Snow Blind
A cautionary tale of color balance:
It was the best of footage and the worst of footage. It was ski footage.
Bright white snow and fluorescent jackets can be terrific graphic elements, but if you push them too hard the snow can bleach out and the vivid colors bleed off the scale. So it’s a baptism of fire if ski footage happens to be one of your first grading jobs. And I got my callow buttocks burned.
Ten thousand feet of 16mm negative film at 24fps. Roughly five hours worth of crisp white powder providing the backdrop for action figures wearing all the colors of the rainbow and then some. All shot on a sunny winter day with blue skies and everything consistently exposed. It looked great straight out of the can. It seemed that I’d barely need to nudge the RGB controls on my daVinci. Downhill all the way at top speed for the skiers and me. Here we go.
At least that’s what I thought.
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.
Unless, that is, you’re an arrogant color suite hotshot like I was. A young whippersnapper who thinks he knows everything about everything because he’s sprawled in the color suite’s Top Gun swivel chair. After all, who needs scopes when the image is mostly just plain white that anyone with eyes can simply see for themselves?
The ancient Greeks called it Hubris.
There I was, admiring my work on the screen. Just look at that luminous white snow. Aspen and Vail have never looked so good. I can probably even get a gig color grading “whiter than white” laundry detergent spots with this footage on my reel. You know what, I deserve to reward myself with an cappuchino and a chocolate croissant. So off I went on a coffee break with about half of the film still left to color grade.
Returning to the color suite, the first thing I noticed was how pink the snow was. The same snow that I’d previously believed to be bright white now looked like cherry-flavored slush to my refreshed retinas. I’d have to stay late to correct my mistake. This is what happens when you ignore your scopes and trust your eyes only.
Rewinding the film, I watch the embarrassing pink tone fade away as the snow traveled backwards through color grading time. From rosé and blush via what could be described as ‘farmed salmon,’ then finally back to the beginning where the snow was a reasonable approximation of pure white. A visual record of my color perception shifting over the course of a morning. I’d been erroneously increasing the amount of red in the scene to offset imaginary green.
Fortunately, I’ve learned from my mistake. Otherwise, I’d be a cable access editor now. Or a even sound guy.
If you watch me color grading today, my attention constantly switches from scopes to monitor and back again. My head swivels between the two like someone watching tennis. It’s probably quite distracting because I have a big, bald head. But there’s a lot of color grading know-how and skill rattling around in that big bald head.