Congratulations to Allen Hughes and the Dear Mama team on their well-deserved recognition. I am crossing my fingers for an Emmy win on the day!
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/2023-emmys-nominations-nominees-list-1235533766/
The team and I just finished up this documentary on the last 100 years of my favorite studio. I might be slightly biased, but I really enjoyed the piece and learned a ton about where I work. You can check out the trailer below and see it on Max May 25th. The stuff dreams are made of.
This was an ACES project mastered in Rec.2020 at 1000 nits. The Dolby system was used to create the 48nit theatrical version playing at the Cannes film festival and the 100nit 709 version that sourced the trailer above.
Well, if you are my age and grew up in the ’90s, you listened to Tupac. Even all of us white boys from Camarillo knew every word to every song. His music really was the soundtrack to the last decade of the millennium and my youth.
Tonight is the final installment of “Dear Mama.” FX’s most-watched unscripted show.
Perfect for a Mother’s Day weekend! Please go check it out on FX tonight or streaming on Hulu.
Allen Hughes directed this insightful docuseries. Fitting because Allen and his brother directed Tupac’s early music videos. Sure, there was a bit of drama, but that adds to the flavor of the story. That connection to the material made Hughes the quintessential choice for captaining this ship. Tupac wasn’t any one thing; more like an eclectic stew of many influences and identities. One thing is for sure. Dude was thug life for real.
Cognac hues or Hughes as it were
Allen was clear on the look and vibe he wanted for the series. Cognac was the word. We spent a couple of weeks developing a look that feels like you have filtered the light through a fine liquor. We also used Live Grain to achieve that end-of-the-film-era perfect Kodak grain structure of the 90s.
Documentary grading is an entirely different beast. Here are a few tips for you to tackle your next interview-based production.
Color management - I preach this a lot, but even more critical with many different sources.
Sounds basic, but group your interviews.
Normalize the frame rate upfront.
AI up-rez is like salt; a little is good, but too much ruins the dish. Don’t be afraid to let some pictures just look old.
Build a KEM reel of all interview setups. Having the A and B cam shots together in the timeline will help you reference grades quickly.
The first step was look development. Allen had already shot some of the interviews we used to refine the look. I built an LMT that had the cognac golden vibe. I used that look and the ACES standard outputs to create a 709 LUT for Avid media creation. Eric DeAzevedo was the operator responsible for many terabytes of dailies. We also normalized all the archival footage to 23.98 during the dailies step. Cortex was used to make the mxf files and bins. We had to double-hop to render in LiveGrain since it wasn’t supported in Cortex at the time.
Early on, we were still in the late stages of the COVID lockdown. I built a reel of every interview setup and had a ClearView session with Hughes and Josh Garcia (Producer). This scene was super critical to our success going forward. It set the bible for the show's look and ensured that Allen’s vision was consistent through the many days of shooting. At the start of each episode, I applied our base settings using a “Fuzzy” match. (yes, that is a real Baselight thing.) Basically, “Fuzzy” is a setting that allows the machine to match grades presumed to be from the same camera roll rather than a timecode approach. This put all the interviews 90% of the way there from the get-go. The next step was to sort the timeline by clip name and time of day. I would then work through a pass where I would track the shapes and balance out any inconsistencies in lighting as the sun hung lower throughout the day. The archival footage didn’t have as graceful of a strategy applied. Each shot was its own battle as the quality differed from source to source. My main goal was to ensure that it was cohesive and told the story Allen was crafting.
The first deliverable out of the gate was a theatrical version for the Toronto International Film Festival. I graded in ACES cc going out to PQ 1000nits. Then that was run through the DoVi analysis, and a P3D65 48nit version was trimmed. Finally, we applied a P3D65 to XYZ lut on the output render to create the DCDM.
