At the risk of exposing my self to music snob ridicule, here is my beer o’clock, celebratory, ‘we’re done for today’ Spotify playlist.

It’s mostly up-tempo music in a variety of styles because the day’s work is done and we’re exporting all the color-graded files.

Obviously, I have a more down-tempo playlist if the shots come back for revisions, but I’ll save that for another post.

We’ve all been there. Spending what seems like an eternity grading a problem scene. The minutes drip by like Chinese Water Torture but still nobody is prepared to sign off on that look.

So you add more warmth. You step back on the greens. You darken the left side of the screen and brighten the right side. You boost the highlights, obviously, and you feather the shadows (nobody knows quite what this means but everyone agrees it needs to be done).

Since it’s still not working, you give the talent a little extra eye light and you reduce the slight glare on his nostrils. Still nope. So out of sheer desperation you slap on a huge vignette and then you … you get the picture.

But that picture still doesn’t look right. For some inexplicable reason the damned scene doesn’t match any of the others you’ve already graded.

The clients love the previous shots. The previous shots look like the Garden of Eden in cherry blossom season. But the shot we’re currently working on might as well be Hell’s parking lot in mid-December. All you did was adjust a few parameters and now it’s total chaos. How did the session end up here?

Back when color grading was called color correction, back when Julius Caesar was a director, Mark Anthony his DP, and Cleopatra the agency creative, our media was 35mm film negative rather than hi-res files.

Forget about data storage issues and corrupt Quicktimes, the problem with color correcting 35mm film negative was plain old dust. Microscopic filaments of airborne effluvia that somehow managed to fall onto the frame you were color correcting.

So it was super important to get the color right ASAP, because running the film back and forth too many times kicked up too much dust. And when magnified by the telecine, dust manifested itself as ugly white spots on the image. Not good. Not good at all. Who cares if the talent’s skin seems too green if there’s a huge white blotch on her forehead?

Dust meant you’d need to clean the film with Trichloroethylene, which was as nasty as it sounds. And cleaning the film raised the possibility of scratching the film. Who cares if the product needs to be brighter if there’s a huge gash across the product’s brand name?

So, as I said, super important to get the color right ASAP before the dust Devils came knocking with their good friends Scratches, Scrapes and Sprocket Damage.

Back in the day, when people had to work face to face in the same room, everyone tried to look the part. Not quite black turtleneck and matching beret, but they definitely attempted to radiate some sort of creative aura, which might be Goodwill bohemia or designer couture or a mix of the two and everything in between. I remember one guy even wore dark wraparound sunglasses for our entire color session. But he was very creative. Nevertheless, the producer and I had to stay late adjusting the brightness levels back down after he left.

Whatever, you can brainstorm in your favorite Cosplay costume and do revisions with giant rabbit ears on your head provided you deliver a top notch job and meet all the deadlines. But the added bonus nowadays is: nobody needs to commute for an hour in Boston traffic to a “Post Production Facility” to check those boxes.

That’s mostly because there really is no defined “nine-to-five” anymore. I receive client emails and texts first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Everybody is on their own flexible schedule and it always seems to be the proverbial eleventh hour, even if the eleventh hour often extends into the twentieth and thirtieth hours.

My clients were hiring a big name DP for a while. He was such a big name that he didn’t even need a surname. Just his first name was enough for instant recognition. ‘We’re shooting with Raoul’ the clients whispered reverently, as if Raoul was kindly allowing them along for the ride.

I immediately knew who they meant: Bicoastal Raoul, based in New York and LA, although he actually seemed to spend most of his time in Boston.

Before hiring Raoul, my clients had always employed local DPs. ‘Those guys are great,’ my clients told me. ‘But Raoul brings something extra to the table.’That something extra was an extra-sized ego as far as I was concerned. But I said nothing. After all, I was concerned that if Raoul got his way I wouldn’t be sat around the table myself for very much longer.

‘Raoul prefers to work with a color grader he knows in Manhattan.’ I was warned. And that turned out to be the case. At least for a while.

‘What does it actually look like?’ is the question I’ve been asked more than any other in this job.

Sitting in a sports bar watching a big deal spot you color graded appearing on five different TVs is a spine-chilling experience. You’ll want to bury your head in the peanuts because you’ll be seeing five very different looking images on those five different TVs. One image is way too dark, another image is far too bright, that image is much too green and the image over there is washed out. Meanwhile, the image in the bathroom doesn’t even bear thinking about, so you can’t run and hide there. None of the TVs looks correct yet they are all receiving the same signal.

So what does it actually look like?

When your color session reaches an impasse about the way a particular scene looks, adding ‘oomph’ to the image is the oldest trick in the color grader’s book. It kickstarts everyone’s creative juices flowing again.

Actually, making everything warmer is probably the absolute oldest trick, but adding oomph definitely comes a close second.

Although, on reflection, maybe adding oomph is only the third oldest, since the sleight-of-eye maneuver of pretending to brighten the picture up a tad when in reality you’ve done nothing at all is truly the second oldest trick.

Whatever, you get the idea: adding oomph is a venerable trick even it does only get the bronze medal for color suite skullduggery.

So what exactly is adding oomph? To be honest, I’m not quite sure how to explain it myself. But I do know what it is when I see it.

The air in the room was thick with differing opinions before we’d started grading the first scene. We were dealing with a thirty-second spot for dinosaur themed children’s breakfast cereal. Fast cuts and extreme close-ups of grinning kids munching on multi-colored flakes floating in frothy milk.

Let’s crush all the shadows, push the highlights into clip, and over saturate all the colors, the film director said. Let’s really make this thing sing.

No, let’s keep it real, the agency creative countered. There’s a lot of color and contrast going on already. It’s supposed to be breakfast for kids, not every drug addict’s favorite morning fix.

How about we split the difference? I offered, and see where we land. I guess you could call it compromise but I prefer the term “creative arbitration.” So I made three quick different color set-ups for the guys to consider: Straight Out Of The Can, Pushed Just A Tad, and Really Singing.

Everyone’s perception of color drifts over time, especially when they’re sitting in a dark room, staring at a studio monitor for hour after hour. Before you’re aware of it, what was aqua now appears to be teal. Green begins to seep into the blacks. The medium grays are magenta. The highlights now have a hint of cyan.

Of course, this may be what’s required if the client gives you artistic license to create a look. But not if your brief is simply to reproduce what was envisioned on set and what the DP shot.

Such a neutral color balance is where you should start anyway, even if the brief is actually something avant-garde. Consequently, a grader needs foolproof tools to ensure he certain that neutral is exactly what he’s looking at before he begins going off-piste with the color knobs

This is why the wise old engineers of the past gave us Vectorscopes and Waveforms. They’re incredibly useful tools if you know how to read the strange squiggly lines they produce. In fact, you simply cannot color grade video without consulting them.