EP019: Color Management

01:00:00:05 - 01:00:16:17
Robbie
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. And today we're talking about something that's probably been on your mind for the past few years, and that's color management. Stay tuned.

01:00:16:19 - 01:00:35:13
Joey
This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at Flanders Scientific. Scott.

01:00:35:15 - 01:01:01:19
Robbie
All right, Joey, here we are for another episode. And this time we are talking color management, which, you know, if you've been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years, you might not be aware of, what color management is for video and how, pervasive it's become in our industry. Not just in color correction software, but even in editorial workflows, DIT workflows, etc. everybody is always talking about color management.

01:01:01:19 - 01:01:18:17
Robbie
So I know this is a subject that is, how should we say near and dear to your heart? Right. This is something that you like to pontificate on all the time. I always learn something from you when we have a color management discussion. And for our audience, I think I think we make one thing clear up the top here.

01:01:18:19 - 01:01:44:23
Robbie
We are not trying to give, specific recipes for specific camera workflows or device workflows or any of that kind of stuff here. There's plenty of, you know, great tutorials on the web about how you push all the buttons. We want to talk about, largely conceptually about what color management is, how it works, how it thinks, you know, in all some of the things to think about sort of intricacies, within color management, right?

01:01:45:01 - 01:02:14:11
Joey
Yeah. Like you said, color management is absolutely, incredibly important in our industry today, more so than it used to be. Now that we're dealing with not only a lot of different source formats, but also a lot of different destination formats HDR, SDR, various flavors of HDR, various tone maps, lots of weird deliverables. Color management can make or break the efficiency of a project, and I don't think a lot of people understand it.

01:02:14:11 - 01:02:17:07
Joey
You know, starting from kind of the beginning to the end.

01:02:17:11 - 01:02:40:22
Robbie
Yeah. You know, what's funny is that I have always thought about color management as something that like, people just kind of understood. And I think that's because years ago, I mean, decades ago, I had some good friends that were print guys, right? And they were always doing stuff, you know, like seismic printing, screen printing, etc., where they were having to interface with like printer profiles, and things of that nature.

01:02:40:22 - 01:03:02:13
Robbie
And so, like the kind of concept, the core concepts of like, hey, this is where this is, you know, our working space, this is our output space, all of those kind of things. I kind of just understood. But it shocked me, you know, that how little video people and post-production people really kind of got that obviously today, these days, people understand a lot more than they did ten, 15 years ago.

01:03:02:13 - 01:03:23:21
Robbie
Right. But it is something I think that's worth, exploring, you know, kind of conceptually because I think it's one of those things, too, where I think that a lot of people know enough to be dangerous with some of this stuff. Right? But like, don't maybe know enough to really use the right vocabulary to ask the right questions or to get help.

01:03:24:03 - 01:03:30:23
Robbie
And I think that's really kind of what we're trying to cover today. Right? Is, again, not individual recipes, but more so some of that, some of that big picture stuff.

01:03:31:01 - 01:03:42:22
Joey
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one only has to look to the resolved Facebook groups and some of the screengrabs of the insane color management setups that people seem to in and themselves.

01:03:42:22 - 01:03:43:21
Robbie
In my, that.

01:03:43:21 - 01:04:00:15
Joey
Was some kind of guess and check where they might be doing one thing and then undoing it and then redoing it like seven times in a row. And I think a lot of that is just not understanding the core concepts. So let's start with those core concepts. And I think the most important, one of the most important core concepts is seen and display referred.

01:04:00:15 - 01:04:09:14
Joey
We we hear these terms all the time. And a lot of people don't really know what they mean like referred. Well what does that mean? It's kind of a weird word.

01:04:09:17 - 01:04:13:06
Robbie
Weird way of saying, and I agree. Yeah, it's weird for sure. So.

01:04:13:08 - 01:04:20:06
Joey
To break it down, it's actually very simple display referred means you're grating. What is on the display.

01:04:20:08 - 01:04:21:01
Robbie
Yep.

01:04:21:03 - 01:04:47:00
Joey
The referred means you're grading in theory. What is the seen light. So you know we worked display referred in television for almost a hundred years. Yeah. Right. And that's why we never really thought about color management in the TV side of the industry, because everything was rec seven and 9 or 601, you know, everything was normal color television, gamma 2.4.

01:04:47:00 - 01:05:14:07
Joey
And you just worked with that. Then we started getting cinema cameras into the mix. They shot log, they shot, raw, and they needed to be converted just to look at them on a screen. Yeah. And a lot of people's initial reaction was to, okay, we do the conversion and then we color correct in our normal way by looking at the screen, you know, display referred again, in the modern world.

01:05:14:07 - 01:05:21:04
Joey
Like we started this off saying, well, now we have more output formats, the screen, we have more time a definite right.

01:05:21:04 - 01:05:24:19
Robbie
We have more screens, different flavors of screens is a way of saying that. Right.

01:05:24:21 - 01:05:52:15
Joey
Exactly. So these days, I, I mean, we always recommend working seen referred unless it's a very, very, very specific exception to say, you know, there are very specific exceptions like maybe if you're grading for the Las Vegas sphere and you're in their test laboratory, you might work seen refer or sorry display referred for that because it's not going anywhere else.

01:05:52:15 - 01:06:15:04
Robbie
Well, I think I think the other thing that I think we're people often get confused about this is because there is a marriage of display referred and seen referred right. You are eventually going to look at this content on a display of whatever flavor that might be. Right. And what, seen referred workflows allow you to do, I often think about it this way.

01:06:15:06 - 01:06:34:01
Robbie
Is the is the management or the flexibility to adjust things to whatever that display referred device might be at the end of the pipeline. Right. So it's not it's not that you're working in this magical fairyland of, oh, where it's seen light and it never has to see a display ever again. Right? But of course, that's not true.

01:06:34:01 - 01:06:49:19
Robbie
To see it, you have to look at it on a display that has a certain amount of settings, etc. but what's seen referred does think about it almost as like your, and I'm going to use these terms a little loosey goosey here. So please correct me, Joy, if I if I get wrong, but is you know, it's kind of you're working space.

01:06:49:19 - 01:07:13:03
Robbie
It's kind of your, your overarching pipeline of, okay, I'm going to work in this scene. Refer. Right. And just to be clear, we've all heard of seen referred workflows, right. You know, working in ACS or we'll talk about later working in Da Vinci wide gamut. You know, those kind of parts of it are components of a seen referred workflow right there, that working space that allows us to work in that stage of the process.

01:07:13:07 - 01:07:37:12
Joey
Yeah. And, you know, like I said, in television, we've always been display referred in the land of cinema and movies. They've been seen referred because they were working with at the beginning. Negative film. Right. You can't just look at negative film and, you know, see what it's going to be. Everything's backwards. So you need to look at it under a transform, which was the print film.

01:07:37:12 - 01:07:56:10
Joey
Then we got into Digital Intermediate where you would scan the negative film. Yeah. Work with it inside of a computer under a display LUT that would emulate your print film. So you got something on your monitor that would approximate what it's going to look like after it gets printed back to film. That's still a scene referred workflow, right?

01:07:56:10 - 01:08:13:19
Joey
Because you're working with the negative film under Display Transform, and that display transform is going to emulate the final print. Nowadays, we have very accurate displays that allow us to kind of see the entirety of the signal, in ways that the I.

01:08:13:21 - 01:08:17:07
Robbie
But the idea but the idea is the idea is similar, right. Your, your.

01:08:17:09 - 01:08:18:06
Joey
The ideas are exactly.

