My two cents. If we’re integrating cg into the plates or anything that has to live in the plates and feel part of the original photography then we work on raw or on onelight tech graded plates before the final grade.
The onelight tech grade is to balance exposures and color before vfx. This is not a creative grade, just primaries only and plates are still exported as linear (rec709 or ACES). This helps the artists keep consistency on shots. This is usually our workflow on heavy vfx commercials.
On the other hand if we are adding more graphical type effects on top or editorial type effects with transitions between scenes then we’ll use the final graded footage, in a more traditional flame finishing way. We’ll still work in linear in most cases just with the standard 2.4 gamma adjustment.
We’ve used the BLG process quite a few times and it does work quite well, even on really heavy vfx commercials. Only a limited set of software can read those BLGs though, so your CG artists will not be able to see that stuff live in their viewports, only comp in Nuke or Flame.
For BLGs we usually do two color passes, first pass before vfx to set exposures, color balance and basic windows. During the vfx process we often adjust windows etc on the fly and pass those BLGs back to the colorist with the final vfx. They then do a final pass with our adjustments and anything else that might come up with final vfx.
onelight tech grade we call NeutralGrade and its gets part of the OCIO viewer setup (and dailies encode) as a reversal, so you can “remove” the NeutralGrade in the viewer if you want to, its very nice as you then also have that as a colorspace in a ociotransform in nuke.
Yes, OCIO is the standard in most places I know… for shot work. Usually the color management for neutral grades is closely related to show / sequence / shot / task shell environment variables. The OCIO CDL node can reference neutral grade values set at the the shot/plate level. This can be also set in the OCIO configuration.
I suspect OCIO could be integrated in Flame as and opcional replacement for the Color Management method, as well as individual nodes that can reference timeline metadata like shot and segment naming, for automatic neutral grade implementation and reversal.
Resolve have only partially implemented OCIO as part of the Fusion module, but not really integrated in the color workflow. I believe SCRATCH has a more robust OCIO integration. I am not sure about Baselight but I know OCIO configuration exist to deal with color management of their T-CAM color space.
This is a pretty good intro into the ideas behind working scene reffered , most of it is not specific to aces , aces is just a set of standards that make working like this easier. I show some examples of how to ingest different cameras and some examples of how it makes a difference working scene reffered.
I usually do the grading for my commercials by myself, and in most cases, I do the comping before the grading. However, the workflow might depend on the project and/or the client. I have clients who want to tweak the grade while drinking coffee and eating chocolate in my grading suite and also have clients who request 2 or 3 versions of the grade so they can choose and feel themselves more client in the end.
Colorists – including me – like to use gradients with some crazy masks, and complex colorwork makes it more challenging to do the comping after grading, in my opinion. When I handle shots for VFX, I usually export ProRes 4444 XQ with the shooting camera’s colorspace (for example Arri Log C for Alexa footage) and ask my colleagues to render it the same way after they have done their comping.
But I have almost always some shots that have to be (re)comped after the grading is done. On my last job, the director asked me to send mattes for the drawings I replaced on an envelope in a Christmas commercial. Later that day, he called me and said that the shot looked like shit after the grading. I asked the colorist if he could send me the Resolve project, but he refused because he is using plug-ins I surely don’t own, according to him. So I did my replacement again on the graded footage and set the color levels for the drawing to look more integrated with the envelope.
All in all, my advice is that you start worrying every time the colorist asks for the matte.
My goto trick for QC is to watch the comp on a HDR monitor, you will see any comp mistake insanely fast. ifs ridicolous how obvious this stuff becomes. Its been ny absolute lifehack as a supe.
I see VFX buggered far too often with mattes used in color grading. A typical example is driving comps. Alpha mattes don’t work like operators such as multiply, screen, additive, etc. A matte when used improperly in grading can flat-out destroy the subtlety of a comp.
To me, if a comp is done correctly, no matte is needed.
But this is rarely the case, as clients ask for them, and sometimes they get misused.
its also often production that just wants to push detailed color talks to grading … “oh yea we will provide mattes for that”. They can be useful though, lets say you have rotoed a car, why should the colorist need to track/roto his mattes yet again?
As a colorist I love getting all the mattes, you can prep a session with the mattes and then just own all the things the client wants to change.
But I do agree they are annoying to create and can make things worse - absolutely!
Ive done a lot of fullCG projects where the whole thing is a bit more fluid as the base tonemapping/grade is often developed during lighting and then further defined in comp with a final pass in grading, I try to avoid mattes here, but it takes a good producer to handle all the client comments at the correct time in the pipeline… as clients expect to be able to change everything at all times because its CG.
its so hard to find a place where grading slots in the best way , for fullCG I very much love to grade before grain and lensdistortion is added, then I add all that in flame (comp supe gives me a grain plate and a STmap). that way I can mostly just use the original rendered Cryptomattes and I do t have to denoise before pulling keys etc.
The collest thing here is the BLG workflow though, if properly executed its best of all the worlds although I have never tried…
I can just imagine a world where a colorist uses flame , comp is done in flame, and you can slot in the image node anywhere in the comp where it males the most sense, its another case of … we could have that if this wasnt a peoples business we need colorist XXX he has the most instagram followers and he only uses software XYZ
