New Doc Grading Project

I’m hitting it hard this week with another grading project. Time is of the essence (isn’t it always?). If you want to know more about the project, watch the trailer below. I’m happy to say that it was shot very, very well much of it by CIY’s in-house video director and another good chunk by FreshDV’s very own Matt Jeppsen. This project also marks of summer of Matt and I working together on this and another project soon to be announced over on FreshDV.

Being that it’s a long-distance grade, the director MD and I have spent a fair bit of time on the phone talking about it, challenge shots, looks and where we both want to go. As usual, it’s a collaborative effort with him laying out the vibe and me throwing out ideas and musing with him. We really didn’t come up with anything solid, but right now, the focus is on a getting a base grade done.

The first challenge is evaluation. He’s in in the midwest and I’m out west. In good fortune he happens to have the same same Panasonic plasma I do, so I’ll be sending him the in-monitor settings to use followed by a 1D LUT to be loaded on to his Decklink card. While I’m monitoring using a 3D calibration LUT, the Decklink is only able to take a 1D so while he won’t be as accurate as me as 1D LUTs don’t control gamut, he won’t be so off as to be unreliable (in this case, over saturated greens). Again, I’m using the Lightspace CMS software to calibrate, generate and convert my calibration LUTs.

The second challenge is in the balancing, there’s several scenes where the ambient light changes quite dramatically so I’ll be focusing my initial efforts there. As I said, most of the shots were very well lit so it’ll be fairly painless to make good time through balancing and matching those.

And before it goes back to him, I’ll be making a second pass and applying a light look to each scene. The film is broken up really well and rather systematically, so it’ll be light work to apply some looks to the various scenes.

Here’s the trailer for Love Costs Everything:

 

 

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