Color Timing Instruction by Hollywood's Best

Color timing is the art of enhancing the look of motion picture footage. Every frame of every movie you have ever seen has been meticulously tweaked by a color timer. Even such Hollywood notables as Howard the Duck, From Justin to Kelly and the perennial classic Showgirls had the great color timer talents of Dennis McNeill,  Bob Putynkowski and Jim Schurmann, respectively. Money that was better spent than on the writers.

Color timing or grading is mostly a corrective measure. Continuity is lost when a sequence of poorly timed shots are edited together. Imagine beautiful park-like setting with saturated greens a blues. An attractive couple is having a picnic on red and white checked tablecloth. They are truly in love. Now imagine that every time there is a close-up of the hunky lead actor the image is desaturated with heavy, dark shadows. You've just turned a love story into a psychological thriller.

In typical productions, shots in the same sequence may have been captured hours, days, weeks or even months apart from each other. On exterior shoots sunlight can change minute by minute. Other factors that effect the look of a particular shot may include different lighting, exposure, lenses or even cameras. When color timing is done well, shots within an edit become seamless. Like they were literally shot one right after in real time.

The real skill of the color timer is using color treatments to develop a mood for a particular scene. Imagine Pleasantville, Lord of the Rings or Saving Private Ryan without it. With skillful color timing we, as moviegoers, are quite at home in a small black and white town in middle America, a cavern filled with Orcs or a Normandy battlefield.



Speaking of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg's go-to color timer is Dale Grahn. He created the subtle differences in the movie that intensified the battles and lifted the lighter scenes.  His vast filmography is quite impressive and envious. Working on such notable films as Valkyrie, Munich, Bug's Life and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Dale is a giant in the film industry. Wouldn't it be great to intern with Dale for a few months to learn his secrets? His magic? We could turn our footage into visual gold.

Now we can. Dale, working with CrumplePop, has recently developed a color timing tutorial application for the iPad that takes you through all of the tricks and artistry Dale has accumulated over his years in the industry. This app, titled Dale Grahn Color, is available through iTunes and retails for $3.99.

Controls on the app are simple. RGB and CMY sliders and controls for adjusting saturation and density. No trackballs or control points on a response curve.



You learn directly by viewing the 20 video tutorials of Dale working with an image. You can also challenge your skills by matching a shot with a master. There is instant scoring of your tests to see how far you are from master. Pretty cool. You can also upload your own image and time it to your heart's desire then post it for your friends to see.



If you've always wanted to update your color timing skills and hadn't yet found an easier way, Dale Grahn Color is the way to go. It's as easy as pausing Words With Friends on your iPad.

Canon 5D MKII CineStyle Test

Shot on a Canon 5D mkII using the Technicolor CineStyle picture style. I used the log and transfer function in Final Cut Pro 6 to import the footage to Apple ProRes 422 (HQ). After dropping the clips to the timeline I exported the timeline to Apple's Color.

In Color I changed the LUT (look up table) to the CineStyle S Curve I downloaded from Technicolor which dramatically added contrast and chroma. I then tweaked the primary grade for a more vibrant look.

The Trouble with (Apple's) Color

I am a big fan of Apple's Final Cut Pro video editing application. I have used FCP since its first version that I bought installed on a close-out G4 that I bought in 1998. Since then I have bought two other updated versions and a third for work. Since version 5 FCP has come bundled into a "Production Suite". The suite includes FCP, Compressor, Soundtrack, Live Type and Motion.

With FCP version 6 there came a new potentially ground-breaking application bundled with the suite- Color. It is a stand alone color corrector that is touted to rival expensive Black Magic's Da Vinci. This application could possibly revolutionize the way film and high-end video were produced and color corrected.

Problem is... it isn't all that good. Color's UI is still unfamiliar to me after 2 years. It bears no resemblance to other applications with the FCP suite. Navagating it is more like using Shake than FCP. The cool things that Apple has done with other apps within the suite have no relevance to Color.

One thing that really kills me is the lack of an eye dropper color picker to select a point of color for white balance. FCP has one in its Color Corrector filter... why did they not think it was important for Color? Another gripe is the lack of sliders anywhere. Motion, Soundtrack, FCP all make use of sliders. Color uses a scrollable positive numeral that is accurate to six positions after the decimal point. This is probably a hold over from the professional color-grading application that it originated from.

Overall I like the concept of a stand-alone application to tweek/finesse color other than the built in Color Corrector of FCP but Color falls short. I hope in the latest version it is rebuilt to be better than the original.

Cross-Processing Effect

This is a shot of author Pat McManus I shot earlier this spring. I StumbledUpon an online Photoshop CS3 tutorial recreating the Cross-Processing effect. Back in the days of film, chemistry was a big deal. Each individual film stock had precise chemistry and processing recipes that had to be followed to generate the desired look. Occasionally, photographers would have happy mistakes where they followed the wrong recipe for particular emulsion. Colors would shift dramatically, grain would enlarge.

This is my attempt at recreating the effect. I had to tweak the tutorial a little bit . I think it looks like a lot like The Matrix.