01:08:18:06 - 01:08:35:20
Robbie
The same. Your log encoded footage off of your cinema camera is the same thing. Is that digital negative. Right. We want we ideally we want to work with it in that scene referred native space. Right. And then at the end of the pipeline put it to wherever it needs to go, needs to go to an HDR display. It needs to go to SDR display, it needs to go to the sphere wherever it needs to go.

01:08:35:22 - 01:08:56:06
Robbie
We have that flexibility at the end. I think one thing that you mentioned that I think is also a little confusing to people is I think when people I always look at it as kind of like this, this, this, the, the, the knowledge you have before you have the real knowledge and that is for the past, I don't know, 15, 20 years.

01:08:56:06 - 01:09:11:10
Robbie
Right. The, the idea of a lookup table or a LUT has gotten into more people's lexicon. Right? They understand essentially what it does. It takes it from one thing to another thing. Right? We always give the example of, hey, the easiest lot to understand is you have a blue pixel, the LUT does some math and you have red pixels on the other end, right?

01:09:11:10 - 01:09:38:12
Robbie
I mean, essentially that's what for our purposes, that's what a lookup table is doing. I do generally consider lookup tables to be part of the, the, the overarching color management process. Right. So if somebody tells me, hey, I'm using a lot, you know, and I'm not in the managed workflow, there's like an asterisk by that because like, you sort of kind of are that what is going to make some assumptions of what the source footage is?

01:09:38:18 - 01:10:03:11
Robbie
It's going to make some assumptions for, what you're out, possibly make some assumptions for what your output device is going to be in that case. Right. So a lot, a lot is like a dumb form of, of color management, if you will, in the sense that, it's it's just I mean, we've talked about this before, and I'll put a picture in the, in the post for this, but it's literally just a table of numbers that say, okay, for this input, make this output.

01:10:03:11 - 01:10:14:18
Robbie
And it goes down and down and down and down and on hundreds of values to tell you that. Right. And that is, again, it's not flexible color management, but it is a form of color management as far as I'm concerned.

01:10:14:20 - 01:10:34:17
Joey
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot can contain whatever transfer form it has in it. Right. So it's funny, I actually saw again back to the Facebook thing, I saw a big argument on Facebook about people saying, why are they called Luts? That's a stupid name lookup table. What are you looking up like? No, no. You have an RGB triplet.

01:10:34:19 - 01:10:43:04
Joey
You look it up in the table and it gives you a new one. A lot is just a text file with input numbers and output numbers and nothing else.

01:10:43:04 - 01:11:01:18
Robbie
I know I remember teaching this one time and I was at a, I was at a, a big conference, I think it was Adobe Max. And I actually opened up the LUT into a text editor. And there was like, like people, it was like Nirvana and people. Like what? Like, I thought it was like some like, you know, I think they were expecting calculus, right?

01:11:01:22 - 01:11:06:11
Robbie
Or some sort of like, you know, big, huge transform function when it's really not.

01:11:06:13 - 01:11:13:22
Joey
You know, that's where people go wrong. So I'm thinking a lot of people say, okay, Luts are just dumb math. They're not really even math. They're substitution.

01:11:14:00 - 01:11:14:08
Robbie
Yeah, it's.

01:11:14:08 - 01:11:18:01
Joey
Good. Right. And I think that's an important thing to to kind of differentiate. I say.

01:11:18:01 - 01:11:18:11
Robbie
That all time.

01:11:18:15 - 01:11:40:03
Joey
Space transforms. We'll talk about later or math. Right. They're doing it from a formula, not from a baked down set of values, but lots of been used in color management for a long time. And they can still be used like I said, the print example of when you're working on something that has to go to print film, they would use a print emulation light to look at it on a specific program.

01:11:40:03 - 01:11:56:14
Robbie
That specific. Yeah. Or they would even get it from that specific lab that I was calibrate. Yeah. Hold on, I get it. The other thing I think that's related to this. And you hear oftentimes why I and I want to say and I'm not trying to point fingers at people, but I do think there's a certain subset of people that think about color management.

01:11:56:14 - 01:12:20:18
Robbie
And the first thing that they think about is complicated, right? They think about like, oh, it's too many steps, too many buttons. There's too many things that can go wrong. And I always get this retort from that type of person is, I'm the color manager, right? I'm the colorist. Right? I'm making the color management decisions. And I, I used to like, think about that and be like, oh God, man, like, you just don't want to learn about this.

01:12:20:18 - 01:12:47:16
Robbie
Whatever. The more that I thought about it, there is some validity to the colorist as the color manager or however you want to see that, right? The color the colorist is making obviously creative decisions about what shots are going on or making creative decisions about transforms, etc. and that, is going to happen regardless of whether you're in a non manage workflow or fully color manage workflow or somewhere in between, like with a lot.

01:12:47:16 - 01:13:06:19
Robbie
Right? You are still going to be making decisions that influence the output, right? You know how much you're going to crash the shadows, how are you going to blow out the highlights, how saturated your things are going to make? So it's not that the colorist is divorced from all of this, right. And in terms of the color management workflow, you're still making this.

01:13:06:19 - 01:13:07:00
Robbie
Yeah.

01:13:07:00 - 01:13:24:19
Joey
It's just like how much work do you want to create for yourself? Because, you know, the attitude of I'm going to do everything manually. You know what? If all of your files were video levels and you and they were tagged as full range levels, yeah, they'd be wrong. You could grade each shot manually to adjust for that, and it'd be fine.

01:13:24:19 - 01:13:42:09
Joey
But you're just creating more work for yourself and having a not good color management pipeline can do that, right? Especially if you have a lot of different sources. It can make way more work for yourself. I mean, you have to be sitting there working on technical fixes as opposed to creative.

01:13:42:15 - 01:14:04:15
Robbie
Yeah. And I think the other thing that doing, working, color management, working color managed does for people is it presents a certain level of consistency to the initial starting point for your shots because, those same people I just mentioned, they go off and go, well, I can just I can grade these shots faster than I can with pushing all the buttons to set this up.

01:14:04:15 - 01:14:10:03
Robbie
I could be halfway through the show by the time I figure that out. And I'm like, that is true.

01:14:10:05 - 01:14:12:18
Joey
But you multiply that by a thousand shots, right?

01:14:12:18 - 01:14:26:23
Robbie
You as the you as the colorist are going to have some variability to how like, fine, you might have been pretty consistent day one you come in and sit back in front of the show. Day two, and now you're crushing the blacks a little bit, or you're saturating things a little bit more than you did the day before or whatever.

01:14:26:23 - 01:14:50:07
Robbie
Right. Color management in whatever flavor comes in, one of its other advantages is consistency to the starting point of your work. And I should be clear about what I mean by starting point, because I think that there is a tendency to think of color management solely as a way to get to, you know, get in, get to a starting point that long to sort of normalize looking, transfer and transform.

01:14:50:07 - 01:15:01:16
Robbie
And I think that's definitely part of it. People want a good starting point, but color management is more than that. It can be part of your ingrained process. It can be obviously part of your output process. But I think that where I'm.

01:15:01:18 - 01:15:03:18
Joey
At, it can be a big part of your look development process as well.

01:15:03:18 - 01:15:24:13
Robbie
Right. And but what I think where most people think of it is how do I go from log to looking something that looks normal, more normalized as a starting point. And that's fine. You're still going to do that work to to to eventually massage that image. What we're talking about in this case where I think that I make the argument a lot of people try color manager, is that you don't do all that work upfront to get it to a starting point.

