Shot Matching – Learning Through A Commercial Case Study

Hi Dan,

Really good insight and excellent result. I reckon you spent around 10 hours on this one.

I’d guess around 3 days.

Fantastic insight! Maybe 8 – 12 hours (1.5 days)? Reminds me, you did a fantastic “look” about how to make a scene look sunny when overcast. Would you consider doing a look inspirations similar to this, “Sunny to wintercold”. Its very striking with the purple trucks.

Black level tricks would be great, as I find that can slip away and I occasionally need to do a quick black level pass to check consistency. Seems like this will be a very helpful series on insights. Thanks, Dan!

Just found a Plug-In, which enables DaVinci to show False Color. I’m new to using False Color to match clips, but I see big potential in this method to adjust conrast levels. If you already have a Flanders Monitor which has False Color built in you don’t need this Plug-In. http://timeinpixels.com/false-color-plugin/

Very Cool insight. So you did the grading before VFX?

I was curious how they handled the VFX as well. Did they send the branding with a motion blurred alpha or did they add branding after the completed grade?

Great insight. Thanks, Dan. I’m guess 17-25 hours, as I imagine there was a lot of time matching the purple trucks amongst all the various matching corrections. I was wondering how many times you had to pull isolation keys on the trucks to pull the color around.

I second Jason’s request for a sunny to winter/cold insight and the various ways to acquire good black levels other than a isolated desaturation curve.

I really like shot matching, thanks for the insight!

I’m going to guess 1-1.5 days on this depending on how much they revised. A good amount of cuts, camera types, locations, lighting differences. Plenty of time spent just figuring out HOW you want to get them to match and depending on the client they could have been the type that kept saying “can we get them even closer?”.

Love the matter of fact openness in sharing your insights.

So most of you guys got it! We spent 12 hours grading this spot before the VFX and matte painting happened and then we had another 6 hour session for final matching, tweaking, adjusting and general pixel pushing before the spot went out. It was great fun working on it but I do feel like a lot of the big decisions and looks were made in the first 4-6 hours.

I have to admit one fact. I do bill per hour so I am quite good at making a grade take “just the right amount of time” 🙂

Thanks man! The next one is just about to go live 🙂

Thanks man! I do try to be very honest as I its fun to share my honest experience with everyone. When I was in Ireland learning it was very hard to learn from people and get honest stories from inside the suite so I’m trying to do my best to share as much as possible

I shall make sure that is my next one! I had already recored this weeks one based on black level matching but could probably do another whole insight just on making them very black and solid.

We did indeed. And after too! We normally do about 80% pre-VFX and the final 20% after

They added the branding after the first grade which was about 80% of the final look. Once they comped it all in flame we then did a final matching pass and also final tweaks