[Tig] Remote client supervised color sessions (was "Color")

[Tyler Hawes]

There are some major issues with remote supervision of color sessions:

 - They'd need a proper calibrated and color managed environment to make
meaningful judgments. For features, that means grade-worthy projection. Even
for TV, broadcast-grade monitors have an appreciable cost. There's also the
whole issue of LUT management, etc. So the production will have to factor
not just the cost of the overseas room, but the local room they have to rent
to facilitate it (or the cost of buying that in-house, which begs other
issues considered below)

 - How are they receiving the signal? If it's over the Internet, it will be
*heavily* compressed, making it quite difficult to have a meaningful
discussion about the work. Not to mention that compression schemes
sophisticated enough to encode/decode this in realtime typically require
dedicated hardware that is also not cheap and require expertise to use, plus
very fast Internet connections, so add that to the cost of the local room.
You could have local storage, another expense, and watch it uncompressed,
but we're talking about rendered output, not raw scans, so that kills that.
Not to mention you need to make interactive changes.

 - Color is a collaborative creative process. During sessions the colorist
and Director and/or DP develop (hopefully) a report and trust for one
another. Reading body language and feeling the "vibe" in the room are
important nuances for a colorist to pickup on to deliver what the client
expects. There's no technical solution to that. It's intangible but
invaluable.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm sure there are scenarios where someone
would try to make this work. Maybe on high-volume, unsupervised work where
it's already being handed off to a colorist to work solo who has very little
outside input from the creatives on the project. I know there's plenty of
that work done for things like versioning, restoration, etc. (maybe -- I
don't do that work so perhaps there's more client interaction required for
it than I am assuming). But for features, spots, episodics, I don't see any
likelihood of it in the near-term (i.e. 3-5 years).

Tyler Hawes
Liquid DI, Santa Monica
www.LiquidCompanies.com


On 5/2/07 2:35 PM, "Alan Rosenfeld" <alanr at bhphotovideo.com> wrote:

> So clients get in a room in the US and discuss the color with their op in
> wherever using broadband hookups, the beauty of digital.
> 
>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tig-bounces at ns1.colorist.org [mailto:tig-bounces at ns1.colorist.org] On
> Behalf Of Tyler Hawes
> Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 5:21 PM
> To: tig
> Subject: Re: [Tig] color
> 
> 
>  
> Our work is almost always collaborative with a lot of supervised client
> sessions. I can't imagine my clients wanting to travel to 3rd world
> countries to do their color work, even if it saves a buck. I suppose it
> could happen once in a blue moon, but not consistent enough to threaten us.
> I can just picture the Producer trying to explain to the Director why he has
> to spend 20 hrs. on a jet so they can shave the post budget :)