Making the Grade

Many of you are probably wondering what in the world is going on with the new DVD Frozen. Good question. I’ve had a bit of a delay due to the music taking longer than expected. The last few days I decided to put some work into the coloring part of the project as that is totally independent of what’s going on in the music department.

One of the most important parts to finalizing any big project is the color grading (or color correcting if you prefer). This is where you set consistent luminance (how bright and dark the picture is) for each scene so that you don’t have those annoying bounces between light then dark that often happens in low quality videos. The next step is to work on the coloring which can be done in probably a million ways. The short of it is that you need a consistent white balance between shots which is often times easier said then done. Usually you white balance the camera as you shoot, but when you get a finished project, you normally find that the colors from scene to scene are not quite the same. Red really overpowers one shot, where in the next, it’s rather dull and lifeless. This must be fixed.

Anyway, I will post a video here in the near future showing the difference that grading can make to a clip, but for now, here are a couple pictures of what I use to do this. I just recently got a 40″ HD TV to use for this very purpose. You can see in the background just a glimpse of how awesome this footage looks in HD. Unfortunately, most people still use standard def, so I still have to figure out what to do for those of you that really like to see things the way they should be seen. Having a large monitor to use for editing has been so nice, it really helps to see all sorts of detail I miss on a small screen…For those of you that are wondering, yes…this is made 100 percent on a PC, no macs involved whatsoever.