The Manual Overload Edition – Sunday Morning Color Grading Newsletter

I hope this Newsletter finds you thriving!

The Newsletter didn’t ship last week as I was in the depths of working on the backend of Mixing Light.

(I’ve been upgrading the speed of the website)

What I thought would be a 3-5 day project became a 10-day Exodus of 16-hour days. I finished up, late Friday night.

In the past 10 days I learned how to:

– Use GitHub as code base revision service.

– Set up a development server, SSH into it, and connect it to GitHub, using Visual Studio Code.

– Extensively modify Mixing Light’s PHP and CSS code to control the file load order.

– Localize 3rd party references (particularly fonts), to speed up the website while reducing its payload.

– Use myPHP to run SQL searches of the Wordpress database and identify every icon used on every page and tutorial (with the goal of reducing the font payload by over 98% – this one is in-progress)

And I did all of this with a Machine Learning assistant.

Well, technically, I used two coding assistants. I started with Grok.com. It was amazing until the whole thing fell apart and I had to start over. Grok taught me the amazingness of the revolution, and how not to use an ‘AI Assistant’.

Then I switched to Claude.ai. It was just… brilliant.

I think I successfully used Claude (accomplishing in 12 hours what I couldn’t accomplish in 112 hours with Grok) because I fundamentally changed my relationship to my Machine Assistant.

And I think we will all have to learn how to approach our Machine Assistants.

The ‘AI’ will have you believe they are the expert. And in some respects, that’s 100% true. I hit all my Project performance goals in 12 hours with Claude – without knowing how to write a single line of PHP or write one SQL statement.

But that was only possible when I realized that we (the humans) are the experts in defining our goals. We need to be the experts in keeping the ‘AI’ from barreling into its favorite wormhole – and we do that by following our instincts and intuition.

This lesson will 100% apply to color grading, VFX, mixing, or any other creative craft.

Buckle up. After the last 10 days, I believe we are in for a heck of a ride! I’m bullish, but not rosy-eyed. We are all going to have to stick together to shorten the learning curve and stay ahead of our clients.

I’ll see you next Sunday.

Happy Grading!

Sincerely,

Pat Inhofer
Chief Photon Wrangler, Publisher
MixingLight.com

PS – If you find an item you think should be in this newsletter, email me a quick note.

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