Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 280

Fig. 7.27 Kassner's final correction.
Fig. 7.28 Data from the Primary room.
Kassner's Balancing Tricks
One of Neal Kassner's favorite tricks for balancing whites and blacks was developed long before he became a color-
ist. His previous career involved “shading” cameras for multicamera shoots. That practice is similar to color correction
but takes place with multiple live cameras before the shoot—and continues to some extent during the shoot.
Kassner blows up the composite waveform horizontally to five times normal zoom. Then he positions the wave-
form so that he can see an area of the screen that he believes has white or black in it. A composite waveform in
flat pass mode—or YC waveform—not only purely displays luminance values but reflects chroma as well, which is
represented by the excursion of the trace. What does that mean? Well, if the line that represents black or white is
thick, then there's chroma or color in it. If the line is as narrow as you can get it, then the color has been eliminated.
Kassner expounds on this idea with another one of his tricks for balancing shots. “Now here's a cheat that I use
and I don't think anyone else uses it. In the DaVinci, I use a Power Window to isolate the black or white areas of the
picture. So if I make a Power Window and center it over a black area of the picture, I get a truly black area in the
shadows. Then, by repositioning the window to a white area, I can do the same kind of thing. So now I've got a rough