Lately I’ve been having to utilize external mattes a lot in commercial work. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re extremely handy and you’ll wonder how life ever existed without them. Although the workflow is fairly simple, it was recently brought to my attention that not many people are aware of the external matte capabilities…
When color grading a piece that has clean plates for VFX it’s essential to do your best to envision the shot as a whole. Hopefully, the framing is locked off and the lighting is controlled. However, that is not always the case. It’s important to know what the VFX capabilities are after your color grade session and to…
A couple of weeks ago I got a Twitter notification from fellow Colorist Dan Diaz asking to do a blog write up on making bids from a Colorist’s perspective. There are a lot of things to take into consideration when trying to put a monitory value on your profession. We all want to work. And…
I recently had the pleasure to work with local photographer/director JJ Miller on a national broadcast campaign for Leslie Pools. JJ managed to capture some really great moments and wanted to create a unique look that would make the commercial stand out from the pack. We decided to go with an Instagram-like look that would help…
Every now and again I have to work in the color suite unsupervised and without client direction. These sessions can prove to be rather challenging at times when trying to showcase your grade and make sure that it is properly monitored and viewed. In this article for Mixing Light I cover a couple of methods…
When grading footage every once in awhile you run into a situation where one of your parameters maxes out. Repeating the process can be a hinderance and take up valuable time in the color suite. This quick 5 minute tutorial with the guys from Mixing Light shows several different ways to duplicate nodes in order…
My third insight for the guys at Mixing Light focuses on grading food and all the nuances that go into making it look as appetizing as it possibly can. Paying close attention to detail and focusing on consistency are critical steps towards nailing the perfect food grade. While every grade is different, there are a…
Hey everyone, my first posting for Mixing Light was an article discussing the preparation involved going into a commercial session. This time around I tried my hand at completing a video tutorial. While my initial attempts were far from good (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the sound of my own voice) I…
I was recently contacted by the guys at MixingLight.com about contributing some material to their awesome website. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mixing Light, it’s a site completely dedicated to color correction that has a ton of videos/articles covering all aspects of grading. In order to have full access to all the…