Comment by xattt
4 months ago
How much of the colour change is also dependent on the film printer and also film scanner/telecine?
It just seems like there’s a lot of variability in each step to end up with an unintended colour, that will taken as the artist’s intent.
> is also dependent on the film printer
The printers deffo make a difference to colour, but I came from VFX world where we put a macbeth chart in for each shot so we could adjust the colour afterwards. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker) We'd have a whole team working on making sure that colour was accurate.
The scanners we used (northlight) were calibrated a lot so my understanding is that if you scanned the same film twice it was meant to be pixel perfect (We did rescans for various reasons and it supposedly matched up enough to do effects work. but that might have been proxies, ie low resolution scans that were done for speed)
Also the printers should, if they are good match it properly, thats what you're paying them for. I know that we did have a person that calibrated film projectors for colour, but I never asked them _how_ they did it.
For toy story its a bit harder because you are digitising a whole finished movie, you don't have the colour chart in every shot to keep the colour consistent. I know for adverts the telecine people did loads of fiddling to make the colour consistent, but I assumed that was because the spirit 4k was a bit shit.
I never dealt with actual finished prints, because the colourist/DI people sent the finished graded off to someone like Deluxe to print out
Thank you! I would love to know the process of the colour guy. Like how much of it is the same as a chef tasting a dish and realizing it needs x ingredient in the spot.
I recommend interviews with Roger Deakins, like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w56rFxPyZno
Any digitizing is done before color grading.
All steps before try to not affect the color and keep as much dynamic range as possible to give as much leeway as possible for the colorist.
Realistically, for Pixar and Disney (not people with limitwd funds, say), the color grade is much much more relevant to the final color than the specifics of digitizing.