01:15:24:15 - 01:15:45:08
Joey
Yes. So that that kind of brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is, you know, what are the actual steps in this color manage pipeline? We keep talking about, you know, you have the final output and you have what you start with, what happens in between them. And the way I like to look at it is there's three basically major regions of this.

01:15:45:08 - 01:16:09:09
Joey
Right there is your original sources, whether they be log, sea, Red, raw, whatever, Rec 709 there is what they are. Then there is the intermediate space, which is where you're actually doing your creative corrections. And then there's the output space, which is a transform from that imaginary intermediate space that isn't display able to something that's actually display able.

01:16:09:09 - 01:16:31:11
Joey
And a couple things to kind of add to that. You know, general one, two, three approach is sometimes your source space can be your working space. You know, a lot of people like to color manage with their working space being log, see, and that's there's nothing wrong with that. Like the most simple color management pipeline is a log.

01:16:31:11 - 01:16:49:01
Joey
See image the airy LUT at the end, and then all of your nodes in the middle being your grade in log. See, now if you have a OD shot that came from like a Panasonic log in that you could color space, transform that to log. See, now that kind of reminds me of the next thing I wanted to talk about.

01:16:49:05 - 01:17:18:04
Robbie
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on one second. Cuz I think, I think you hit on something, you hit. You said this, but I want to reiterate because it's so important that people get this. So what I heard you say is that there are essentially three parts to this pipeline. There's your starting point, your input. What the footage you have is there's how you're working with it and processing it, that working space or timeline space or whatever you want to call that, and then your your output space.

01:17:18:04 - 01:17:47:07
Robbie
Right. And what we're trying to do with a well-managed pipeline is that we initially transform our camera shots into our working space that we want and prefer, right? No, right or wrong. They're talking about that more in a second. We're in our working space. And then from our working space to whatever output device space we need, whether that be P3 D65 for HDR 2020, whether it be Rec 7 or 9, whether that be, you know, sRGB, gamma 3.9 or whatever for some weird display, right?

01:17:47:07 - 01:18:09:12
Robbie
It does. It doesn't matter. But those kind of three components and those handshakes need to be correct. But it's important to say that those handshakes are also done for the most part under the hood. Right. We're not necessarily having to go, okay, well, I'm taking these pixels and going to this, I'm going to this, these pixels and go into that.

01:18:09:14 - 01:18:15:16
Robbie
You're simply saying, hey, this is my footage is this is how I'm this is my working space setup and this is my output.

01:18:15:18 - 01:18:26:01
Joey
Yeah. And I think it's important to do one more kind of core definition we defined seen refer to we defined display referred. We've never just defined what is a color space.

01:18:26:05 - 01:18:26:16
Robbie
Oh right.

01:18:26:16 - 01:18:28:06
Joey
And people.

01:18:28:07 - 01:18:28:16
Robbie
This is this.

01:18:28:18 - 01:18:58:02
Joey
A big one. Very confused about this because there's various aspects to it. So let's just break it down a little bit. A color space consists of a set of primaries, which is where your primary red, green and blue sit on. For example, see chromaticity chart. Yeah, a white point, which is where white is a gamut, which is how much saturation you can go, outside, which essentially is defined by the boundaries of your primaries.

01:18:58:04 - 01:19:24:11
Joey
And some kind of transfer function, whether that be a peak curve for output, whether that be a log curve for input. Right. So there are various ways to convert these numbers. So like for example, if you're going from log C to ACS it knows where red, green and blue in log C are numerically it knows where red green and blue in ACS, AP zero or AP one is.

01:19:24:15 - 01:19:48:04
Joey
So it just maps those. Imagine like a three dimensional map from one to the other. That's what a color space transform does. Yeah, and that's what we're using to get between those stages of input to working to output. And there are plenty of Luts that have that baked into them. So any LUT that changes you from like log C to a display space has those conversions built into it.

01:19:48:06 - 01:19:48:19
Joey
Yeah.

01:19:48:21 - 01:20:07:03
Robbie
And I mean, I think that any color scientist that is listening, listening might take a little, you know, might raise a finger about that quick definition because it is a little more nuanced and complicated than that, where we have abstracted the spaces, you know, you think about like x, y, z, you know, and then you have encoding spaces like Y, Kcrw and stuff like that.

01:20:07:03 - 01:20:26:05
Robbie
Like it is a complicated subject. But I agree with you on the kind of, the baseline 50,000ft view of that. So, so now that we've defined those kind of three parts to define what, you know, kind of going in and out of color spaces, I think, it's important to describe where the color management can happen in that pipeline.

01:20:26:05 - 01:20:44:22
Robbie
Right. So let's start with we got a bucket of media that we've brought under our computer. It's now in a project. Let's just for sake of argument say it's in DaVinci resolve. Right. At that point we have the first step of any pipeline. And I people are going to go, well, what about project management versus node management? Doesn't matter for this part of the conversation, right?

01:20:44:22 - 01:21:07:13
Robbie
Yes. It's different. There are different ways of doing the color management, but the principles here are the same. First thing we have to do whatever system we're using and whatever project or no based ways we're using, we simply have to tell the computer, this is what my footage is. It's R.E. log. See, it's Blackmagic Cinema camera. It's canon logs, you know, three or Sony S-log, you know, two or whatever, right?

01:21:07:15 - 01:21:35:10
Robbie
We have to tell it what it is. Once we define what it is, we have to tell it how we'd like to work. Right. This is the working space that we like to work in. Now, this is a big decision, this part. Right. Because working space is largely. Preferential I think that there the the guideline would be that you want to work in a working space that is large enough to not damage the footage that you're working with.

01:21:35:10 - 01:21:54:22
Robbie
Right? So traditionally, you'll see these spaces. And if you look at them on the visual locus that you mentioned just a moment ago, the chromaticity chart, you'll often see that the these spaces as being very big and wide. Right? I'm thinking about things like ACS, AP one. AP zero is more of a transfer space, but AP one Rec 2020 log.

01:21:54:23 - 01:22:16:14
Robbie
You know, log, log. See, DaVinci wide gamut. These are all very large working spaces that you're essentially never going to run into the boundaries of as you're working. So therefore whatever you need to go then down the pipeline for your output, you're not losing anything in the processing that happens either going into or out of that working space.

01:22:16:14 - 01:22:19:22
Robbie
So that's the essential idea. You always want to work big if you can.

01:22:20:00 - 01:22:48:12
Joey
But and a lot of these working spaces are designed to be used with a particular set of output transforms. That's where you get into ACS resolve color management, etc.. So if you're working in ACS, you probably want to be working with a, you know, ACS working space because the transforms from, for example, ACS, CCT into your displays are all completely done and standardized and easy to use.

01:22:48:13 - 01:23:06:14
Joey
Same thing with resolve color management, t cam and base light. Right? So usually that working space is tied to the output transform as kind of a partnership, but not necessarily always. And that's one of those times where you might want to think about some weird stuff.

01:23:06:16 - 01:23:33:18
Robbie
And by weird stuff, I think one of the I think you're generally right that, you know, if I'm working in ACS project, working in ACS, you know, AP one as my, my working space makes sense to go to, you know, in that pipeline. It doesn't have to be. But I think the one weird thing about this choice and I actually, it's it's funny because we when we did our conversations a few weeks ago with, Nate McFarland from Dolby, which, if you haven't listened to those episodes, be sure to check them out.

01:23:33:20 - 01:23:53:00
Robbie
You know, one of the things that always struck me when talking at Dolby about this kind of thing and color management, like, they're kind of like, whatever you want for your working space, whatever. It's like they're non-committal about it because this this last point about it, I think is important. Is that the working space another way of saying that is your timeline space where it's kind of governing.

