Color before VFX? Or VFX before color?

[ace_elliott]

@ace_elliott

…Would love to hear everyone’s Pros and Cons for commercial and also feature work!Artists:Do you like to work on your VFX shots with colored plates? Or do you prefer dailies and then color your comp?Colorists:Do you prefer to color final rendered comps? Or multiple assets for the VFx artist to comp?Why one way or the other?Advantages and disadvantages?

Hey Everyone! I have @eric_mason , @finnjaeger , and @PlaceYourBetts all available for a podcast about this topic this Tuesday 12pmPST/3pmET/7am Aukland/9pm Hamburg!

Send me a DM if you’d like to join this discussion!

[paul_round]

Thats where it helps to have the CC file and LUT downstream so you can see how your comp will most likely look in the grade.
We’ve done a lot of shows with blood lately and sometimes trying the get the correct blood colour through the grade has been quite challenging, but without them could have been very time wasting going back and forth.

[Nick]

Thanks for that info. I have a few more questions.

So in this case, grading is done before VFX, only to supply a LUT to VFX? Any secondary color work like keys or windows wouldn’t transfer into that LUT, as far as I know. The final color still happens afterwards, once the VFX have been finalized. So, the grade is approximate, but close enough?

One would assume that the grade was approved and not subject to big changes at the end of the job. If that were the case, and color was changed significantly, do you get a new LUT and tweak from there? Seems potentially messy in that case.

[paul_round]

Yes, and no. The preliminary grade is done first, but we work on raw plates, but use the CC and LUT files downstream so we can see how it looks with the grade, however one of the downsides of this approach is the ever increasing request for mattes to be embedded within the delivered comps.

[BrittCiampa]

I’ve had clients ask for mattes for smoke or fog elements- ugh. Just, come on, now.

[paul_round]

Yeah, it’s damned annoying. We spend ages getting a really nice, soft key with reflection, dirt on windows etc, and DI complain because the matte isn’t pure black and white. It’s not always possible to create a perfect black and white white when comping GS or BS shots.

[Nick]

It would seem that they could, well, color correct the matte if they needed to punch it up. These things shouldn’t be tailored for color at all.

[ytf]

It seems that what was once a preferred workflow in vfx has now become too much of a good thing. Although I only do short form (spots) It can be a huge timesuck for me to prepare work for another purpose. Add complications, like “more mattes.” only makes it worse.

[paul_round]

Agreed, sometimes creating perfect black and white mattes for many objects in the comp can take longer than the comp itself, purely so they can tweak the colour of every little thing in the shot.
Surely a good colourist should be able to do this with a minimum of alpha channels.