Building A Show LUT to Keep Your Looks Consistent

I’ve worked on a few projects using a show LUTs, but never created my own. Would you consider providing the show LUT to editorial while they cut or would you rather provide media with a “look” burned in? Appreciate you sharing the lesson you’re picking up as you work on more long form projects. Thanks!

I think they would probably end up getting burned in. I’m hoping for 2018 to be much more involved in productions and possibly build them custom LUTs to load into their monitors on set for preview. I’ve had great success with that on a couple of commecials that have gone down that road. The DIT could easily bake that in then for editorial

Any reason to use a LUT over just collapsing the saved grade into a compound node?

Although I’m often “Mr. Anti-LUT,” I have to admit that a custom-created “Show LUT” can totally work for a project. At the very least, it can show you what the editorial team saw during the edit, and that’s very helpful. I think it’s almost always possible to convert the LUT to an actual correction, and in many cases that has more range than a fixed LUT.

None really, I think clients are just so used to hearing and seeing LUTs it got in my head also. I guess the cross application benifit is the only reason you may have to bounce down to a LUT.

Thanks for the cool Insight, Dan. I’ve seen show LUTs used on TV series for editorial purposes. John Brawley’s team used them on Queen of the South and pretty sure on the Resident – shot on Alexa Mini and Ursa Mini 4.6k. Not sure if the show LUT for each scene is a starting point for the final grade, though. I’m curious now … worth asking.

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I’ve just read this article and in my opinion this workflow depends about the project you are working in. Example to all the guys that say: no I don’t use any any LUT! How can they say that? there is often on movies proj a DIT on set to create LUT+CDL and I start my session from there. So It’s inevitable to work output out with. Isn’t it? Cheers!

Hey! Yep totally agree. I find on short form projects it’s generally ok to grade what ever gets the best result on the day but for longform narrative projects I find people are really attached to the LUT + CDL so if you radically change the texture and feel of the movie you are going to have a lot of shocked people. I’ve also found my looks on longer projects are a little more simple as they have spent so much care and thought with camera/makeup/costume tests that it looks so great right off the sensor