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the average is 3 to 8 hours for a single 30-second spot or a series of spots based on the
same material. Some facilities expect certain output from their colorists, such as 100
shots an hour.
Craig Leffel, of Chicago's Optimus, says that it depends if the corrections are from
tape or server or if the OCN has to actually be racked on the telecine. For film negative,
the average is 4 to 6 shots an hour if there are only a few shots per reel.
Legendary colorist Bob Festa, formerly of R!OT in Santa Monica, says that for spots
he corrects off the telecine, the average is 10 shots an hour. “Unfortunately, in today's
world, I'm still racking up film on a day-by-day basis. Today I was working with dailies
rolls and we had 30 shots in 3 hours basically. So that's pretty much to my formula of
10 shots per hour.” (Most colorists working from telecine have an assistant that threads
up the telecine for them.) In a new interview for this edition of the topic, Festa says that
the majority of his work is spots, and he grades a typical 30-second spot in 3 to 5 hours.
His company, New Hat, also does DI work, which typically takes 40 to 80 hours to grade
a midlevel 2-hour feature film. Festa's company doesn't do TV series regularly, but his
colleagues at his former home, R!OT, generally grade a 30-minute HBO series in about
8 hours.
Pankaj Bajpai, who is also featured throughout this topic, grades top-tier episodic
television at Encore in Hollywood. According to Bajpai, “It depends on the project; it
depends on the budget for the project because you can do an episodic in ten or 14
hours. We average about 16 to 18 hours on an hour long episodic but you can go up
to 25 or 30 hours on a budget. I have done that obviously on a show like Rome where
you're not gonna get it done in 20 hours because every detail is just finessed to the nth
degree so it go 25 to 30 hours. If it's a period drama like Carnivale from HBO, it was a
period drama set in the Dust Bowl era and everything was heavily processed on color,
and we did it in 24 to 26 hours per episode, but it was an enormous amount of work to
create a time and place. In Santa Clarita, they would shoot hills of green for the Dust
Bowl. The reality of it is you have to be able to manage your time, and the way you do
that in my view is that you don't spend a lot of time talking about it, you show options
and find out if this is what they are talking about and then move, you have to constantly
keep moving on and I find that if you get stuck, one thing and people start to obsess
on one frame then you're hosed. So you've gotta keep moving and move in way that
people don't feel rushed. That's the other aspect of coloring. I don't think were talking
as much about color here but about the other aspect of coloring which is important to
know.”
Some of these numbers have changed somewhat over the years, as colorists are
transitioning from a workflow that was originally almost entirely “straight off the tele-
cine” to a current workflow where telecine transfers get transferred “flat” to either a
digital disk recorder, some kind of a server as a file or to a tape format like D5, then the
colorist basically does a tape-to-tape color correction or color corrects from a file. Back
in the day, a rule of thumb for telecine transfers was 1 hour to grade 11 minutes (one
1000-foot 35 mm reel).
D e f i n i t i o n
OCN:
Original Camera
Negative.
racked:
Physically placing
the spool or reel of film on
the telecine and threading it.
telecine:
This is the
machine—or sometimes
used as a description of
the process—that transfers
film to video in real
time. The telecine feeds
the image to the color
correction hardware. I've
heard at least three dif-
ferent pronunciations and
everyone will tell you that
the way they pronounce it
is correct. TELL-uh-sin-ee.
Tell-uh-SEEN. TELL-uh-sin-
uh. Most of the interview-
ees, including Bob Festa,
who's probably been at it
longer than anyone else,
pronounced it “TELL-uh-
sin-ee,” with the heavy
accent on “tell” and a
lesser accent on “sin.” The
other way to transfer film
to video (or data, actually)
is with a film scanner,
which, as of the writing of
this topic, is not real time,
but is getting close.
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