01:23:53:00 - 01:23:54:10
Robbie
Once you get once you get your.

01:23:54:11 - 01:23:55:13
Joey
Intermediate, your.

01:23:55:14 - 01:24:30:00
Robbie
Intermediate, once you get your footage in and tag it what it is, how are you going to be actually color correcting? What space that is? It's largely about feel, right that, you know, the controls, if they are color space aware controls, will feel a little bit more normalized. If they're not, they're going to feel pretty different between these different working spaces and how, you know, how if you move one of the the balls in your color, color control surface, you know, you'd be surprised in a really big space where a tool is not color managed or color space aware, a little move goes all the way out to the edge, like super far,

01:24:30:00 - 01:24:31:18
Robbie
right? Yep. So it could be much.

01:24:31:19 - 01:24:54:02
Joey
About the thing, you know, talking about working spaces. I think it's kind of interesting to think about is we mentioned earlier, you can use for example, a lot as their output transform. But all that we've talked about so far with this three step process has implied floating point transforms, right? As in we're doing the math completely imaginary and floating point land where there's infinite precision, right?

01:24:54:03 - 01:25:15:22
Joey
If you are involving lots in your process for any reason, whether that's some kind of transformation LUT, whether that's a specific print emulation that you're using, as well as a display transform, you might actually want to not use as wide of a working space, because then that LUT might not have the precision to resolve that working space into the display space.

01:25:15:23 - 01:25:35:00
Joey
That's kind of the weird outlier situation I was thinking of. But in general, if you're staying floating point where you're not cutting off the precision and you're not clipping anything, how wide your working space doesn't really matter, right? You could multiply by 100, then divide by 100 and you get the same number back at the output.

01:25:35:02 - 01:26:00:06
Robbie
Yep. 100%. And so I think that that choice, I think you if you talk to a lot of colorists, they're probably going to say one of maybe a few things that we've kind of narrowed it down. You know, I think people are going to say some, you know, an ace is working spaceship one, a lot of other colorists are going to say, you know, their color corrector of choice, native working space.

01:26:00:06 - 01:26:21:11
Robbie
So for resolve, that might be, you know, DaVinci wide gamut or slash intermediate, you know, in the baseline, it's going to be their own, you know, their own, flavor of a working space. The output spaces are interesting because this is the third, the third part of the chain. So once you, you know, you've got stuff into your working space, you've made your Academy Award winning green.

01:26:21:11 - 01:26:46:05
Robbie
Everything's going lovely. The clients are giving you high fives. We now have to get it out to that display, referred space to your actual device that you're using. That's going to be a little interesting because some of these things are standardized, industry wide spaces, right? Seven and nine rec. 2020, etc.. But they can also be a little bit of like inside baseball kind of math that's going on.

01:26:46:05 - 01:27:05:05
Robbie
That's based on those. Right? So for example, in ACS, you have like something they call like simulated spaces for like projection setups, right. Like a D 60 or, you know, a D 65 simulated space. That's an output transform. So the guys at ACS, you know, the ACS working group, came up with the good that this is how we can get, you know, this to map to this display properly, etc..

01:27:05:05 - 01:27:24:15
Robbie
So there is standardized stuff for output. And then there is some sort of, you know, customized stuff. But the point generally with that output space, and this is a good rule of thumb to have right now, circle this one is that you want to have your output transform in a pipeline generally match how the actual display is set up.

01:27:24:21 - 01:27:44:11
Robbie
Right? Yeah. So if you are working with an HDR display and the HDR display is set up, P3 to 65, well, it makes sense. Your output transform would be set up to P3 to 65. Not Rec 2020, right. We want to make sure that as I mentioned word handshake earlier, we want to make sure that these handshakes are consistent from one place.

01:27:44:16 - 01:27:52:17
Robbie
So you're not doing something. Oh okay. Well I'm feeding my display a different color space that it's set up for. That's going to give you and lead to a whole bunch of problems.

01:27:52:19 - 01:28:15:06
Joey
And on the subject of these output spaces, up to now, we've been pretty loosey goosey about our recommendations. Right? We were like, oh, you can use whatever input transform intermediate, you know, build it up as long as you're keeping the ingredients right and the ins and outs match, you can build this pipeline however you see fit. The output transform, in my opinion, is where that ends.

01:28:15:11 - 01:28:37:04
Joey
You need to not do anything after that output transformation for a couple of reasons. The technical reason you know doesn't exist. You could do an output transform, then do a display, referred great of that and tweak it a little bit if you didn't like it. But guess what? Then you lose any ability to change the output space to another deliverable.

01:28:37:04 - 01:28:38:10
Robbie
Without having to compensate against.

01:28:38:10 - 01:28:58:17
Joey
Any ability to put that output transform anywhere else in the pipeline. Right? So we talked about project based color management, node based color management and other systems like base. Like you would have layer based color management where you're putting these transforms can logistically make a difference in your project.

01:28:58:17 - 01:29:02:22
Robbie
So that's a big one there. That's a real that's a real big one.

01:29:02:23 - 01:29:27:04
Joey
So project based let's start with that. Right is when you're telling resolve okay. We just tag each clip as its input. We tell resolve what the timeline space is. It'll automatically transform from those inputs. The great thing about that is most of that can be handled by metadata automatically. Yep. Right. And then you set the output space and then your node tree as far as you're concerned is just all in your timeline space.

01:29:27:06 - 01:29:33:05
Joey
Easy peasy. You work as normal. That's kind of the simplest from an operator perspective way to do this.

01:29:33:05 - 01:29:54:02
Robbie
And to be clear, Joey, it does in in a project wide approach, you have your choice and we'll expand on this more in just a second. But I want to be clear that that concept of how that works is no different. It doesn't matter which system you use, right? If you're using ACS or CMT, cam, whatever. It's the same basic flow.

01:29:54:02 - 01:30:15:00
Robbie
You're tagging footage. It's transformed automatically into your working space, automatically into whatever you have set up output. And I was also worth mentioning. One important thing is that many systems I can't say all, but many systems, they do treat raw footage a little differently in those type of workflows. You said you and I just want to be clear, you said this, but I want to expound them on that.

01:30:15:00 - 01:30:27:20
Robbie
So you said this can happen automatically with metadata. That's true. But specifically with raw footage, oftentimes because raw is not a color space, right? It's raw. You're just automatic.

01:30:27:20 - 01:30:28:19
Joey
On an RGB image.

01:30:28:20 - 01:30:46:23
Robbie
Right? You're automatically parsing that into your working space, all the math happening behind the scenes without you having to explicitly say, oh yeah, this is already raw red, raw Sony raw, whatever. Because it already knows that it's raw. It's not in a color space that you have to tag or define. So it's going to do that automatically.

01:30:47:01 - 01:31:18:02
Joey
Yeah. Now anybody that's listening to me or Robby in the past ten years knows we personally advocate for node based color management and resolve, which means essentially, instead of telling the project level the color manager project, we are taking the entire pipeline and building it ourselves in the node tree with color space transforms on either end from the input source to the intermediate space, and then from the intermediate space to the output space.

01:31:18:02 - 01:31:47:00
Joey
Here's where it gets a little bit dangerous though, because when you are working node based and this gives you a lot more flexibility in my opinion, the reason why I like to work node based is because I can work. For example, before the input transform, if I want to do some paint work or some texture stuff that really looks like it was done in camera, I can more easily do that inside the original camera space then inside the managed space, in my experience.

