Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1382552
49 S U M M E R Q 2 I S S U E T E C H Babinec used Colourlab Ai to propagate those looks across all of the clips within those scenes. "It really made it a lot faster of an experience than trying to rebuild each different shot from scratch," he said. Although Jencks is not using these tools for final color, he sees potential future uses of Colourlab Ai in the dailies process "where we are sometimes pro- cessing a tremendous amount of footage with a tight turn-around," he said. "Any tool which can speed up the routine part of that process and get the dailies colorist more time to study the day's footage, that's a really interesting, exciting idea." Jencks feels that often using a mini- mal toolset in dailies is the best approach — for instance, just using printer lights in a correctly set up color pipeline — so that the dailies colorists or DIT doesn't accidentally impose extra 'flavor,' be- cause to some degree, the dailies serve as a mirror for the cinematographer and the filmmakers, showing the image that's actually being captured. "I like that Colourlab Ai has designed in the ability to limit the tools the system is using and then, also, to see exactly what it has done. If you ripple what it does into Resolve — say for example, printer light adjustments — it's very easy to see what's been done and either use it or not, or tweak it," he says. "They're working on giving the user more control over the type of strategies that the system might be using for its matching. So you could have it match the contrast or just match the color or those types of things." Jencks added, "These tools are really in their infancy. I see a future workflow where cameras record positional data, and lens data, and systems run 3D cam- era tracks in the background, helping to automatically identify wide shots, close ups, tracking shots, and other key features to identify singles, two shots, etc. Machine learning algorithms love data, and the more data we are able to feed them the more useful they become." Interested in exploring Colourlab Ai? Download the Free Trial version, which includes the Colourlab Ai standalone app for macOS, plus Look Designer and Grain- lab plugins for DaVinci Resolve. Note: the only limitations are the export and render options are disabled. Additional video tutorials and reference resources can be found on the Colourlab Ai website in the Support section, or on the Colour- lab Ai YouTube channel. Still not sold on the advantages of artificial intelligence in color grading? Not to worry. Other color grading sys- tems haven't yet taken that leap but are offering some interesting advances in color grading. Colorist Gino Panaro, at SSI Advanced Post in Los Angeles, started his career 29 years ago at Editel/LA , where he advanced from assistant to colorist. "Transferring film was a dream. It was magic to take a film reel and create differ- ent looks. As film transitioned to video, I moved onto learning FilmLight's Base- light, DaVinci Resolve, and Autodesk's Lustre," he said. At SSI, Panaro colors trailers and spots for film campaigns using Film- L i g h t ' s B a s e l i g h t v 5 ( h t t p s : //w w w. SEE PAGE 57 f ilmlight.ltd.uk/products/ baselight / overview_bl.php). "What really drew me into Baselight is how it handles color in a very organic way. From the camera original file to the final render, you have control over the whole process," he said. Since Baselight works with layers, Panaro can set his grade with a base layer and gradually build from there. "Base Grade is a feature that I'm using more every day as a way to get specific and affect certain areas of the image. I can easily find a certain level of highlight, for example, and adjust its intensity and the color," he said. "The Base Grade layer offers a great deal of control over the highlights and deep blacks. It's probably one of the best additions to the software." While working on a recent project in HDR, Panaro's client requested to open up a few very dark scenes in a film trailer to reveal more detail. It seems like a simple task, but Panaro's challenge was to achieve the desired result while not taking away from the original grade. "At first, I used a layer to open the blacks and mid tones. This worked pretty well, but then I remembered that Baselight has a Boost Shadows layer that you can use to get more detail. It gave me the control I needed to get the look the client wanted very fast. I was very impressed with how well this worked," he said. Panaro works as part of a team with other colorists, editors, and sound ed- itors/mixers, so it's important that the color grading system fit nicely with the overall facility workflow. Sharing session seamlessly between two color bays is beneficial on large film campaigns where there's a need to reference and access previous spots and trailers. "In our work- flow, Baselight is bookended by editorial. We import the ungraded edited piece into Baselight, and then export back the graded files for editorial to add titles and audio," he noted. "And while I don't often do visual effects fixes in the color bay, Panaro.