Author: geoff

I can’t stay quiet anymore, I have to scream!

I’m a member of a number of colour grading groups on the net and they vary from the great, LGG, to the unbelievably bad.
I made a comment a long long time ago that the way to tell who was a dailies colorist was to look for the white stick and the dog.
It seems that now everyone is a colorist and most of the so-called colorists are either color blind, partially sighted or completely blind.
I see examples posted online asking for comments, I have refrained so far.
My only comment would be “go and find an optician!”
Guys, you need to start with a good image. If after loading your work into your software of choice ( usually Resolve) set the workflow to ACES and use the relevant IDT & ODT. If after this your work doesn’t look pretty good you have fucked up the shoot! go and start again.
Great grading has to start with material the colourist can work with, yes a really good colourist can rescue crap work but there are limits.
If you give them good work to start with…
Please notice I am saying that you should give your work to a good colorist, not that you should do it yourself.
If, for whatever reason, you end up doing it yourself then shoot it right and don’t do a lot in grading.

It seems that everyone using grading systems for the first time finds the 11 setting before anything else!

I am so fed up with seeing oversaturated images with crap skin tones and weird contrast. Learn to do it right first. Don’t use the “I am an artist” excuse to cover up bad work.

I must be in an alternative universe, I just can’t believe what I see and hear.

11 years ago I shot a movie digitally, it was shot in HD in true RGB and uncompressed. Each of the 3 sensors had 1920 * 4320 photo-sites that created 3 * 1920 * 1080 images. It was 10 bit log and 4:4:4  generating 447.45 GB per hour.

Now Netflix are specifying that they will only accept “4K” cameras but they’re not 4K,  they’re 2K * 2K in green and 2K * 1K in R&B they’re barely 3K and that gives you with Redcode 5:1 a grand total of 189.10GB per hour. It’s not a problem of Redcode, it’s just it was easy for me to get those figures, all the cameras they accept produce similar data rates.

Now I accept that technology moves on and compression get better but 4 times the resolution and less than half the data! no chance.

The issue is that people making decisions don’t understand what they’re deciding and are swayed by marketing.

The lunatics are truly running the asylum.

This is now the 4th day I’ll be wasting bouncing from support desk to support desk.

It’s never “their problem” it’s always the other guys.

I am in the ludicrous situation of having to go to a public Internet facility to be able to log on to our list server.

My ISP Ziggo says it’s not their problem, it’s a problem with the sites SSL, so why does it only effect me and why only the lists, which are not SSL, and not the main site which is SSL?

Dudobi who run the listserver say it’s all fine.

NetworkSolutions who are the main system provider say it’s all fine.

So if everything if so fine why have our pages listed on Google dropped from 2,500 or more to 94?

Why can’t I get connected to the listserver from home?

Sometimes I just want to pop round and give them a smack, difficult when they’re in the US, UK and Netherlands.

I’ve just received notification from NLPost that they have a parcel for me from Ziggo, I expect it’s the new Modem that I don’t need but id their standard response, change the modem.

Short term it’ll cost a fortune to install fast commercial fibre and install servers here but long-term it may be the only way to keep my sanity!

Why is it in a time of great depression that most of the scripts I get for films made in and about Britain are so profoundly depressing?

I realise that they are an accurate slice of these people’s lives, they reflect current life in the North and Midlands of England.

But the audiences live those lives! they don’t need to see them coming back at them from a big screen.

In the 30’s during the great depression the most successful films were ones that took people out of their depressing and hard real lives and gave them some hope.

Maybe not even hope, maybe just a few hours escape.

Busby Berkeley, the Gold Diggers series and Foot-light Parade, just sheer indulgence and fun.

Producers, Directors, look around, the successful films in the UK are happy ones, Billy Elliott, The Full Monty, 4 Weddings, Bridget Jones.

Are they art? who gives a damn!

They entertain people and make money.

Please send me a happy script…

CML was set up for high-end pro’s and those who aspire to be in that class.
I’ve never worried about offending anyone else.

There are lots of places on the net for cinematographers who don’t care about or maybe just don’t recognise a high quality image.
I never wanted CML to be one of those places.

My recent experiences of working with post people whose whole approach to life was “that’ll do” “good enough” “nobody”ll notice” has caused me to stop and take stock.

I feel that CML has been drifting in that direction.

I realise the political and economic pressures that are on us, believe me!

That doesn’t remove from the fact that if we don’t stand up for image
quality nobody will we are “the guardians of the image” and painful though it might be at times we have to fight that fight.

Answer for yourself a few simple questions, in a world where data size
didn’t matter, where RAW recorders were tiny and cheap, where transfer times were zero, where processing power was vast WOULD YOU EVER SHOOT ANYTHING OTHER THAN RAW?

Of course you wouldn’t because deep down inside you know that compression damages your images.

Next question, bearing in mind the conditions listed above, given a choice
of a system that recorded equal amounts of RGB and one that recorded 50%G and 25%R&B and then guessed what was in the holes that that approach left behind would you ever use anything other than the full RGB system?

Of course you wouldn’t because you know that resolution and colour are
compromised by CFA systems.

Now, given that you would go the quality route every time, why are you being such chickenshits and compromising your images all the time?