Pro Colorist "Day for Night" Workflow
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- Опубліковано 22 сер 2024
- Day for night is a tricky subject, but there is a foundation of principles that you can use to help you approach any shot and set you up to take on the scene’s unique characteristics so you can more easily to achieve the look you want. Learn ’em in today's video.
We dive deeper into this technique and I answer your questions during my livestream of Grade School, which you can watch here: • Grade School: Advanced...
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I have a different approach to this, but have some of the same ideas. Not very Pro, but for this kind of thing I use a reference still. I found that the Walking Dead is so brilliantly shot almost excessively in the dark, that they have mastered the night look.
And I totally agree and have said it many times - when you pull up those references, there is always more light than you remember or notice on people's faces - if you don't see the stars face, you don't need the big star.
I also notice that with the color grades - rarely is there saturation in reds like you have in your demo here. Saturation in the dark is a big giveaway in my opinion. Although a lot of TV dark tends to push blue in to sell the idea of the moonlight.
Again, exposure to me would be isolating the place where I want the audience to look and exposing that and with an extremely soft power window darken the rest of the image.
I'm not sure how much you have played with the HDR tool, I tended to not like it that much until I worked out the audio analogy for it.
In pro audio if you used the tonal equivalent of having a base eq of Bass, Mids and treble - you do the base grade using those broad adjustments and then add the parametric EQ to areas that require tuning.
So you find the sweet spot by using a narrow slope and then on top of the bass, mid, or highs, you raise or lower that frequency and then broaden the slope to smoothly adjust the eq to blend and not abruptly change the tonal quality. More of a dialling in and adjusting then smooth thing.
The HDR tool, if used with that in mind. The shadow /light wheels set up the lows and highs. The Black and Dark wheels represent points within the shadow range that you can pinpoint and like the EQ, can lay into that region with a smooth curve making the tonal adjustment with pin point precision.
I think that the HDR on a day for night would be perfect for that. Without highlighting which actually parts of the image you are doing it on I I think that I would find it a bit difficult.
Anyway up until I started thinking of the audio analogy, I kind of didn't like the HDR tool for grading. Now for fine tuning, it makes more sense to me, and I tend to fine tune with it.
Cullen - sorry if this isn't explained well. Having a bad august of 12 days ( and nights ) of hiccups followed by getting Covid ( on Tuesday ) and now a foggy brain.
I love your tip with starting with the wide and then go from there. I wish we got to see your final result if you finese it even if we don’t ser your whole process. Hopefully you will have more in depth in future videos. Thanks Cullen!
This upload came right in time. I just started researching day for night shots!!
@@CullenKelly Thank you for such amazing insight!!
I've just completed a feature where I had to deal with footage in the same scene (a chase through a forest) with most of it filmed at night and probably 40% filmed in the day. The day shots had to be graded DFN to fit the night shots.
A real challenge!! @Cullen Kelly
Great topic! Looking forward to unpacking it further.
I was actually doing this today and it was driving me mad! I am going to give this method a try tomorrow. Thanks man! Friday will be fun!
@@CullenKelly sure did mate! Cheers!
Finally!! I've been waiting for this one! Thank you!!!
🙏🏿
Absolutely loved this tutorial ! Have to try it on my next personal grading session ! :)
It`s great that you chose shots that look as if they weren`t planned to be graded Day for Night! I guess that grade is actually being done in prep and production more than in Resolve sort of...
Excellent topic! See you tomorrow!
Some tips:
Please upload in 4K. UA-cam's 1080p compression is unforgiving and makes it very hard to see your colour adjustments.
Also, smaller and cropped talking head. It's blocking certain parts of Resolve.
Webcam could do with a grade too! Top content though.
Thank you, Cullen! Great conversation. :)
This is a great exercise, Cullen! Thanks for this workflow & tips!
Great video as always, Cullen. I just wonder about the reasoning why did you use offset for lowering the exposure and not the global wheel in HDR?
cuz HDR is so powerful
Awesomely explained...cute and short..tq
Thank you ❤️
Subbed!
Interesting video!
Can you, please, try record your screen and upload videos in 4k? Image is so damaged by youtube and most of the time i can see just cubes, specially when you adjusting curves.
this is happening because of bitrate, but 4k may help
Care to make a tutorial on how to handle flame/fire scene?
Amazing, hello sir, in your live session can help us to know what to do when clients doesn’t want blue in day for night scene ?
What would be the look approach, palette or color wise if client doesn’t want blue or cyan but want day for night feel
Hey Cullen! Great video, thank you so much for the constant uploads, you’ve aided my colorgrading journey immensely!
