The My.Blue Edition – Sunday Color Grading Newsletter

This annual salary survey is open through the end of October. I urge all readers to add their details (anonymously), whether you’re a student, freelancer, staff, A-lister, or facility owner. This helps us all understand trends and rates in our industry, because these details are otherwise almost impossible to find. Results are publicly available and broken down by city, so you can understand your local market.

“Surveys are administered annually, allowing the industry to anonymously share a snapshot of who we are, how we work and what we are paid.

If you’re wondering how much to get paid for a job, what post production pay rates are in your town, or how much to pay someone to work on your production, the information can be found here.”

Click through to learn more and add your data point.

“Colors are not a static entity, but are subjective both in personal and in cultural terms. So it is no surprise to see a little online test go viral based on the very arbitrary demarcation between blue and green. Sure, navy and forest are very different shades. So are emerald and sapphire. But where do you place turquoise? Is it green or is it blue?

The test can be found at the ismy.blue and it simply asks you to decide between shades of green and blue. Click on a button and place the color in one of the two camps. After a few selections, you are given a boundary hue.”

This is a direct link to the previous item, “Test your color perception with this interactive test.” Technically, you’re testing your blue-green color perception.

The last line of this characteristically pithy Seth Godin blog post is what careers are made of.

(video) “If you want to know how to become a certified Blackmagic Design Trainer for DaVinci Resolve, this video is for you! I’ll tell you the process you need to go through and share my experience with the process.”

(video) “Colorist Daniel Stonehouse shares why a successful grading career requires more than a great reel and how he helps creatives collaborate.”

(video) Stefan Ringelschwandtner shows how to use his Mononodes Balance DCTL for – you guessed it – skin tones.

(video) Darren Mostyn, “shows you how the Face Refinement tool has just had an upgrade in DaVinci Resolve Version 19 making it now much more useable!”

(video) From Stefan Ringelschwandner’s channel, “These tools are designed to simplify balancing tasks and provide multiple ways to analyze images, making the grading process easier and more precise.”

(video) From the official Blackmagic Design channel, “This short video explains how shot sequencing works in DaVinci Resolve when doing live action replays. Shot sequencing allows you to play multiple shots in a replay without building a timeline, so you can create live replays with multiple angles at any length. “

(video) “Adobe Video Senior Product Marketing Manager Jason Druss walks video editors through our new and exciting color management developments in Premiere Pro (beta), including our Auto-Raw capabilities and Wide Gamut toggles.”

“Using Moments Lab’s MXT-1.5, editors can access AI-generated editorial information about their videos — including summaries, breakdowns of key sequences and compelling quotes — to quickly grasp video content without needing to watch it in its entirety.”

As someone who was an editor for 15 years, the lesson I learned about 7 years in was… watch the footage.

(videos) Avid’s website has a section devoted to IBC 2024 announcements. I’m linking to their ‘Edit On Demand’ landing page. It has several embedded videos, “Collaborate from anywhere in a fully configured secure environment. Without any overages or hidden fees. And without spending time and money on expensive production hardware, overhead, integration, training, security monitoring or protection.”

Avid continues investing in their Media Composer platform, “Avid’s technology partners and users can now expand their workflows by sourcing, building, and integrating the components that their editors need directly within Media Composer.”

(video) Like the headline says.

“As the AI race heats up, companies are doing whatever they can to feed their models more data—and many are using our data to do so, sometimes without asking for our explicit permission first.”

(video) “Join Bram Desmet, CEO and GM of Flanders Scientific (FSI), as he explores the present state and future of HDR technology and showcases the latest QD-OLED HDR Reference Master Monitors at IBC 2024.

Discover how the new XMP310 and XMP650 monitors are setting new standards in color accuracy and brightness, designed specifically for colorists, DITs, and post-production professionals working in UHD and HDR workflows.”

“When I see new products like the DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel, my first question is whether I, as a confirmed Luddite, would actually use the product in my workflow.

Luckily for me, I got the opportunity to try out the new Micro Color Panel for a few weeks and put it to the test. So, what was my verdict? Well, you’ll have to read on to get the full explanation. But, long story short, it’s pretty darn cool.”

Ugh. Billboards have now invaded your living room, “Even if you buy one of the most expensive TV models today, you cannot escape ads. LG is rolling out screensaver ads, including ads for things completely unrelated to the TV experience.”

I remember when SpinRight 6 was released. 20 years later it’s been updated to support SSDs, and petabytes of storage, “We’ve learned that even when solid state mass storage can be read, storage that is only ever read and rarely written, such as most of operating system files, become more difficult and slower to read as time passes. So well before the data becomes unreadable, a machine’s performance can be significantly impacted. SpinRite can refresh and restore solid state media to “like new” performance.”

“At IBC 2024 in Amsterdam, Blackmagic Design released Blackmagic Camera for Android 1.3 which adds support for recording timecode with clips, anamorphic desqueeze, higher frame rate recordings on Pixel phones, off-speed and time lapse recording, as well as support for Samsung Flip and Fold 5/6 and Xiaomi 13T phones.”

“However, despite the widespread adoption of UHD TVs, there remains a significant gap in the availability of content produced in UHD.”

Because it’s that time of year. “Things look a lot different in Germany than the United States, for starters. Here’s everything you need to know about Oktoberfest beer.”