01:31:47:01 - 01:32:07:07
Joey
But I never ever do anything past that output. Transform. Even though in a node based workflow you could. The reason being because that will break lots of other things and you can put that output if you're working node based. There's a bunch of different organizational techniques you can use to put your output transform at the end of your chain.

01:32:07:09 - 01:32:27:09
Joey
Easiest, put it on the timeline level less easy. Put it on an adjustment layer, or put it on a group level, or even just put it on every clip. There might be reasons why you do one or the other. For example, if you are working in rec seven and nine and you have Rec 7 or 9 graphics, you might not want to color manage those.

01:32:27:09 - 01:32:48:09
Joey
You might want to just take them from the designer, lay them on top of your master with a adjustment layer in between. That works great. You might want to do it on the group level and have it, you know, be easily changeable globally. That way without having to use the timeline level, because again, that would affect things like graphics and even slates and bars and tone.

01:32:48:13 - 01:33:04:04
Robbie
You know, you know, when I, you know, the one I get all the time, I just I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is an important one. It's not because graphics are an easy one to think of. The non-linearity sometimes that you find in the way that the tone curves work with things like dissolves can also be like something special.

01:33:04:06 - 01:33:06:20
Joey
Dropping down to black. You might want to handle differently.

01:33:06:22 - 01:33:07:23
Robbie
Totally, totally.

01:33:07:23 - 01:33:09:00
Joey
And it works.

01:33:09:02 - 01:33:11:20
Robbie
It will react slightly different depending on where you do it.

01:33:11:22 - 01:33:32:16
Joey
The one of the other reasons for never going beyond that output transform is you might start your grade and grade your entire film, for example, with the output transform on the timeline level right? And then you might run into some online editing problems when you try to drop in graphics or fades or other stuff in the timeline and say, hey, you know what?

01:33:32:18 - 01:33:50:04
Joey
This would actually be way better if I put it on an adjustment clip or on a group, or rippled it to all the clips, right? Since that output transform is completely standardized and we haven't messed with it, we can just take that node, use any of those other methodologies, and our output image is not going to change. Right.

01:33:50:06 - 01:34:09:11
Joey
And if you need to send things for VFX with like a preview grade on them, you can send a graded image in your working space and then just tell them, for example, hey, that's a CT. Or you could give them a lot for associate to rec 7 or 9, and they can give you back a log image in your working space.

01:34:09:15 - 01:34:34:06
Joey
But since you have not changed that output transform at all, that's going to be the same across your entire pipeline with multiple people. So basically, any time you do anything after the output transform, you are taking your entire color managed workflow, breaking it down, and doing a display referred grade on top of it, which in my opinion completely defeats the purpose.

01:34:34:08 - 01:35:01:01
Robbie
Wise thoughts from a wise man. I do think that one of the ways that I have often explained the node based approach is that one of the frustrating things to me and do for full transparency here for years prior to really robust color management systems, I was a big fan and still occasionally am of using lookup tables in my workflow.

01:35:01:01 - 01:35:22:11
Robbie
Right? And in my setup in my node setup, when using a workflow, I always put my lookup table, generally speaking, kind of in the middle of my tree. Why did I do that? Because I wanted the ability to massage the image before the lookup table, before that math of whatever processing that's doing. And I wanted the ability to do it after words.

01:35:22:11 - 01:35:44:21
Robbie
Right. Like there are certain times like you would apply a creative LUT and I don't know, black level would be clipped at like, you know, 7 or 8%. So you could if you couldn't do anything before the LUT, but after a lot, you could bring that black level back down. That's just, you know, one example. So when I started getting to a color manage pipeline, I was initially very frustrated by a project wide approach.

01:35:44:22 - 01:36:09:07
Robbie
Doesn't actually allow me to do anything before that initial transform into my working space. Right. And then it also doesn't really allow me to do, you know, sort of any, any part, sort of after that processing, if I know that's a bad idea, but it doesn't allow me that flexibility. If I wanted to actually needed to do something after that process where, where node based.

01:36:09:07 - 01:36:23:20
Robbie
And I think one of the reasons that we love it so much is because, reason I should say, I don't I love it so much is because it emulates that LUT workflow for me. Precisely. I put whatever transform is in the middle of my tree, and if you look at our tree, we'll post one on our chart.

01:36:23:20 - 01:36:46:17
Robbie
Trees. People can compare your complicated tree versus mine. You'll see in both there's a similar similarity, and that is that our transform into our working space is generally somewhere in the middle of the tree, where we have nodes where we can process and do corrections in what we like to refer to as camera space. That's not exactly true.

01:36:46:17 - 01:37:05:20
Robbie
But let's just, for the sake of argument, call it that, right in kind of the unprocessed pre transform pre working space area. We do that transform. And then we have our working space whether that be ACS or RCM or whatever it may be. And it simply just allows us to work on both sides of the equation at the same time.

01:37:05:20 - 01:37:25:20
Robbie
And there's perfectly great reasons to do that. One of the most ones I see all the time that hit the Facebook groups and other places like that is, oh, I got these artifacts and they post a screenshot and it's these little like black dots all over the clip and it's like, okay, you're producing negative values in, you know, from the transform into your working space.

01:37:26:02 - 01:37:44:19
Robbie
These are values that don't really can't exist, but the math lets you create them. Therefore you need to to fix it. You need to apply some clipping or do something else. But guess what? It's really only solvable if you do that when you transform, right? And you can't really do that pre transform. If you're in a project wide approach.

01:37:44:21 - 01:37:45:12
Robbie
Another.

01:37:45:14 - 01:38:11:14
Joey
Thing in theory, right. These color management systems are designed to make that not happen. Right. But you shouldn't get weird negative values and gamut problems if you have the right input transform the right intermediate transform. But guess what? Our footage isn't always perfect. Sometimes there's issues in the footage that will push things out of gamut or into negative values and weirdness and things like that, and you might need to tweak it.

01:38:11:16 - 01:38:19:10
Joey
I, I, I love being able to go into camera space to do that, but I will die on the hill that you do not do anything after your output space.

01:38:19:10 - 01:38:41:18
Robbie
I understand that the other the other thing I was going to say about this before and after thing of the transform, which node based applications or approaches a lot allow you to do is that and it's the same thing, honestly, it's the same thing with lookup tables is that those those transforms, even though they're a higher level of math, they're still expecting a certain set of conditions on an input.

01:38:41:18 - 01:39:03:11
Robbie
Right? They're still expecting that more or less, you know, your gray levels, you know, mid-race right about here are more or less, you know, all these, you know, things is these criteria are met. You can create some pretty crappy looking images with the correct transform right? So it does also allow me to go ahead of the transform, massage the image a little bit.

01:39:03:16 - 01:39:15:19
Robbie
So the math of the transform is doing more or less. What a picture. So it's like I have a clip for example that's a couple stops overexposed. It's going to look really terrible after I apply that transform, but.

01:39:15:20 - 01:39:18:03
Joey
It transforms expecting it to be exposed correctly.

01:39:18:06 - 01:39:38:15
Robbie
Right. And chances are you could probably recover some of that detail because of floating point and some of the things that you spoke about earlier. But to me, it's just much easier to go ahead of the transform. Bring that shot down a little bit before it gets to the map of that transform. And now I have the kind of correct which is again, very difficult, impossible to do in a project wide approach.

01:39:38:20 - 01:39:41:21
Robbie
So that's why I just kind of like that flexibility of another base brush.

