Understanding the Future of Color Grading – Color Gamut

Excellent series, and this last one really spoke to me. It’s about bit-depth for moving forward with gear, yea, now I can see that. Great observation!

As to the vastly increased saturation in shadows and highlight with HDR/wide gamut combinations. One of the biggest “feel” things for
“looking cinematic” has been to decrease sat in deep shadows and highlights because, well, film did. High sat content in shadows especially gets often called “looking digital”.

So … it sounds like the tech is going to just go so far beyond what film could do, that perhaps we’ll stop being so restricted as to what is quality cinema in look? Because you’re absolutely right, film was way more limited than human vision. As the gear gets able to push things clear to the limits of vision … won’t we want that?

If the pursuit of more life-like images also increases the audience’s sense of ‘presence’ using wide color gamut images then yes, that’s where we’ll move. But as we talked about in the movie on frame rates, greater ‘realism’ may decrease an audience’s sense of presence. At least for a time. We may need to wait for culture to catch up before really pushing things.

RE: saturated shadows – I’m going to start a series on the fundamentals of color grading and there will be a section on controlling the colors in your shadows. For very good reasons, black should have no tint unless you are purposefully creating a sense of the unreal. This won’t change in a Wide Color Gamut world.

When can we expect in Mixing Light HDR Color grading Setup,color timing and deliverables using Resolve?

And especially SDR trims and delivery!