Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 272

Neal Kassner
Neal Kassner's first brush with fame was in college when he lit the audition reel for his
classmate, Al Roker, while they attended Oswego State University in upstate New York
together. After college, he worked on Richard Donner's Superman and Milos Forman's Hair.
Eventually, he was hired at ABC Television, where he matched multicamera shoots for
shows like World News Tonight and Nightline. He also worked on the soaps All My Children
and One Life to Live in addition to providing fill-in roadwork on Monday Night Football.
In 1981, he joined CBS Television and worked for 14 years as a video operator and
technical director. That was when he began building towards a career in color correction,
starting in 1995 with Eye to Eye with Connie Chung and documentaries for CBS Reports.
He also graded for Public Eye with Bryant Gumble before starting work on 48 Hours,
where he's been ever since.
Kassner has also graded recap shows for Survivor, America's Next Top Model, and
Jericho.
Kassner qualifies the face with a red color pick and a vignette before
he rolls the midtone trackball away from red. “I just want to make his face
look a little tanner” ( Figures 7.12 and 7.13 ).
Kassner continues with a helpful tip: “I do a lot of switching between
graded and ungraded. It helps you just see where you're at. Some peo-
ple like to use a split screen. I find that that is not helpful to me. Because
of my training as a video camera tech, you didn't have a split screen
capability. You had a switcher that allowed you to cut back and forth
between cameras. The quicker you cut, the more you could see a differ-
ence between the two and that's the way I grew up learning, so that's
what I do here.”
I do a lot of switching between graded and ungraded. It helps you
just see where you're at. Some people like to use a split screen.
- Neal Kassner, 48 Hours
I ask Level 3 colorist Larry Field to take the same image in a differ-
ent direction: more “straight sitcom.” “Well, to do that, I'd defer to the
scopes,” begins Field. “Make sure the blacks are balanced. One reason I
like at least one of my parade scopes expanded out is so I can really see
that black balance coupled with the expanded vectorscope. Then the next
thing is to neutralize the shirt and white balance and bring his shirt away
from green.” As he pulls the scene towards a proper balance, he seems to
be looking primarily at the zoomed-in vectorscope. “I'm kind of looking
at everything simultaneously. One of the bad things that happened to this