A Day in a Life - short film

[Brian Duke]

My latest short film shot on GH5 edited with FCPX.

Enjoy and feedback is always welcome

YouTube (Short URL)

[Cary Knoop]

I think the color grading has a bunch of critical issues.
For the next project, I would advise getting someone to color grade who has experience.

[Chris Hurd]

Embedding issue fixed.

[Brian Duke]

Originally Posted by Cary Knoop

I think the color grading has a bunch of critical issues.
For the next project, I would advise getting someone to color grade who has experience.

What are the issues you see so I know what to look for? thanks

[Cary Knoop]

The whole movie seems to have been processed by some bad LUT that makes practically every color completely unnatural. Colors seems to be overall squeezed into the teal-orange spectrum (see the chromaticity diagram example).
A lot of what is actually white looks blue tinted.

Also, the footage is dead contrast-wise, there are almost no speculars. Code values are generally way too low.
There are outside daylight scenes with code-values hardly surpassing 50%.

Here are four examples that are completely off. The grey image on the right is the actual color of the girl's left hand.

[Brian Duke]

Thanks Gary. Some of the JPGs you attached seem to be Value %, right, not colors, because I checked and they are all balanced. I did have some issues when I shot it with the camera, like when their hands were over exposed. Not sure what happened, but even when I exposed it correctly, the mids had to be turned almost all the way down in post. Never really had this issue before.

[Josh Bass]

I got pretty familiar with Da Vinci Resolve on a personal music video project. LUTs etc. never seemed to work for me...if I wanted a look I had to hand craft it for every shot, using power windows and all kinds of stuff to tweak individual elements of each shot. Sometimes what works on a certain color/luminance value in one shot looks terrible in the next cut.

What I'm getting at is if you did want that teal & orange look you might have to go back and tweak it for each shot to make it look right.

And of course a proper grading setup helps you know "objectively" what you're getting, in case anyone's advice here makes no sense to you 'cause you're seeing something totally different.

[Brian Duke]

I totally agree. I had some exposure and camera issues on this one, which messed up my regular workflow. Different color temperature etc.

I general use color central guides, i.e. color balance and fix each clip and then apply an over all look to it afterwards. Which has worked in the past, but this project was weird.

[Derrick Jones]

Its been a while since i been to this site but your movie is the first i seen. I actually enjoyed the film from a synopsis standpoint. I thought it was very well put together. The only think i saw wrong was the color correction seemed off. it looked pastel to me.. Vivid colors no contrast.. If you fix that man you got something good.

[Brian Duke]

I am going to fix it and thanks for your kind words and feedback.