Colorist Comparison – Grading Identical Footage & Comparing Notes

Part 1 – Image evaluation and color grade reveals

Get an inside look at how different Colorist’s work

Welcome to our first Colorist Comparison – my new series on Mixing Light!

In this series, we distribute the same footage to two Contributors, give them the same set of Director’s notes, and after spending no more than 90 minutes grading the sequence, we get together and share the final results.

We hope the result will be a deep dive into colour grading approaches, techniques, and workflows. In our first take on this concept, Kali Bateman and myself share our thoughts and insights for the grade. Patrick Inhofer selected the footage, gave us our creative brief, and joined us in the discussion.

Patrick chose a project from the Film Bakery, an Australian agency that cinematographer Ben Allan ASC operated for many years. His (now defunct) website shared his many early experiences in the digital DSLR revolution. In 2012, Ben released the raw footage to the internet from a television commercial he shot and produced for a charity.

The ‘Loved Ones TVC’ blog post can still be found in the internet archives wayback machine. Although the download is no longer available. Originally graded in Resolve 9, this was a good project to kick off this series. The footage puts lots of restrictions on our workflow and made for an interesting conversation and color grade.

The shots don’t match, and it’s 8-bit, and we’re losing light, and…