Post Perspective - Color Pipeline: Virtual Roundtable

Here is a Q&A I was recently included in. Check out the full article here at postperspective.com

Warner Bros. Post Creative Services Colorist John Daro

My mission control station at HQ

Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services is a post house on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. “We specialize in feature films and high-end episodic projects, with picture and sound finishing under one roof. We also have editorial space and visual effects offices just one building over, so we truly are a one-stop shop for post.” 

What does your setup look like tools-wise?


I have been a devotee of FilmLight’s Baselight for the past five years. It is the beating heart of my DI theater, where I project images onto a 4K Christie projector and monitor them on two Sony X300s. For that “at-home” consumer experience, I also have a Sony A95K.

Although I spend 90% of my time on Baselight, there are a few other post-software necessities for my craft. I call my machine the “Swiss army box,” a Supermicro chassis with four Nvidia A6000s. I use this machine to run Resolve, Mistika, Photoshop, and Nuke. It also makes a fine dev box for my custom Python tools.

I always say, “It’s not the sword; it’s the samurai.” Use the right tool for the right job, but if you don’t have the right tool, then use what you’ve got.

Do you work in the cloud? If so, can you describe that workflow and the benefits?


Not really. For security reasons, our workstations are air-gapped and disconnected from the outside world. All media flows through our IO department. However, one cloud tool I do use is Frame.io, especially for the exchange of notes back and forth. I really like how everything is integrated into the timeline. It’s a super-efficient way to collaborate. In addition to those media uploads, the IO team also archives finished projects and raw scans to the cloud.

I do think cloud workflows are gaining steam, and I definitely have my eye on the space. I can envision a future where we send a calibrated Sony X3110 to a client and then use Baselight in the cloud to send JPEG XS straight to the display for remote approvals. It’s a pretty slick workflow, and it also gets us away from needing the big iron to live on-prem.

Working this way takes geography out of the equation too. I would love to work from anywhere on the planet. Bring on the Tiki drinks with the little umbrellas somewhere in the tropics with a laptop and a Mini Panel. All joking aside, it does open the talent pool to the entire world. You will be able to get the best artists regardless of their location. That’s an exciting prospect, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for this new way of looking at post.

Do you often create LUTs for a project? How does that help?


I mostly work with curves and functions to do my transforms, but when on-set or editorial needs a preview of what the look will be in the room, I do bake LUTs out. They are especially critical for visual effects reviews and dailies creation.

There’s a film project that I’m working on right now. We’re doing a scan-once workflow on that show to avoid overly handling the negative. Once scanned, there is light CDL grading, and a show LUT is applied to the raw scans to make editorial media. The best looks are the ones that have been developed early and help to maintain consistency throughout the entire workflow. That way, you don’t get any surprises when you get into the final grade. Temp love is a thing… LUTs help you avoid loving the wrong thing.

Do you use AI as part of your daily job? In what way?

Superman II Restoration


I do use a bit of AI in my daily tasks, but it’s the AI that I’ve written myself. Originally, I started trying to make an automated dust-buster for film restoration. I failed miserably at that, but I did learn how to train a neural net, and that led to my first helpful tool.

I used an open-source image library to train an AI up-rezer. Although this is commonplace now, back then, it was scratching an itch that hadn’t been scratched yet. To this day, I do think my up-rezer is truer to the image and less “AI”-feeling than what’s available off the shelf.

After the up-rezer, I wrote Match Grader in 2020, which essentially takes the look and vibe from one shot and applies it to another. I don’t use it for final grading, but it can be very useful in the look-dev process.

Building on what I had learned coding Match Grader, I subsequently developed a process to use machine vision to create a depth channel. This turns your Power Windows from circles and squares into spheres and cubes. It is a very powerful tool for adding atmosphere to images. When these channels are available to me, one of my favorite moves is to desaturate the background while increasing the contrast in the foreground. This adds dimension to your image and helps to draw your eye to the characters where it was intended.

These channels can also aid in stereo compositing, but it’s been a minute since I have had a 3D job cross my desk that wasn’t for VR.

Machine vision segmentation with YOLO. 16fps @4k

Lately, I have been tinkering with an open-source library called YOLO (You Only Look Once.) This software was originally developed for autonomous driving, but I found it useful for what we do in color. Basically, it’s a very fast image segmenter. It returns a track and a matte for what it identifies in the frame. It doesn’t get everything right all the time, but it is very good with people, thankfully. You wouldn’t use these mattes for compositing, but they are great for color, especially when used as a garbage matte to key into.

I have also recently refreshed my AI uprezer. I built in some logic that is somewhat “intelligent” about the source coming in. This way the process is not a one size fits-all operation.

SamurAI Image Restoration

It can auto-detect interlace and cadence now and can perform a general analysis of the quality of the picture. This allowed me to throttle the strength and end up with the perfect amount of enhancement on a case-by-case basis. The new tool is named SamurAI.

If given an example from another show or work of art, what is the best way to emulate that?


It’s good to be inspired, but you never want to be derivative. Often, we take many examples that all have a common theme or feeling and amalgamate them into something new.

That said, sometimes there are projects that do need a literal match. Think film emulation for a period effect. People can approach it in two ways. First — the easiest way, while also being more complicated — is to get a hold of some of the stock you are emulating. Next, you expose it with color and density patches and then develop and measure the strip. If you read enough points, then you can start to interpolate curves from the data.

FilmLight can help with this, and back in my lab days, that is exactly whose software we used. Truelight was essential back in the early days of DI, when the “I” was truly the intermediate digital step between two analog worlds.

The second way I approach this task would be to use my Match Grader software. I can push the look of our references to some of the production footage. Match Grader is a bit of a black box in that it returns a completed graded image but not the recipe for getting there. This means the next step would be to bring it into the color corrector and match it using curves, keys, and scopes. The advantage of doing it this way instead of just matching it to the references is that you are working with the same picture, which makes it easier to align all the values perfectly.

Oh, or you can just use your eyeballs. 😉

Do your workflows include remote monitoring?


Not only do they include it, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when that was the only option. We use all the top solutions for remote sessions, including Streambox, Sohonet ClearView, Colorfront and T-VIPS. The choice really comes down to what the facility on the catching side has and the location of the client. At the moment, my preference is Streambox. It checks all the boxes, from 4K to HDR. For quick approvals, ClearView is great because all we need on the client side is a calibrated iPad Pro.

What film or show or spot resonates with you from a color perspective?


Going back to my formative years, I have always been drawn to the austere beauty of Gattaca. The film’s use of color is simply flawless. Cinematographer Sławomir Idziak is one of my favorites, and he has profoundly influenced my work. I love Gattaca’s early flashbacks, in particular. I have been gravitating in that direction ever since I saw the picture.

Gattaca

Magic Mike

The Sea Beast

You can see a bit of Gattaca‘s influence in my own work on Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike and even a little bit on the animated film The Sea Beast, directed by Chris Williams.

Gattaca

The Sea Beast

I am always looking for new ways to push the boundaries of visual storytelling, and there are a ton of other films that have inspired me, but perhaps that’s a conversation for another time. I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked on projects that I have, and I hope that my work will continue to evolve, inspire and be inspired in the years to come.

Questioning Color

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, Senior Colourist, Warner Bros

    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.