The biggest challenge of this show was keeping up with editorial. As you can imagine, documentary storytelling is honed in the edit bay. The edit was constantly being updated as shots were cleared or discovered. Back at my shop, Leo Ferrini would constantly update my project to chase editorial. Multi-Paste (Remote Grades for our Resolve friends) was clutch in this situation. We took the old grades and copied them across. Leo would categorize the new material so I could sort the scene for the changes. The timelines constantly evolved and took shape until we got Allen in for the final grade. Allen has a great eye and religiously kept us in the world he had envisioned. We paid particular attention to eye-trace and ensured the information from each visual told a straightforward story without distraction. Next was a pass of Dolby trimming to take the approved PQ to 709. We would send that 709 file to Allen and get notes before creating the final IMF for delivery.
A super big thanks to Paul Lavoie for managing this one. There were many moving parts on this production but thanks to him, I rarely felt it. It’s a blessing to have a partner that doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty even though he’s one of the suits😜.
Be sure to check out this killer doc about one of our generation’s most prolific artists, told through Hughes's equally unparalleled artistic voice. Allen is a true master of many formats but has solidified his place as one of the best documentarians. Thanks for taking the time to peek behind the curtain, and let me know what you think.
Here are some more before and afters. Mellow yella’ Dan Muscarella would have been proud.
I was recently interviewed for an article on the power of color. The questions were very thought-provoking, and some topics I hadn’t thought about in years. I think it’s always a good practice to periodically approach the profession with a kindergarten mindset, ask the important “why’s”, and question or reaffirm first principles.
You can check out the article here and see the complete list of questions and my responses below.
Hopefully, this helps my fellow hue benders out there. Let me know if you disagree with anything in the comments. I always appreciate new ways of looking at things.
John Daro is a Lead Digital Intermediate (DI) colourist at Warner Post Production Creative Services, a division of Warner Media. He has supervised the finishing and grading of many feature films, television pilots, commercials, and music videos for clients, including all the major studios, in addition to independent productions.
Daro started his career at the film lab FotoKem. His first notable achievement was architecting a direct-to-disk dailies pipeline. From that role, he moved on to film scanning-recording and, with the DI process's creation, his current position as a finishing colourist. His past jobs gave him a mastery over colour transforms, and he started to couple those strengths with the art of cinematography. He continued to pioneer post-production techniques, including 3D conversion and the early days of HDR imaging. As a founding team member of their digital film services department, he helped FotoKem achieve its status as one of the premier post houses in the film and television post-production industry.
In this interview, Daro talks to us about how colour can be used to shape an audience’s interpretation of a film and provides examples of how he’s used colour to help communicate a narrative in the past.
How do you think colour shapes the way audiences perceive film?
It's funny that you asked how colour shapes the audience's perception because, in a way, the colour process is literally “shaping” what we want you to see and what we don't. At its most basic, colour finishing is the process of highlighting and subduing certain key areas which directs the viewer’s attention to where the filmmakers intended. Before digital colour grading, cinematographers highlighted these key areas through shadow, light, depth of field and lens effects. Photochemical timing changes were limited to colour and density. Nowadays, the sky's the limit with shapes, articulate roto masks and matte channels. Ultimately, the end goal of all these tools is to make it feel natural and true to the story and highlight key moments necessary for the viewer to absorb the supporting narrative. It's an old cliche, but a picture tells a thousand words.
How have you used colour to communicate with an audience?
A couple of examples that popped into my mind involve using dynamics to simulate coming out of a bright area. I think I used this technique most effectively in Laika’s The Boxtrolls. When Eggs, the film’s protagonist, came out of the sewer for the first time, we applied a dynamic luminance adjustment to simulate what your eyes would do when adjusting to a bright light coming from the darkness.
Another example is Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, where colour choices define geographical location to help the viewer know where they were without needing additional information. I also used this technique in Natalie Portman’s adaptation of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness. For this film, we were dipping through memories and a fantasy world. Colour choices defined the real world versus the world inside the character’s head.
Can you talk us through your involvement in choosing and implementing a colour palette for a specific scene/film?
