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 of any scene, but if you push them too hard the snow can bleach out and the vivid colors bleed off the scale. So a baptism of fire if ski footage happens to be one of your first grading jobs … and I got my callow buttocks burned.

It was 16mm negative film, about ten thousand feet at 24fps, so roughly five hours worth of crisp white powder and action figures wearing all the colors of the rainbow and then some. A sunny winter day with blue skies and everything consistently exposed. It all looked great straight out of the can. I barely needed to touch the RGB controls on my da Vinci. It was downhill all the way for the skiers and me.

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 once was aqua now appears to be teal; blue begins to seep into the blacks; the grays are somehow greenish-gray. Of course, this may be what you want if the client has given 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. And if you ask me, neutral is where you should start anyway, even if the brief is actually something avant-garde.

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 who thinks he knows everything because he’s sprawled in the Top Gun swivel chair plowing his way through ski footage. After all, who needs scopes when it’s mostly just plain white that anyone with a good eye can see for themselves?

The ancient Greeks called it Hubris.

I was admiring my work on the screen. Just look at that luminous white snow. Aspen and Vail had never looked so good. I could probably even get a gig color grading “whiter than white” laundry detergent spots with this on my reel, I told myself. I deserve an coffee break and perhaps treat myself to a chocolate croissant. So off I went with about half of the film still left to color grade.

When I returned, the first thing I noticed was how pink the snow was. The same snow that I’d previously believed to be bright white looked like cherry flavored slush. Oh no, I’d have to go back redo all that footage. This is what happens when you ignore your scopes and trust your eyes only. Rewinding the reel, I noticed the pink tone fade as the snow traveled backwards through color grading time: from rosé and blush through what could be described as pale salmon or light coral, then finally back at the beginning to a reasonable approximation of plain white.

It was visual record of how my perception of color had shifted over the course of a morning. I’d been adding minute amounts of red to offset an imaginary green tint. Fortunately, I 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 from scope to monitor, my head swiveling between the two like someone watching tennis. It’s probably quite distracting because I have a big, bald head. And if you’re really unlucky, I might bore you with details of what the CIE Chromaticity graph means. Most clients humor me, smile politely and nod.

But that’s because they know their project is in safe hands, safe eyes, safe scopes.