COLOUR MANAGEMENT GEAR
R E P O R T
STUDY UP Mustafa Morad hosts a webinar on the Datacolor Spyder Checkr Video (below)
COLOUR MANAGEMENT IN FILM: ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT? We delve into the findings of a survey and webinar produced by Datacolor
D atacolor, a producer of colour management solutions, recently hosted a webinar in support of its Spyder Checkr Video (reviewed in our November issue), inviting top- class speakers from the film and video production industry to weigh in on how colour management can be improved. Held in Germany, participants included Datacolor product expert Boris Bergmann, Marco Schreiber (colourist, cameraman and DaVinci Resolve trainer), Roland Sauer (editor in chief of VIDEOAKTIV ), Mustafa Morad (videographer, photographer and Canon Academy trainer), as well as Sam Nash (photographer and videographer). As part of the event, Datacolor surveyed 625 people (divided into around 30% professionals and 70% amateur videographers) to gain insights. One point of discussion concerned the number of camera systems used in a film project. Given that different camera systems are usually associated with different colour characteristics, this inevitably increases the time required for colour matching footage material. If a variety of lenses are also used, this means even more work. Just 25% of all respondents stated that they only use one camera system – with the rest regularly employing multiple systems – which means that this issue is relevant to the majority of both professional and amateur videographers. Also interesting were the responses to the follow-up question of how the participants colour match footage material: 60% perform their colour matching purely visually by eye, 12% work with LUTs and 28% use colour reference cards. Given that visual matching is only ever an estimated approximation – and not a metrological process – this approach can lead to the colour tonality changing over the length of the final film, in which countless clips are generally used. A professionalised workflow, on the other hand, simply means comparing the complete footage material with a colour chart, then cutting the film and carrying out the desired colour grading.
In one webinar, participants were asked how often they use automatic white-balancing: 56% stated they always do this, 39% sometimes use automatic white-balance and the remaining 6% do not attach any importance to it. The high percentage of those who carry out automatic white-balancing is undoubtedly due to the skew towards hobbyists in the survey participants; a professional is unlikely to do this. Automatic white-balancing calculates the colour temperature on the basis of the available image information, without the aid of reference colours based on a standard. If you rotate the camera around its own axis during automatic
Further information is available at datacolor.com , where you can also get the lowdown on Spyder Checkr Video, Datacolor’s new colour reference tool for videographers the majority answered that they would film with standard settings. Only 23% or 14% work with log or in Raw video mode, respectively. This survey is not wholly representative, of course, but gives a flavour – indicating that colour reference cards are still far from an everyday tool for videographers in the amateur, and partly in the professional, sector. white-balance, the image will change smoothly from a colder tone to a warmer tone (and vice versa). When asked ‘how do you shoot?’,
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