So many of these decisions are decided upfront through lighting, production design and wardrobe. It's always a pleasure to be brought in on a project early enough to have been part of those conversations and understand the motivation behind the choices. I feel there's great value for everybody to be on the same page and know how specific colours on the set will render in the final output.
Look development can have many muses. A style guide, concept art and a reference deck are great tools. I like to start by picking two or three key colours that are important to the story, symbolize a character, or represent a message. Then the objective is to find the best way to shift and enhance to make a split complementary palette. Contrast and simplicity are at the heart of the finest design in my opinion.
Do you think colour is the backbone of emotion in film?
I don't think so, no. I think sound is. Smell would be even more evocative, but luckily for the Jackass movies, smell-o-vision didn't catch on!
I prefer to grade with the latest mix. It's the sum of all the parts that make a great cinematic symphony. Colour and sound must be playing in concert, similar in tone or in contrast but always together.
I think that kind of sensory feeling might be ingrained in our DNA. Whenever I hear the opening to Peter and the Wolf, I visualize spring greens. It doesn't work the other way, however. I don't hear Peter and the Wolf every time I see green. Colour must be taken in context. Green can make you feel safe and calm like a lush field of grass blowing in the wind does. At the same time, it can evoke feelings of jealousy or sickness. It all depends on context and the motivation behind the story being told.
How do you know when a specific colour scheme does or doesn’t work?
There are a few academic reasons I could give you. For example, certain colours clash with other colours. Certain colour harmonies are not particularly pretty, but that doesn't mean that you can't use those mismatches. Especially if what you're going for is to make the viewer uncomfortable or uneasy. Colour is subjective; balance is not.
Ultimately, the real answer is feeling it in your gut. You know when it’s right. I have an internal rule when taking my passes. The reel is done when I can watch it down and have less than three tweaks to make. You are never really finished. Most often, you just run out of time.
How do you work with the director and cinematographer to achieve a specific look in a film?
I first watch a rough cut or read the script and get an idea of the story. Next, I take camera tests and start to build a basic look. The goal with this V1 transform is to find something that works for the cinematographer and gets them repeated results in different lighting conditions. Obviously, it should also have an aesthetically pleasing visual component. It's important when building a look to ensure that the camera still behaves as expected regarding sensitivity and dynamic range. You don’t want to bake anything that could hamper the original photography. Essentially, make sure mid-grey still maps to mid-grey.
Once we have dailies, the process begins again, where I might have a V2, V3, or V4 version of the look that we're going for. I put those in a still gallery on a server for remote viewing, and we constantly update the conversation forum page with feedback from the creatives. I maintain before and afters of all versions to ensure we improve and never go backwards creatively. The last step is to ensure that the look works for the story once the film is assembled. Tweaks are made to the show look and certain scenes get special treatments for effect.
CDLs are a vital part of this process as well. Grading your dailies is very important for ensuring that there are no surprises when everyone gets to the DI theatre. I've had past experiences where producers see something that has the final grade, but it's too far of a departure from what the look was in editorial. To combat this reaction, we always want to ensure that the look is consistently maintained from the first shot out of the camera through to the final finish.
How can colour set the tone for a scene?
To set the tone, it's all about warmer, colder, brighter, or darker. As I've already touched on, it's really important to pick a few colours that you want to enhance and then let the background support that enhancement, whether through a complimentary value or making it recede. They're also the obvious washes that you can do. For example, if you make a scene very red, the warmth invokes a sense of romance or love. It can also yield a literal hot vibe. Something very cold, very desaturated invokes a sense of bleakness or a dystopian feeling. Magenta's a weird one because it can be warm and cold at the same time. Depends on the context and how it's used. Green-yellow also functions similarly. It can seem sickly and off, but it can also be romantic and warm, depending on what side of the hue you're on. I don't know where these generalities came from, but they're almost universal at this point. My gut is that human evolution has something to do with it. I think the responses to these colours helped us survive at some point. When I say it’s in our DNA, I do mean just that.