01:39:41:22 - 01:40:10:10
Joey
Yeah. And that brings me to kind of the next thing that I think everybody is going to want to hear about, which is the actual tools we use for grading and what are things like color space aware tools. What are conventional tools that you would use? Do they behave differently in a color manage workflow? Things like that. And I think that's that's it's really important to know what the individual color tools do to the image and how that behaves inside this greater color management workflow.

01:40:10:11 - 01:40:52:17
Joey
Big examples are things like contrast, saturation. We're going to talk about printer lights because that's like everybody hears about printer lights. And I think a lot of people don't understand printer lights. Yeah. But you know, when you have tools that are known as color space aware, that just means that the input and output of what that tool is changing knows what color space it's working in and tries to tailor itself to that color space, as in, for example, if you use the HDR tools in DaVinci resolve and you set the color space on the transform to Rec 7 or 9 when you're working in log, see, as you're working space or as a key

01:40:52:17 - 01:41:17:09
Joey
and you're working space, what it considers to be highlights and shadows are going to be wildly wrong. And you would need to adjust those ranges manually. So color space aware tools can be really, really useful because they're basically pre setting where their controls start and finish their adjustment to the image to match your working space. Now contrast in printer lights.

01:41:17:11 - 01:41:27:00
Joey
This is where I think a lot of people go really, really, really wrong. And this is this is also kind of one of my other goals.

01:41:27:02 - 01:42:06:04
Robbie
I want to I want to preface something because I don't think, I mean, yes, it's wrong in the way that they think it works, but I don't I don't want to blame these people because I do think that, like any industry, there's a little bit of hero worship that goes on and the emulation of workflows. Right. And so I think what you're I because I think I know what you're about to say, part of the problem here is that, a lot of people emulate what they see from higher end colorists who are willing to share some of their workflows, but not really guaranteeing the entirety of what their process looks like in their workflow.

01:42:06:04 - 01:42:21:06
Robbie
So, you know, you might see an A-list, A-list color is going, oh man, I never use lift gamma gain. I never use any of these tools. I'm just printer points and everything. And voila, I won an Academy Award, right? What they're forgetting to tell you is what drove.

01:42:21:08 - 01:42:44:22
Joey
The entire color science team that's building their color management pipeline, right? Right. And, with this, I'm one of the people that tells you, hey, use printer lights for basically everything. My, if you look at my node tree, it's entirely designed so that my primary grade basically just has to be printer lights because all the work is happening and all the other color management around those printer points.

01:42:44:23 - 01:43:08:04
Joey
But what are printer lights and what is the contrast control. Right. So that's what we need to talk about. Printer lights move the entire channel red, green or blue up and down basically. So your shadows go up, your highlights go up, your mid-tones go up all proportionally. And a lot of people like you said, well here really great colorist who do amazing works.

01:43:08:04 - 01:43:29:15
Joey
So yeah, it was this was like 99% printer lights. And then colors will take their display referred grade and rec 7 or 9 and start doing printer lights and say, why are my shadows hot, pink, polluted and weird? My highlights are all wacky because printer lights were never, ever, ever designed to be worked, not under a transform.

01:43:29:19 - 01:44:02:19
Joey
They were never made to be used on a displayed display referred image. What I mean by that is let's go back in time to the film days again. What are printer lights? Why do we call them printer lights? And whose printing anyway? Right? So when you had negative film, you would project that film with an optical printer onto a print film, and that optical printer had red, green and blue lights to expose the print film based on the negative that was contacted on top of it.

01:44:02:21 - 01:44:27:19
Joey
And if you wanted more red or more green or more blue in the image, you would literally have those lights turned on for more time. When it was doing the optical print. And that was the only real color control that filmmakers had for the longest time. But what a lot of people don't understand, and why I think it's important to mention, is print film has a contrast curve associated with it.

01:44:27:20 - 01:44:32:02
Joey
It has a contrast baked into the chemistry and the.

01:44:32:04 - 01:44:35:07
Robbie
Multi motion layers of the film. Yeah yeah yeah. Totally.

01:44:35:09 - 01:45:00:00
Joey
So those printer points in the film days, we're always working under that kind of S-shaped contrast curve of the print film. And guess what? All of our output transforms usually have a similar kind of s curve for contrast. Yep. And if you use printer lights underneath that in your color manage space, the shadows naturally kind of roll off in a neutral.

01:45:00:00 - 01:45:17:04
Joey
The highlights naturally kind of roll off in a neutral, because that's the way the output curve is working. And printer lights work great. In fact, they work better in a lot of cases than lift gamma gain, because lift gamma gain is doing it based on a curve. And then you've got a curve for your highlights, curve for your shadows.

01:45:17:06 - 01:45:37:02
Joey
That's then happening under your output curve you're double curving, which can get you some weirdness, which is why I also mentioned contrast. The default contrast setting in DaVinci resolve adds an S curve. This looks great and display preferred workflows because you don't end up clipping your shadows or your highlights, but you do that in a color managed workflow.

01:45:37:05 - 01:45:56:15
Joey
Double curve and guess what? You turn that contrast off. You're adding an S curve and then adding another another on top of it. It kind of multiplies. So one of the other things I like to tell people is just go in, turn off, use S curve for contrast. If you're working color management, it'll make it just feel the control will feel and look better in general.

01:45:56:17 - 01:46:11:20
Robbie
Those are all really great points because I think a lot of people with with printer, printer lights, you know, I again, I was teasing teasing earlier when I said this, but like, you know, you look at an A-list colorist, you know, you I, I agree with this whole filament printer points and you want to emulate that not getting similar results.

01:46:11:20 - 01:46:32:06
Robbie
I think that's that's a key, key reason why I think another reason why, by the way, that that bothers bothers people is because I think a lot of people honestly don't realize, that printer lights like how the, the interactivity, the additive nature, works between red, green and blue channels and in, well, in yellow and cyan magenta too.

01:46:32:10 - 01:46:50:01
Robbie
But like, between all these color channels, I don't think they realize, oh, if I add red, I'm, you know, you know what negative red or that's, you know, I'm adding red. I'm taking away from somewhere else in the kind of because remember additive color space, you add all the numbers together, you get white, right, or whatever. So no, it's it's a good point.

01:46:50:01 - 01:47:11:12
Robbie
I think I have one last thing I want to say. Talk about color management, but it's a very tangential thing. Okay. And to be honest, we don't have enough time in today's show to really dive into all the particulars about this, because it is, it is a complete hated subject. What we have said so far to date is we've talked about seen and display referred.

01:47:11:12 - 01:47:32:11
Robbie
We've talked about where in the pipeline this works. Different places you might want to work, different tools you to work. We've talked about a lot. Right. But all of that has assumed to a certain degree that we're working on generally a standardized display of some sort that is, you know, we're piping, baseband video signal into it, you know, HDMI, SDI, whatever.

01:47:32:13 - 01:47:59:09
Robbie
It's going into that and it's the monitor is not the way it is. Well, in the wacky, wild world that we live in, of web delivery and various device delivery, etc., things are not as, simple anymore as just, hey, it's one piece of video and it displays more or less correctly everywhere, right? And the one way that we have to sort of do, we have to get into our lexicon of thinking is, is metadata tagging that is related to color management.

01:47:59:09 - 01:48:25:21
Robbie
And what I mean by that is that no doubt you've heard the I've seen or read the 16.5 billion post on why does my footage look different when I play it in QuickTime player or X, Y, Z, or whatever it is? And part of that reason has to do with the fact that these days, metadata tagging of color spacing, the color space information is vital to a successful display of that content.

