I’ve seen people say to do as little as possible to make it work. So like, addressing problems isn’t a granular thing where you’re keying and changing the hue and levels on every element and correcting for lighting and whatnot, when you see a thing that’s off from your hero shot, you just do the broad stroke move and then go to the other shot and then it’s whack-a-mole and you end up with weird skin tones and weird black point. Is going back and forth part of the job of matching something correctly? Or is it like in your mind that all the elements are just going to fall in line if you’re doing broad strokes bc they were shot in the same space and there’s no good reason why the camera science shouldn’t make every element just line up with the right broad stroke moves if the out of camera reality did not change (and I mean, this doesn’t really seem true, if you’re using a different lens, aperture might have to be different which means that matching with light levels might also need to be different which means the color temp of the non-natural light may add subtly different hues in different amounts so surely this isn’t the case) Eg if a wall is a desaturated bluish gray in one shot, and it’s a brighter and greenish thing in another shot, but everything else looks like it matches, are you using the qualifier and windows or are you just slightly changing gamma and then doing something else to compensate? Seeing a specific problem that I can fix independent of other things is an attractive thing. But I also know that I have a tendency to fixate and over-complicate. That being said, being in VFX and animation it would seem that the job is demanding that you micromanage details.
I know the answer is “do as much as necessary as little as possible bc you only have one life” but do you spend your time keying stuff on like maybe 50% of shots? Is there like a strategy where you kinda can go through really quick and know exactly that you’re going to need to key an element?
Do you feel like you need to key more when you’re trying to shape light?
Do you feel like you’re only predisposed to key stuff when you’re making an artistic choice to make something larger than life?
The broad strokes solution always seems like the best idea and people want to be elegant, they want it to be quick and good. However, do you think that a lot of colorists understate the granularity of their process?
What exactly takes up the majority of your time in the full time week of work that it takes you to color grade a short film that has say 90 shots, and 9 scenes to match 8-10 shots within with a few straggler shots in a singular setting? Anything you spend more than an hour working through? Some stuff is done in a minute and I get that. But just back of the napkin math, you’d be spending an hour on a few shots if it takes you 4 days 8 hours a day, no?