What technical difficulties do you come across with undertaking this critical part of film production?
You can avoid many technical difficulties by ensuring you’re doing no harm to your pixels. The most important thing is that you have a colour-managed pipeline, in that you’re never working on what the film looks like, but rather what the film was captured as. Make sure you’re always working in a photon real-world scene-referred way. At that point, the displays don’t matter as much. They simply target what you’re trying to hit. They can always be adjusted after the fact if there are technical concerns. I always work with soft display-referred transforms that gradually roll off your highs and also have a nice toe in the black. This generally helps cut down on the number of technical issues.
Past that, it's all about keeping your eye on the scopes and ensuring there are no technical glitches in the actual capture or renders like quantization, dead pixels, hits or bad frames. All it takes is an eye for detail and a great QC department.
How does your role as colourist differ when working on animation compared with live action films?
At the core, the two are very similar. The same principles that make a strong image still hold true regardless of how the image was created. Modern render engines are very good at doing what light does. So much so that a lot of DoP buddies of mine are pre-vising lighting setups virtually.
Nowadays, that line is being blurred even further, where some films can be comprised of mostly VFX shots. Many of these setups, especially with the advent of digi doubles, are not very different from a fully animated picture.
Now, if we’re defining a “live-action” shot as being something captured with a camera, and no further manipulation, then the biggest difference comes from the workflow. For example, if you take a live-action setup that has been shot with clouds and maybe some inconsistent lighting situations, your first step is technical colour correction just to balance the shots together. You don't have this problem with animation, but you do have a similar situation where you might have many artists working on the same scene. This can sometimes lead to slight inconsistencies that must be smoothed out.
A huge advantage of CG-originated shots is that they tend to have advanced matte channels. These could be as simple as a matte for the main character or as complicated as depth or normals. These additional tools allow for more complex grades but also increase the time that you spend on each shot.
Can you tell us about your grading suite? What could you not be without while at work?
My grading suite looks like a hot mess. Imagine the Great Wall of monitors. I have two x300s, and two GUI monitors for Baselight, one extra wide LG for what I call my Swiss Army box and an admin computer. The most important display is my Christie 4k projector. I also have an LG C2 to simulate a consumer experience.
The most important machine in my tool set is the Swiss Army box. Essentially, it's a super micro chassis with four a6000s that has every single piece of post-production software that has ever been useful. I also use this box for coding and the development of my own in-house tools. I would consider this machine mission-critical. Second to that, the next most important piece of gear would be an external scope. Your eyes can lie to you, but scopes never do. Software scopes have made huge advancements in recent years. I can't say I use the external one every day, but when you need one, there really isn't a substitute.
How does Baselight aid your role as a colourist?
There's a lot of great software out there and I always say use the right tool for the right job. For most of my jobs, that ends up being Baselight. The reasons are straightforward. Firstly, the colour science in the machine is second to none. Next, I appreciate the simplicity of the interface. When colouring long form, most of what you're doing is manipulating groups of many shots. Baselight makes this very easy to do. The other thing I can't live without is how Baselight organises and categorises. When you get towards the end of the project, things get hectic, and it's very nice to be able to sort and view in any way that a project demands. Often this has to do with missing visual effects or work I need to get to after the session. I use categories and marks so that I always know what the status of a scene is at any given time. This organisation also aids in communication. I can always keep post supervisors up to date with reports. Additionally, my in-house team always knows what needs to be done and what is already completed based on the organisation that we have put in place. I've always felt that Baselight was built by people who do the job of colour – not by committees or nonpracticing theoreticians.
What are you working on now/next?
I’m currently finishing a docuseries directed by Allen Hughes for FX about Tupac Shakur’s life and relationship with his mother called Dear Mama. The interviews have an exciting cognac look that I can’t wait to share. The first part premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was very well received.
