Written by Simon Cox, Colourist. (Man in charge of colouring in)

We’ve just finished putting the finishing touches to our colour grading reel, which you can see here.

Grading is something we all get quite excited about here at Oakslade, but it’s often difficult to explain why, but here goes… A question we get asked quite often is: “Why bother?”  The easiest way to answer is to think of all the feelings and emotions that we readily associate with colour. Romance…red? Jealousy…green? Cold…blue?  Heaven…Mila Kunis?   OK, perhaps not the last one, but all the others are examples of how we constantly relate to colour, whether we consciously realise it or not.   Given that these are all common responses, think of the multitude of ways that we react we unconsciously react to colour. How much effort goes into choosing the colour you paint your living room or the colour of your new car? Which is why colour grading your film is important.  Don’t you want to own a TVR just because they come in Felix Chameleon Black?

If you watch your favourite film without sound, it will be a very different experience (providing it’s not a silent movie, of course!) Watch a film without colour and the same rule applies (again, providing your film isn’t black and white - but even then it will have been graded).   So what do we do?

Once a picture lock has been signed off we get to work in our dedicated grading suite (running Apple Color and our super shiny 23″ Vutrix LCD Grading Monitor) to get the most from the images, working on the tonal range and overall contrast until all the shots are equally balanced before moving on to our secondary corrections. These can range from simply improving skin tones and replacing dull, grey skies (a fairly common feature here in the Midlands!) to isolating specific colours and adding stylized looks and moods.

Each sesson with our colourist is specific to the clients brief and helps to achieve a specific ‘look’ to help tell the story. Having an in-house colourist means that not only can we make the changes to your film that you need, but we can can advise you so that even if you’re not sure what you want then we can help you work it out.

Take a look at the reel and see how we can bring your images to life.

Another quick post pointing you toward something interesting. Studio Daily is a web resource for all kinds of production matters, from cutting edge technology to training resources to general production related material, but there was a post on there recently that caught our attention. We’ve waited until now because the responses seem to have petered out at last but it did provoke some interesting debate.

The short version is this “the availability and affordability of high end home editing systems means that the majority of the newest generation of editors don’t know squat about editing”.

The interesting distinction to be made is that it doesn’t say these people can’t edit, rather they don’t know, don’t understand or don’t care about the tricks of the trade, etiquette, useful planning techniques, technical details, traditions, inside-knowledge, trade secrets, workflows, standards, practices, finishing techniques, secret handshakes and (with a raised eyebrow) work ethics and that have built up over the last century.

If you’re an editor its worth a read, regardless of which side of the argument you fall down on. But if you’re not an editor then its absolutely worth a read because it explains the difference between editing and being an editor and demonstrates how hard it is to tell the difference between the two.

The Studio Daily blog is here.

You may have seen that we’ve recently added some new tricks to the box.

In days of yore, TV commercials in the UK were submitted on 1/2″ tape to the clearing house, who’d check the content of your ad to make sure it didn’t break any laws.  You’d then send it off to whoever was dealing with broadcast for you and the edit would be subjected to a series of tests to ensure that the video was within stringent broadcast standards. If you’d distorted some audio or your whites were a bit too bright, the tape would be rejected and you’d be faced with another mammoth round trip.

Fortunately, some lovely people have got together in the past few years and created digital means of submission.  Both the clearance service (in the UK this is Clearcast) and the companies who serve the ads direct to the broadcasters (IMD are one) can now accept ads submitted online.For the quality to be broadcastable, you obviously can’t employ the same compression the guys at YouTube use.  The requirement is for 50Mbps MPEG2 video comprised entirely of I frames - which is to say that the compression encodes every single frame individually, rather than trying to guess at the changes in between key frames.

This format is not easy to encode to with standard tools, which is why when the need arose we plumped for the utterly brilliant Episode Pro which has taken on all encoding duties across the facility.  It’s fast - optimised for our multi-processor Intel Macs - and highly configurable, which is a great boon when involved with the black art of tweaking compressed files for the best quality for the smallest file size.

Not only is the software easy to use, it produces beautiful output - and the first ad we submitted with the system went through its technical checks with flying colours.