Re: Goodbye apple color hello davinci resolve for mac for $ 995

"I honestly can't believe that you can 'color correct' a 60 minute realty show in apple color in 10 hours., do you count/ charge any prep work in final cut and render time? As great as some of us are – an average show will have more then 1000-1200 shots per episode , so we are talking on about 30 seconds per shot – how much 'correction' you can do in 30 seconds?"

Well I have done at least 60 1hr shows in a 10 hour day, all on Apple Color. I have done at least twice that number of 30 min shows in approx half the time.

A few things.

The first dozen or so shows I did took 2-3 days, but the budget and ultimate requirements by my clients were to achieve the result in 1 day - which is how long the DaVinci tape to tape grading on these same shows had been taking in the past. It's not impossible, it's standard for cable shows in the USA anyways.

The prep is done previously by an online editor - I receive the show ready to go. It would generally take just as long to prep and complete output to digibeta or HDCam and prepare EDL etc as it does to prep a show for FCP-Color round trip, so this process is a wash in terms of Color vs DaVinci tape to tape in my view.

The rendering is handled by a render station. I split the show up into 4-6 parts and start rendering on the render station as soon as Part 1 is done. By the end of 10 hours there is usually only an hour or so of rendering left to be done.

I use a control surface - I don't believe it would be possible to do this in this time without one.

Most of these shows include a number of interviews that are repeated throughout the show, so once you setup and save the interview grades, they get reused many times - I've never counted, but would guess these account for 100-200 shots in a typical show. Many scenes involve 2-4 cameras in one location and basically you make and save a grade for each camera and reuse these over and over - just tweaking a little for each instance when necessary. All this means that "30 secs" for each shot isn't really accurate - I might spend a few minutes setting up some of the saved grades, but then only a few seconds applying them to each of 20 or 30 instances in a scene or show.

This kind of work accounts for about half of what I do and it's certainly not my favorite stuff - the quality of the footage I have to work with varies, and some of it is very bad - in one day I can make it look a lot better, but it's still often looks crappy - if the source footage is way overexposed and not white balanced correctly DVCProHD, there is only so much I can do..... However some of the shows are shot pretty well, considering moderate budgets and technical contraints and end up looking quite good.

About 25% of my work is shortform like TV ads and music videos, where I have spent 10 hours on one 30 second ad on several occasions. This is really different - multiple keyframes secondaries, many subtle tweaks etc etc.

The other 25% is a mixture of all sorts of things - low budget indie features and docos mostly. These I spend more time than the reality stuff, although I usually don't get paid as much, but not as long per second of footage as the shortform.

Anyway, I am not telling any lies here....just relating my experience....



PW

Do not use Color unless you have a compatible video I/O device and broadcast monitor.