Later this month, I will be finishing a feature called Sweetwater. It’s about the story of the first black NBA player, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton. It is a period piece, so a lot of fun in the colour department. We contemplated a black-and-white double X look for the show but ultimately landed on a derivative of an Ektachrome simulation that I had built a while ago. It has a super cool look if I do say so myself.
We are also supporting pre-production and dailies on A Gun on Second Street. This show is shooting on film, which is always pleasurable and exciting. The look for the show is a straightforward Kodak film vibe, expertly lensed by Leo Hinstin.
While we are on the topic of film shows, I’m also supervising the remastering of Superman II (yes, both cuts.) This will be released in early 2023 just in time to get people excited about Michael Shannon’s General Zod in The Flash. Kneel before Zod!
Additionally, my team and I will return to animation early next year for an upcoming Netflix feature. More on that later at www.johndaro.com.
Have you ever needed to convert older standard-definition footage from 29.97i to 23.98p for use in a new project? Resolve is no Alchemist, but it can get the job done in a pinch. Read below for the best practices approach to converting your footage for use in new films or documentaries.
I would recommend creating a new project just for conversions. First up, we will set up the Mastering Settings. Set the timeline resolution to 720x486 NTSC. Are you working in PAL? If so set this to 720x576. All the other steps will be the same, but I will assume you are working with NTSC(North America and Japan) files going forward.
Usually, we work with square pixels with a pixel aspect of 1:1 for HD video and higher. Here we need to change the pixel aspect to conform to the older standard of 0.9:1. Remember when you were young and pushed your face right up against that old Zenith TV set. Perhaps you noticed the RGB rectangles, not squares, that made up the image. The 4:3 standard definition setting accounts for that.
Finally and most importantly, we set the frame rate to 23.976, which is what we want for our output.
At this point simply dragging a clip onto a timeline will result in it being converted to 23.98, but why does it look so steppy and bad? We need to tell Resolve to use high-quality motion estimation. This optical flow setting is the same engine that makes your speed effects look smooth. By setting it on the project page we declare the default method for all time re-mapping to use the highest quality frame interpolation. Including frame rate conversions.
Technically 29.97i has a temporal sample rate of 59.94 half resolution(single field) images per second. Before we take 29.97 to 23.98 we need to take the interlaced half-frames and create whole frames. The setting we can engage is the Neural de-interlace. This setting can be found on the Image Scaling page. This will help with aliasing in your final output.
Now that all the project settings have been set, we are ready to create a timeline. A good double-check to make sure everything is behaving as expected is to do a little math.
First we take the frame rate or our source divided by our target frame rate.
29.97 ➗ 23.976 = 1.25
This result is our retime factor
Next we use that factor multiplied by the number of frames in our converted timeline.
1.25 * 1445 = 1818.75
That result will be the original # of frames from the 29.97 source. If everything checks out, then it’s time to render.
I prefer to render at source resolution and run any upscaling steps downstream. You can totally skip this step by rendering to HD, 4k, or whatever you need.
I would recommend using Davinci’s Super Scale option if you are uprezing at the same time. This option can be accessed via the Clip Attributes... settings in the contextual menu that pops up when you right-click a source clip.
I hope this helps take your dusty old SD video and prepare it for some new life. This is by no means the “best” conversion out there. Alchemist is still my preferred standards conversion platform. Nvidia has also cooked up some amazing open-source tools for manipulating time via its machine vision toolset. All that said, Resolve does an amazing job, besting the highest quality, very expensive hardware from years past. The best part is it’s free.
Happy Grading,
JD
P!nk: All I Know So Far is a documentary that chronicles the artist Pink’s (aka Alecia Moore) 2019s beautiful trama tour. The audience gets an intimate look at what it takes to be a touring global icon while balancing family life. Producer Tom Pellegrini sought out Paul Lavoie and myself to finish this project. I was uniquely qualified having done similar work for Miley Cyrus, Missy Elliott, The Jonas Brothers, and Katy Perry previously. The first step was to get the enormous amount of footage to editor Cindy Mollo and her first assist Mary Chin.
