What’s going on everyone! Welcome to another epic video. Today we are going to be talking about what tools a pro colorist uses on every paid job. Now there are two sides to color grading. The technical and the creative sides. The creative goal is to enhance the storytelling. The technical is not only knowing your tools and how and when to use them, but your biggest challenge is time. My go to tools that I use on every professional gig are going to be talked about in this video and it will shave tremendous time for you.

        I am pumped to be sharing these tools with you because it’s really going to help speed up your entire color grading process. Jumping right in, this was shot on Alexa.

Right now our color management settings are just unmanaged.

That’s okay though.

        Building our node tree, we are going to start with five nodes, but we may use less.

Now on our last node, we are going to convert our footage from log to rec.709 using the correct parameters for Arri.

Now since we already have the timeline color space set in our project settings, we don’t need to change those in our CST.

Going to our first node, imagine if the cinematographer is there and says we want to go for a high key look. Usually what you would do is raise up your offset under your primaries. Now the DP would expect for it to change by stops. But unfortunately, right now we are working in a rec.709 color space and the tools we are using are after it was shot. So imagine now that they wanted a horror movie. We would bring down the offset a lot.

So what’s happening here is everything is getting clipped and that info is gone.

        Now to show you how to correctly do this, I am going to show you the first tool I’ve been using a lot. It’s the HDR palette. The difference between this and what we just saw, is that here, we can select our color space and gamma.

What does this mean? It means that now this will behave like you are changing exposure in camera. The exposure meter acts as stops. So bringing it up a full stop, you would type in 1.00 and then it will bring it up a stop.

This is also a lot easier to communicate with the cinematographer too. You can measure the changes by stops. Now if I drop it 2.5 stops, it behaves better. It actually feels like it was shot later in the day.

You can even tell comparing the scopes that doing it with the HDR palette doesn’t clip the scopes.

The HDR method just makes it feel like it was done in camera, not in post.

        Now, again going back to that high key look, we are going to crank up our HDR palette global offset.

        Now moving to our second node, we will use our contrast and pivot to help darken it a bit, but also add some contrast.

Now it gave us good contrast, and popped the skin out, but it gave us a nice, stylized high key look. That was done with our HDR palette offset.

        Now at this point, it leads us into our second tool. The color warper. Now we will compare this to HSL curves since that was the way you’d do what I’m going over before. But it’s a lot easier in the color warper now.

        Take this imaginary situation. The DP says “I want her shorts to be more of a proper yellow and a little bit darker.” Traditionally, you’d go under your curves, in hue vs hue and select the shorts, then swing the hue.

However, this only changes the hue. Now we have to go under hue vs saturation and add more saturation.

Then they want a deeper yellow, so we have to go through hue vs luminance.

Now, despite the results being very clean, it took 3 steps which is too long. As a colorist, you know you’re always fighting against time. So now we are going to be using the color warper. It is way more granular than what we just did. So the first thing we want to do is change the grid from 6 x 6 to a 12 x 12.

At this point, I want to hover over it and click on the shorts. Now here, we can adjust everything all at once.

See how clean that is? Everything sticks and everything is going to look proper. Now let’s work on the sky. Let’s click on the sky and then mess with the parameters.

Now as you can see, we shaved off so many steps with just these two tools. Imagine doing that on the spot with your client, it will take hours off your work, which saves time for your power windows and secondaries. I am going to say it again, I cannot stress how important time is when it comes to color grading. Having these tools over the traditional tools will allow you to spend more time on the creative side of color grading. Remember, work hard, get obsessed and get possessed.

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