[Tig] compositors doing grading

[Marc Wielage]

On 8/4/06 2:45 PM, "Rob Lingelbach" <rob at colorist.org> wrote:

> However, the best colorists often haven't a clue how to grade a shot
> so as to achieve the color separation necessary for separation-based
> compositing.
>------------------------------<snip>------------------------------<

Hey, speak for yourself.  It's not that hard to do.  I'll often "preview" a
hold-out matte just by hitting the highlight button on the daVinci 2K, then
qualifying the vectors so I can make sure the blue or green background is
going to work for the client, and making sure nothing's getting too noisy or
grainy.

The reality, though, is that compositing artists (and the software they use)
are so good these days, they can work with pretty crappy backgrounds and
still pull a usable key.  My experience is that any problems with the
footage is rarely the fault of the colorist; it's the fault of the crew,
when they don't know how to follow all the rules for bluescreen, such as
getting even illumination on the background, keeping the foreground far
enough away from the background that there's no spill, avoiding wrinkles in
the cyc, and so on.

When they get all that stuff right, pulling composites is easy.


--Marc Wielage/Senior Colorist
Technicolor Creative Services
Hollywood, USA

NOTE:  The comments above are strictly mine, and may not necessarily
represent those of my employers.