There was over 260 TB of footage that needed to be converted to DNX36 for Avid cutting. The footage consisted of multi-camera live shoots for multiple nights of tour performances. There was also behind-the-scenes footage, and archival clips spanning from Pink’s childhood to the present day. The live show was captured using Sony Venice cameras. All behind-the-scenes footage was shot using Blackmagic Pocket Cinema cameras. Dailies colorist Eric de Azevedo created CDLs to balance the footage underneath the show LUTs for the Venice and BMD cameras. The rec709 archival material stayed rec709 and was simply converted to DNX. It was also at this time that we normalized the frame rate for all sources to 23.98.
I first spoke to Michael Gracey on New Year’s eve 2020 about his vision for the look of the show. I remember this well because since he was in Australia it was already his New Year. He wanted a rock and roll look for the behind-the-scenes material. I presented him with 3 different options. He dug on a riff of 7219 that I created. The main difference from a standard print simulation was a decrease in magenta saturation. We then took that original look and refined it further by introducing a fairly heavy application of LiveGrain. We also developed a Tri-X black and white treatment for when Alicia breaks the fourth wall.
The Venice live show material was pretty straightforward. I used the built-in Baselight T-CAM transform with a couple of small tweaks. First I took the skin tones and hue shifted them away from magenta-red. The second small enhancement was with the blue magentas. I grabbed those vectors and swung them to be more true blue. This made a nice complement of skin tone to blue stage lighting. Other than those two minor corrections it was pretty much stock Venice. The idea there was to have the stage show very vérité. Just as if you were there.
Conversely, I wanted to do the opposite with the behind-the-scenes material. I wanted to show the juxtaposition between Pink the artist and Alicia the mother. To achieve this I removed all the “Pink” from the Blackmagic footage by keying and channel mixing out the magentas.
I wanted to avoid the greens being overpowering with the picture devoid of magenta, so I took the greens and shifted them towards the yellows. In my opinion, this brought back balance to the fairly strong look. This device allowed the story to focus on the two very different sides of Pink’s life.
Pink(literally) when she’s on stage. Alicia when she’s not.
As usual, my right-hand man on this project was the always buttoned up, Leo Ferrini. Having done editorial work on shows like this in the past, I have a great appreciation for the effort that goes into documentary editorial finishing. With all the various formats, sources, colorspaces, and effects there were many plates spinning for him. The conform was done natively in Baselight with some opticals being run through the Avid for an exact match.
The Color grading work began shortly after the looks were set. At the end of my shift each day Leo would export the reel to Australia as an HDR10 ProresXQ QuickTime. Michael reviewed while we were sleeping and would send back notes for my morning. Michael is a great communicator and would send notes back a couple of different ways. We used project files with markers if the notes were straightforward. This was great because I could jump from mark to mark hitting the notes as I went. Very efficient! The other note tool we used was video. He would send me clips of what he was looking for. This was sort of like an offline CineSync. It was a great way to convey complicated ideas that a standard text note couldn’t.
Towards the end of the process, once a lot of heavy lifting and the Dolby trim was done, we started to use ClearView for interactive remote sessions. We sent hard drives with H.265s and ProresXQs for Pink’s notes and creative input. We then started mastering once all the creative choices had been locked.
The deliverables for Amazon fall under the standard deliverables that I recommend for every show.
UHD Graded P3D65 PQ 16bit tiff files with textless sections
Unmatted and ungraded working resolution and colorspace archival export
Dolby XML
ProresXQ HDR and SDR
Thanks for reading! As always a big thanks to the entire Warner Bros. Post Production Creative services team. This is one of those projects that benefited greatly from having sound and picture in a one-stop-shop. Now go check it out on Amazon Prime Video and let me know what you think.
The trailer for the latest documentary I graded dropped yesterday. Check it out on Amazon Prime Video May 21st!
