Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 269

film lists into a text file that FinalTouch can read in and then go through the process of
grading for 40, 60, 80 hours depending, while we're doing titles and effects stuff at the
same time. Then we're rendering to video deliverables, and film out and web previews
and trailer all at once instead of having to go through an IP [interpositive] and then video
transfer and downconvert. It saves a lot of money in the end.”
For more on the film's look, check out the sidebar “The Director Speaks: Chasing
Ghosts” in Chapter 8 .

Neal Kassner of CBS also graded this image. “The first thing I want
to do—as my background is in painting cameras—I want to balance the
blacks the white and then the mids. So the first thing I want to do is look
for something dark in the frame—in this case, it's the pants over there on
the left—and I'm going to move the primary color corrector around until
I begin to null it out. Somewhere in there,” he explains, as he works with
the shadow trackball.
“Now his shirt is supposed to be white. If it helps sell the story, I might
leave it a bit greenish. In my normal work, we don't want to see that
green, because it's news and the object is to enhance visual reality with-
out distorting it. So what I'm going to do in that case is to take the green
out of his shirt,” Kassner explains as he uses the highlight trackball to
balance out the shirt.

D e f i n i t i o n
painting cameras:
The act of balancing all of
the cameras in a multicam-
era shoot so that all of the
cameras match. During a
live broadcast, this task
sometimes also requires
making adjustments to the
brightness or iris of the
camera. Sometimes called
“shading cameras.”

Normally what I would do is I have my waveform monitor set to
magnified, and it's an overlaid display, so I can watch the colors null out.
- Neal Kassner, 48 Hours

As he does this, I ask what he's watching. Kassner responds, “I'm watch-
ing the vectorscope, primarily. Normally what I would do is I have my wave-
form monitor set to magnified, and it's an overlaid display, so I can watch
the colors null out. At this point, what I would want to do is cut between
the graded image as it is now and the raw image and see where I am.”
Kassner continues, “So now, what I might want to do as well is—since
there's a lamp in the foreground, that's going to motivate some light in his
face, so I want to brighten things up just a little bit. And this is where Power
Windows [a DaVinci trademarked tool] or a mask would come in handy.”
Kassner goes into secondaries and adds a small soft circle vignette over
the lamp, explaining, “So I'm going to crank down the gain here, to coun-
teract what I did to bring him up. And this obviously is a judgment call as
to how much is too much. Then we go back and forth to the 'before and
after' just to compare the luminance of the lamp.”