01:48:25:21 - 01:48:52:01
Robbie
So in tools like DaVinci resolve, we can tag our files on output, right? So just like I said earlier, we're generally speaking you want your output transform to match up how you're displaying things. Well, generally speaking, when you output a file, whether that be h264 inches, x five, ProRes, etc., we want to tag it to match what our output transform was, how we looked at it while we were grading it and working on the show.

01:48:52:01 - 01:49:15:10
Robbie
So if you're working on a Rec 7 or 9 monitor, we want to tag that file Rec 7 or 9. So various software players and devices and stuff like that go, oh cool. Because guess what? They're doing their own color management pipelines on those devices and on those applications and on those screens. So just like we said before, where we need to tag incoming camera footage, your outputs need to be tagged.

01:49:15:11 - 01:49:20:06
Robbie
Think about it as an input transform, if you will, for that player it needs to be tagged.

01:49:20:06 - 01:49:21:12
Joey
Correctly.

01:49:21:14 - 01:49:42:14
Robbie
To be able to display correctly on that software player or that device. Right. So output transfer. I'm sorry, output tagging is a vital thing for most of us. Your best bet is just to create what's called. And there's there's a certain standardization of this, even though it's very old and antiquated. It needs some updating. And I'll see tags rate this at this, or MCL.

01:49:42:14 - 01:49:43:08
Robbie
I always get that backwards.

01:49:43:11 - 01:49:44:06
Joey
Kelsey.

01:49:44:07 - 01:50:01:18
Robbie
Yeah, these are metadata tags that there's a standardized way. You know, one means this, two means that, three means that, etc. for most of us, we're trying to create 111 files, right. That's a standard rec 7 or 9 file. You might throw in a OD 9 or 16 if you're doing, you know, HDR, working on that kind of thing.

01:50:01:20 - 01:50:15:04
Robbie
But having those tags standardized and understanding what they do is vital, because I see people all the time go, well, it looks different in QuickTime player. Well, that's because QuickTime player is expecting a certain tag, etc., and you can get yourself into a whole again, we don't have time to fully, but.

01:50:15:04 - 01:50:39:19
Joey
This honestly gets easier in HDR because the standard transfer functions are much more standardized. One thing I just want to mention you said 111 tagging. That means Rec 709 across the board. A lot of people get confused about this because they say, well, I'm grading rec 7 or 9 gamma 2.4 on my reference monitor. Yep. The gamma correction factor of a monitor has to do with the ambient lighting of the viewer.

01:50:39:19 - 01:50:42:18
Joey
Right? So in a reference environment you happen.

01:50:42:19 - 01:50:43:03
Robbie
To use.

01:50:43:03 - 01:51:08:23
Joey
2.9 with gamma 2.4 in a dark room reference environment, you do not want to try to tag your file rec 7 or 9 gamma 2.41 because there is not an explicit tag for gamma 2.4. Yep, and two because your viewers might not be watching in a gamma 2.4 environment. In a brighter environment, you're going to be wanting the display to be gamma 2.2 for a computer, for example.

01:51:08:23 - 01:51:32:22
Joey
So what we've found and what I kind of stick with is the best thing to do for SDR. Like we said, HDR, this actually gets easier, right? Because PCU is PCU is PCU. It's absolute everywhere, right? But in Rec 7 or 9 world, the best thing to do, in my opinion, is monitor Rec 7 or 9 gamma 2.4 on a calibrated reference monitor.

01:51:32:23 - 01:51:55:02
Joey
Notice we're not talking about making your UI monitor in the grading software match any of that. Honestly, I don't even know how to make that happen. I keep the UI monitors dim as crap so I don't even have to be distracted by them. Probably some Kentucky windage ways you could make them kind of match, but everything we're talking about is assuming that you're using a calibrated external reference monitor.

01:51:55:04 - 01:52:22:04
Joey
If you're doing that and you're grading gamma 2.4 tag, everything 111, which interestingly and resolve, you just do by setting the output color space to rec 7 or 9 and the output gamma to Rec 709 as well, that will yield A111 tagged file. Even though you are monitoring gamma 2.4, your file won't have an explicit gamma curve assigned to it because again, that depends on the viewing environment.

01:52:22:06 - 01:52:34:18
Robbie
Yeah. And there's a little more to this. I don't want to make this seem like this is the definitive, you know, only way of solving these problems. But you know, because there's there it gets a little more complicated with Apple specific display devices. Yeah.

01:52:34:18 - 01:52:46:23
Joey
People try to make it more complicated and yes, it can be more complicated. But that general guideline for Rec 7 to 9 is what I have found to get the most consistency on the most players on the most.

01:52:47:01 - 01:53:11:16
Robbie
And that's the end. And that's and that's the name of the game is consistency. So yeah, I think no, this is this is really interesting stuff. I mean I again, I think there are a lot of, you know, nuances with some of this stuff. And one thing I think we didn't mention, but it's important to mention is that, remember, so we we went from lookup tables right, to a fully managed pipeline.

01:53:11:17 - 01:53:36:07
Robbie
Right. Even though you might not choose a specific, you might not like, you know, say, hey mom, choose Aces project wide or RCM project wide. It's important to note that in a CST workflow, you can you're still color management, right? Like CSP is. A is a more sophisticated you know, it's not a lot it's not a lot of course it's it's different math.

01:53:36:07 - 01:53:55:09
Robbie
But like, you know, you can you're are essentially color managing when you're using color space transforms in your node tree. And it's important one thing that we didn't mention here, and the reason I brought this back up is because there is sort of a half assed approach to doing this a little bit. Right? And that is, I'll give you an example.

01:53:55:11 - 01:54:17:20
Robbie
I often use CSS. TS went into just a different flavor of something that I know to be a little bit more comfortable for the way that I want the tools to work. Right. So I might not know exactly which version of s-log it was for a Sony shot or, you know, whatever what gamma, you know, give it three setting or whatever.

01:54:17:22 - 01:54:41:20
Robbie
But guess what? I know, I know Ari has, you know, kind of one, 1 or 2 things and I can just use one of those. Right. So I often will transform from, say, S-log three or whatever into Ari and then just do the rest, you know, just the rest of the work that way. So you can use sort of parts of color management to just to get the behavior of your toolset to change a little bit too, which is something.

01:54:41:20 - 01:55:00:15
Joey
No, absolutely. And what you're mixing there essentially is a full color management pipeline, right? If you go if you have a mixture of S-log and RB footage, for example, and you transform all the S-log to RB, then you do all your grades and log C and you just put a log C, direct 7 or 9 or log C to PQ LUT at the end doing the same thing.

01:55:00:15 - 01:55:01:22
Robbie
Yeah. Absolute as soon as.

01:55:02:00 - 01:55:03:23
Joey
It's input intermediate.

01:55:04:01 - 01:55:05:02
Robbie
Output.

01:55:05:04 - 01:55:05:12
Joey
You know.

01:55:05:12 - 01:55:22:21
Robbie
But I think I think a lot of people don't do well. I think a lot of people don't think that way. I think they think that it's, it's it's a half out, as I said, half assed kind of thing. But it is it is a truly managed pipeline. And there's reasons to do that. You might have you might have a whole let's let's just combine the two things.

01:55:22:23 - 01:55:43:01
Robbie
You might have a whole package of lookup tables that you love. Maybe they were developed by a color science team. Maybe you bought them whatever, right? But all of those lookup tables were designed to work in log C, space. Right. So you might go, hey, no, I love these creative Luts. I need to use them on this project, but they're meant for log C.

01:55:43:03 - 01:55:56:07
Robbie
Well, you could get them to work properly. Log C by converting everything into log C, applying a lookup table for that log C thing that you like in your work, you know, on the other side of your tree and you know Bob's your uncle, right?

