Home Is Where The Colour Suite Is
Color Grading At Home
Slip out of bed, drown your face in a carafe of coffee, wish you could reduce the color saturation on that bowl of Fruit Loops, fire up your color grading software and you’re ready to make pretty pictures from the comfort of your own home office.
These days, it seems like many people regard the working day as a clothing optional activity. I’m sure they can focus in their PJs and sweatpants but I absolutely still feel the need to dress-up for work, even in the privacy of my residential color suite here in Somerville.
This is serious business, after all. So it’s long pants, collared shirt and polished shoes for me. I might even add a stylish blazer for a Zoom call with a client, although I’ll replace that button-up shirt with a crewneck tee when I’m trying to be fashion-forward. I usually fail but I hope people appreciate the effort.
No, I wasn’t the kid at school who never took his coat off in class. I just empathized with his sartorial neurosis.
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.
A corporate video I’m currently color grading is now at the four-thousand-and fifty-seventh hour. My client’s client client (whom I’ve never met or spoken to) keeps changing his mind about everything. We color grade about one scene every two or three months. There had been a ‘drop-dead’ date sometime last year, so we must be into the second or third reincarnation by now. Perhaps some Past-Life Regression Therapy is in order? But those decisions are beyond my pay-grade.
Although I sometimes miss the immediacy of on-the-spot client feedback, an issue easily rectified with a quick mp4 render for color approval, I can think of few downsides to color grading from home. My dog will bark and yap at the screen if I’m adding too much contrast to a scene, but that’s easily rectified also: I give her a Milkbone treat and keep the contrast. Then there’s the inescapable lure of my espresso machine, which means also partaking of an imported biscotto that costs about the same as I charge for an hour of my color-grading time. But I just call that an well-earned if somewhat expensive snack break.
In fact, I guess the only real pain is the time it takes sending any file bigger than a mp4 back and forth across the Internet. For that chore, I prefer WeTransfer but also regularly use Google Drive, Filemail, Frame io, Dropbox, and even an ancient ftp site that a certain client still swears by. Occasionally, someone will show up at my house with one of those removable SSD things. Then I have to search through the bucket under my desk to find the correct cable.
But for all the time lag, downloading raw 4K video from a secure website has its consolations. While all that data is being transferred from modem to modem, I can figure out what outfit I’m going to wear for that day’s color grading. Since we’re miles apart and only communicating via email and file upload, you may never know what that outfit is. But rest assured, I’ve inevitably chosen black-tie formal attire if I’m working on your spot. After all, working on your project is an important, swanky, high-class affair.
Even if it just me at home with the dog, a fancy cup of coffee, and a high-speed internet connection.