody, like we talked about with VFX, spoke the same language and all the and all the graphics were being done with HDR monitoring. That's just not the state of the industry right now.

00:59:54:02 - 01:00:14:19
Joey
So we need to understand the client needs to understand that and the artist needs to understand that. So the whole thing goes back to the very beginning. Close that loop of communication so the artist knows, hey, I'm taking your 100 nit graphics and I'm going to place them in HDR where they fit with the footage. That's something that we just need to do for this workflow.

01:00:14:21 - 01:00:26:15
Robbie
For sure. For sure. So as we said at the top, this is a very deep topic, Matt. Hopefully we've answered some of your general grievances and questions about this, but if not, please let us know. Of course.

01:00:26:15 - 01:00:49:04
Joey
Be clear. We don't want you know, the goal here is no surprises. Everyone's happy. Everyone gets their artistic lane and their creative decisions represented where they should be, right? The idea of maintaining artistic intent is the purpose of these workflows. It's just we got to step over some of these challenges as we go.

01:00:49:09 - 01:00:49:14
Robbie
Yeah.

01:00:49:15 - 01:00:51:14
Joey
And keep that attitude, you know.

01:00:51:15 - 01:01:09:22
Robbie
To that. To that end, to that end, I would just say that, you know, as you do more of this, these kind of handoffs, there's a certain sort of checklist of things that you get used to asking all the time. And I would just build up that, that list of questions honestly, like, what's the what alpha genera are you using?

01:01:09:22 - 01:01:33:07
Robbie
Is it straight or is it pretty much is this you know, what color working color space are you in? What types of Luts can you accept? Like all those kind of questions. Is it is it str whatever. Like you'll find that you get into a lot of the similar type of repetitive questions. And that's why I led off the discussion today talking about documentation, because it's great.

01:01:33:07 - 01:01:52:21
Robbie
If you could just hand over, hey, we work in nuke. Cool. Here's your instructions in nuke, right? Like it might take you some work and some research and some development time to do that kind of stuff. But ask yourself, would you rather sit on a phone call or a zoom call 30 times in a week handling, asking the same questions, or just go, nope.

01:01:52:21 - 01:02:13:11
Robbie
Here's the documentation for it. Just follow these steps and you're good. So I would I would also argue like there's some lifting work that can kind of go on sort of preproduction. And as you do more of these type of projects from both what sounds like Matt's emotion, graphic artists like from his side as well as from the colorist side that they can get on the same page.

01:02:13:11 - 01:02:30:04
Robbie
So good stuff. Good stuff. All right, well, as a reminder, you can always follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for The Offset Podcast. You'll find our our logo right there so you can you know, it's us. Also, as we mentioned at the top of the show, we launched a Discord server two weeks ago. We got about 50 or so people on there.

01:02:30:04 - 01:02:49:13
Robbie
Now it's an open server. We would love to have you join the conversation. It's pretty simple, straightforward design. We got a lounge. We got a questions for them. We got some show notes, things of that nature. But so far so good. A lot of really cool people in their asking some good questions. Just this morning Joey was going on about color management ad nauseam.

01:02:49:13 - 01:03:07:04
Robbie
So it's that kind of you. If you need more of the discussion, that's the place to go. Get more of the discussion. You can also follow the show on YouTube where you get the video version. And of course, all the major podcasting platforms like Spotify and Apple, Apple Podcasts. And you can always head over to OffsetPodcast.com for our entire library of shows.

01:03:07:05 - 01:03:34:06
Robbie
And last thing, we would love it if you'd consider supporting the show by visiting this link on screen to buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Every dollar pledge there goes directly to supporting the show. So, Joey. Yeah, good, good conversation has always man, this stuff, this stuff gets deep. And I think that's one of my my last point here is I would just say, like if you're ever feeling overwhelmed about these workflows, just trust that you're not the only one that's feeling overwhelmed about these workflows, right?

01:03:34:09 - 01:03:56:11
Robbie
They can get complicated. It's easy to talk yourself in circles. And so I think that my overarching point is, just when you're in one of these situations, take a breath, think about the questions, ask the questions, work through the problems, work through the tests. Don't make assumptions, and you'll be more than halfway there of of of getting getting it right for whatever particular project you're working on.

01:03:56:11 - 01:04:01:07
Robbie
So good stuff. So for The Offset Podcast, I am Robbie Carman.

01:04:01:12 - 01:04:03:13
Joey
And I'm Joey D’Anna Thanks for listening.