01:55:56:09 - 01:56:08:10
Joey
That's the one problem. And this is going to this is kind of I'll close with this because I think it's the one of the biggest questions we get about color management is, why can't I use my Luts that I like?

01:56:08:14 - 01:56:13:03
Robbie
Oh, that's a good question because those transforms output transforms are often baked into with the logs.

01:56:13:03 - 01:56:39:01
Joey
Exactly right. Because sometimes the LUT just as a look sometimes the LED is just a technical transform. Most of the Luts that have been circulating around the world in the past, you know, number of years are not log to log Luts with a look built into them. The drop into a color management pipeline. They are a combination of some creative look with an output transform to for example original.

01:56:39:03 - 01:56:39:10
Robbie
Yeah yeah.

01:56:39:10 - 01:56:58:15
Joey
Yeah. Those Luts you could use in a color managed workflow like we're talking about. We're all transforming to what that LUT is expecting. Yep. But you'll never be able to get out of the display space that that LUT is outputting. And there is you know, people have tried to do math to kind of reverse a lot and remove the display transform.

01:56:58:15 - 01:57:19:10
Joey
And intuitively you think that might be something simple to do, but it's really a three dimensional volumetric thing that you cannot mathematically do accurately. In almost all cases, it's basically you can't un bake a cake, right? Once you put that output transform and that look together into this list of you're not.

01:57:19:10 - 01:57:21:00
Robbie
Getting it right. Yeah.

01:57:21:00 - 01:57:56:08
Joey
You're never going to get their constituent ingredients back. And that's something just to be aware of. If you do want to use some of these legacy look based Luts that have transforms built into them, if your project is only ever going to be SDR, great, do that. But if you might think about going to HDR down the road, or you don't want to clip anything on your output and you want to do something a little bit more flexible, it might be worth trying to recreate that LUT with normal grading controls in a node, because, you know, once you once you have that output transform baked into a lot, there's nothing you can do to get

01:57:56:08 - 01:57:56:22
Joey
rid of it.

01:57:57:00 - 01:58:22:11
Robbie
Yeah. Two last things I want to wrap up with is number one, when you I think a lot of people have, integrated oh effects or DCL tools into their workflows because they do a lot of extra things that, you know, native tools and some of these applications don't do or they add some functionality. You know, just be aware that a lot of those tools have color management sections in them.

01:58:22:11 - 01:58:50:00
Robbie
Right? Like the ability to say, okay, well, okay, I need to I need to make sure that this tool is operating in ACS space or in DaVinci white gamma or whatever, so that processing is behaving how you want. That's something that sometimes is just hidden under, you know, a little disclosure triangle or somewhere like that. And and if it's not a color space, kind of a where kind of thing, just tell a developer, I mean that some of that stuff is easier, more easy than what used to be to implement because their standard libraries and things of that.

01:58:50:00 - 01:59:15:19
Robbie
That's number one. And then number two, the last thing I'll say is that the complicated, how should I say this? There are complicated workflows, CGI workflows, animated workflows, you know, those kind of things where it gets it really becomes a mind, you know, my job. But I will say in general that if you are getting confused about this, you're probably doing too much and breaking it.

01:59:15:19 - 01:59:38:10
Robbie
And a case in point is this I see people all the time post things about, well, should I change these 400 things in my options in my CST? Because I'm doing whatever, and my answer is no, unless you know what you're doing for specific and good reasons. Let the auto magical nature of some of these tool sets do their thing, right.

01:59:38:10 - 02:00:10:23
Robbie
So like if you put a KST on a clip, it's going to kind of take stock of, okay, this is your working space, this is what your output like. It's going to kind of make some intelligent decisions for you, not all the time, but some intelligent decisions. And so I would just stop messing with things. So oftentimes because I just find that people who have the biggest complaints about color management are often the people that are tweaking and not knowing what they're doing, which is, it's it's and to be fair, I have no idea what half of those sliders and things mean on some of the transparency either.

02:00:11:05 - 02:00:13:18
Robbie
So I just go in general, right?

02:00:13:20 - 02:00:41:20
Joey
Black magic has done specifically has done an excellent job making the Color Space transform tool automatic. You set the input and output color space and transfer function and anything beyond that, you very likely don't need to change because it'll automatically populate like there's the checkboxes at the bottom for different OTF. So in other different transforms, as you change options and your source and destination, you'll notice those checkboxes automatically turn on and off.

02:00:41:20 - 02:01:00:06
Joey
That's a point of confusion for a lot of people. They don't realize that those options are automatically set based on what you're coming from and where you're going to, and if you want to change those, you really need to understand what you're doing and have a reason for it. That is one reason I think a lot of people go with ACS because ACS doesn't give you that flexibility.

02:01:00:07 - 02:01:06:05
Joey
ACS has a list of inputs and a list of outputs, and everything else is under the hood.

02:01:06:07 - 02:01:36:05
Robbie
Yeah. And I do think that the last the last piece of advice that I have for, for the tweakers out there is that it would be to get involved with, I mean, so you can't really get involved with, you know, the resolve development team or the baseline development team other than giving them, a feature request. But open source systems like ACS, you certainly can if you if you would like to contribute to you know, there's I'm thinking of, our friend Nick Shaw, for example, who's an incredible color scientist.

02:01:36:07 - 02:01:53:11
Robbie
He contributes all the time to the ACS, the ACS platform of, hey, this is how this should work. This is how you know, that should work. And so there is a certain level of trick ability on some of the open source platforms like ACS. You know, if you wanted to make your own idt's or your own oddities like, that is possible.

02:01:53:13 - 02:02:00:20
Robbie
But generally speaking, if you find yourself getting more complicated than your, you know, your guts telling you, you're probably more complicated than you should be.

02:02:00:20 - 02:02:04:05
Joey
Yeah. If it's too hard, you're probably doing something wrong.

02:02:04:07 - 02:02:20:09
Robbie
Very good. Joey, this has been an exceptionally good and fun talk. We covered a lot of ground here. Of course. For our viewers, if there's anything that doesn't make sense. You want clarification? Just let us know wherever you find this. And to that end, remember, you can always find episodes of the offset podcast on YouTube.

02:02:20:09 - 02:02:42:20
Robbie
You can find them just by searching for the offset podcast. Or you can use our YouTube handle, which is, at the offset pod. At the offset pod is where we are on YouTube. And of course, you can always find us on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Again, searching for the, for the offset podcast. And oh, actually, the last thing I want to say about this is that a lot of people aren't aware we've been doing this for, what, about nine months or so?

02:02:42:20 - 02:03:01:15
Robbie
Every two weeks for about nine months. It's been going it's been a lot of fun, but we can always use some more ideas. And if you have an idea for the show, you can actually we have a website for the show just, offset podcast.com offset podcast.com. There's no THE its just offset podcast.com. And then you can click on the Submit an Idea button at the top of that page.

02:03:01:17 - 02:03:20:14
Robbie
That comes right to our right to us. And we'll consider it for an idea for a future show. So if you have some ideas, please let us know. And of course, wherever you find this podcast, like and subscribe. That always, goes a long way. Big thanks to Stella, our editor, and big thanks to Flanders Scientific, as always, for being an amazing sponsor.

02:03:20:16 - 02:03:26:04
Robbie
So, Joey, that was good stuff, man. So for the offset podcast, I'm Robbie Carman.

02:03:26:06 - 02:03:27:20
Joey
And I'm Joey D’Anna. Thanks for watching.