Question, I’ve recently downloaded your free kodak LUT and Ito start off the node tree, I’d create a node to CST into davinci wide gamut and end the node tree with another CST, usually its the output to rec 709 and the LUT node after, do I have to set the final CST output to Cineon for your LUT to work? I’m also thinking if getting your LUT pack, does the palette and tone work the same way as this as well?
Also, will you be doing a video on creating different visual looks for corporate video rather than film in the future?
Really appreciate all your work and effort!🥹🙏🏼
Thx cullen🌈
Great one again, Cullen! If I may ask: why the vignette at node nr.2, branch 2 instead of node nr.1, branch 2? Cheers! 😉
Great list almost used all the hacks.. but pr pro
To deal with the sky, could you use a luma key and mix it and out to drop the prominence of the sky?
Instead of using "timeline level" nodes, can we use "post clip" nodes in the groups
of course
@@m1nt9reen 👍❤
Hey Cullen, thanks for all the great information. Any chance you could mention how you would go about implementing a Panasonic Vlog workflow using colour management? I can't seem to get a satisfactory result using davinci colour management no matter what I do. I now just use the leeming lut on a timeline level, then switch to clips and go from there. Any info on how to work with Vlog in colour management would be great. Thanks again.
Martin.
@@CullenKelly Thanks for taking the time to reply Cullen. Much appreciated. I shoot vlog on the GH5 with the Panasonic view lut only. The files don't have the lut actually applied to them. This is the process I use.
I set davinci colour management to custom. Set input colour space to vlog. Set timeline colour space to rec 709.
When I do this there is no change in the timeline, the files just display in log space.
If I highlight the clips in the media pool and select change input colour space, I see that the colour space is actually set to rec 709. If I select vlog here, everything is then correctly displayed and the clips now look as you would expect, with the colour space change.
I can link you a couple of vlog shots to test with if you like? Again many thanks.
Martin.
Really loving your channel. Thank you.
I’m sure this isn’t the best place to ask this question, but you might notice it.
I’ve been handed a project shot on the new Sony Venice, in X-OCN Log. There are no color space presets that I can find anywhere to get into rec709. What to do when there’s no way of interpreting what the camera recorded. Turning off color management altogether gives me a good looking, ARRI-like log image, but… what would you do?
@@CullenKelly sadly no. That’s what I’d read too, but the x-OCN log has a distinct, saturated blue cast. No input space overrides this that I can find. Even in ACES cct, where they actually have a “Venice” CST, the problem persists.
Nothing on the Sony site. Nothing on Creative Cow. Nothing on the forums. If I CST it to ARRI log C, the blue remains. Can I send you, like 12 frames and see what you think? It’s ok if you’re too busy. Maybe it would make an interesting (if niche) video, cos lots of people are moving to the.Venice and a lot of grading work is coming down the pike. You could be the go-to genius who sets them straight! Let me know.
WOuld be nice to zoom the image view in when you grade. Your adjustments are subtle, so we don't really see what's going on when you grade. Besides that, thanks for the pro tips.
Mr Kelly why are all your youtube videos so dark?
@@CullenKelly It is just that I've noticed your videos are considerably darker than other UA-cam videos. I use DaVinci Resolve with a Benq Rec709 monitor. On some of your more recent videos it does rather look like you are a floating head on a very dark, almost black, background and I can also see a few items on a table or shelf. I don't mean to be rude, but just wondered why this was?
e.g. ua-cam.com/video/KTWdqIdpG9Q/v-deo.html
Is Sam a fan of Johnny Dollar? Yours Truly….
Here’s a link to how Hoytema shot day for night in NOPE: ua-cam.com/video/xrI0J0hbJQA/v-deo.html
Is it just me or is the video in 360p??
Same here.
Guys lmao^^ it's still processed by UA-cam when u watched it💁♂️
It’s now available in 1080P, so was prob just being processed by YT at the time.
When you upload video on UA-cam it goes out but it takes time to process into1080p, if 4K, you watch while it was processing so.
It’s a nice 1080p upload
I have never been this early
sincerely this did not work out very well but it then was impossible to pull out right with those shots. You needed extensive secondaries to mascarade sun as moon, but still impossible I think
@@CullenKelly the day sky and the reflections give you away, but it was imposible to pull off. You could try qualifying highlights, then where the folliage got damaged try to comouflage excessive light as a moonbeam or something
It just a suggestion that might help to engage peolpe watchinh your videos...start with showing before and after result as an intro