This hands-on course explains all.Baselight grading used for new Quentin Tarantino film. Baselight has long been one of the industry’s premiere grading applications, used on projects both large and small, and among professional colorists I’ve always heard it spoken of glowingly.Learn how to efficiently set up and manage grading projects in the Baselight system and how to achieve excellent results. Color Grading, Calibration and Post-Production Workflow Training and ConsultingFor a variety of reasons, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to give Filmlight’s new Baselight plugin for Final Cut Pro 7 a whirl. High-end DCI Cinema & Display Calibration with LightSpace CMS, JETI SpectraVal 1511 Spectroradiometer and Colorimetry Research CR-100 Tristimulus Meter. Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve & FilmLight Baselight Color Grading for HDR and SDR presentation.
Baselight Color Grading Movie Written AndSoftware: Baselight.When announced at last year’s NAB conference, everyone’s amazement that a high-end company like Filmlight would bring their technology to the Mac as, of all things, a plug-in was overshadowed by Apple’s announcement of Final Cut Pro X, which rendered all FCP7 news somewhat obsolete.However, as there are many, many shops still using Final Cut Studio 3 regularly, and there are likely to be many who use it into the coming year, I can understand Filmlight’s interest in finishing the project and bringing their plug-in to market, especially given the unique workflow that it enables, of grading from within Final Cut Pro in such a way as to be able to export the corrections directly, with perfect fidelity, via XML to a full-blown Baselight workstation for a dedicated grading session.What really drew me to work with the plug-in, however, was the desire to get my hands on Baselight’s well-regarded user interface. Baselight Four: Storage: BL4 I/O - 1.4 TB. The latest movie written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, took the 2019 Cannes Film Festival by storm.Baselight Four color grading full system.Baselight Color Grading Plus A ViewerHowever, if you instead double-click to open Baselight into its own window (or click the “pop out” button at the upper right corner), you get all of these controls, plus a viewer that’s useful for other Baselight functions (like drawing curves), as well as LUT and Viewer controls, and Baselight’s own take on the Histogram overlay scope.This self-contained window can be enlarged to be full-screen, and the divider separating the controls from the image preview and histogram can be resized, giving either half of the interface priority.Now is probably a good time to point out that the Baselight plug-in is compatible with the Avid Artist Color control panel, allowing you to control much of the UI using that panel’s trackballs, rings, knobs, and buttons.The general idea behind Baselight is that you can build up a grade using layers. However, after adding a few secondaries, I needed to select dynamic for both Playback Video Quality and Playback Frame Rate in order to maintain performance.Incidentally, the accompanying documentation recommends legalizing out-of-bounds (over 100%) signals with a Color Corrector 3-Way filter prior to the FilmLight plugin, to make sure no part of the signal gets clipped when being fed to Baselight.When you open your clip’s Filters tab, you’ll see the Baselight plugin collapsed vertically, with instructions to expand the Viewer window in order to see the UI within the Filters tab, or double-click the Baselight box to open a dedicated UI in its own window.If you expand the size of the Viewer and the width of the Parameters column, most of the Baselight controls appear, which is an amazing sight to see inside of Final Cut Pro.While the Baselight controls are visible in the Viewer, you can view your changes in the Canvas and via video-out on your video interface. Keeping in mind that you are able to stack many layers of correction one upon another, I was able to stack several layers of primary operations one on top of another and maintain good performance. Otherwise every clip you add this plugin to appears with the red render bars that force a complete render before previewing.The plugin’s performance was good with the primary corrections I was making. It’s effectively an application within an application, similar to the approach of other color correction plug-in user interfaces such as Colorista II and Magic Bullet Looks.For the best previewing performance while using Baselight, you’re recommended to use the Unlimited RT mode (resulting in orange render bars).They give you all of the tools, hence the Video Grade toolset that’s next in the list.This set of controls provides the familiar Lift/Gamma/Gain toolset that many of you may be more familiar with, with Shadow and Highlight contrast controls that allow for controlled compression and expansion of the Luma, and color balance controls with broadly overlapping tonal regions of influence, allowing extremely soft and subtle interactions between adjustments made to the darkest and lightest regions of the image.Incidentally, if you set the FilmLight pop-up menu to Default, you can then open the Region Graph tab, within which you can redefine the tonal ranges of influence exercised by the lift/gamma/gain controls.Once you’ve created new curves, you can save the result as a graph that you can recall later.You may also notice in the image above that an RGB Correction graph shows you the effect your adjustments are having on each of the three color channels of the signal. The Shadows/Midtones/Highlights ranges are more restrictive, allowing far more specificity regarding which parts of the picture are excluded from each color balance control’s effect (I’ll be doing a separate blog entry on film-style grading tools later). Furthermore, in this mode the exposure sliders provide curved control of the knee and toe of the signal.Colorists coming from more video-oriented toolsets may find these tools strange, but these controls were designed specifically for film colorists who come from a completely different tradition, and the truth is once you get used to this style of working, you’ll discover a range of situations for which they provide fast solutions.However, the beauty of Baselight is that they don’t just give you some of the tools. The names of the three color balance controls may be deceiving if you’re used to other grading applications that use the labels of Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights incorrectly, because these color balance controls influence a completely different set of tonal ranges then do the Lift, Gamma, and Gain controls found in the Video Grade toolset. The R G and B contrast sliders are ganged by default, but an individual slider can be unganged by turning off its button, directly underneath.Finally, the Saturation sliders provide global control over saturation, but interestingly you can selectively disable ganging on individual color channels, with the result being a sort of color rebalance that works quite differently.Exposing the ShadsMidsHighs tab reveals another set of film-oriented controls.Although this may appear to be a standard three-way color balancing system, it’s not. In particular, the separated “Film Grade” and “Video Grade” tools are an interesting way of exposing two very different kinds of functionality to colorists of different backgrounds.Examining the Film Grade first, two tabs with three main controls each are exposed.The left-most tab, ExpContSat, contains an exposure section which provides you with a global exposure slider (raising or lowering the entire signal equally), as well as a global color control that allows for offset adjustments of color (letting you re-balance color by raising or lowering each color channel in its entirety).The Contrast sliders let you expand or contract contrast with a single adjustment, about a pivot point that’s defined via the middle dotted cyan lines intersecting the diagonal graph found underneath. These toolsets are the Film Grade, the Video Grade, the Curve Grade, the Hue Shift, and the Six Vector tools.Each of these tools can be qualified using either keying or shapes, and each tool has parameters for making adjustments both inside and outside of a secondary qualification, simply by clicking the tools button in the appropriate column.These different toolsets are a unique way in which Baselight organizes what you can do.
Baselight Color Grading How To Efficiently SetHueSaturationLightness provides a complete set of hue curves, while RedGreenBlue provides dedicated luma and color channel curves as a separate set. As I mentioned, Baselight gives you all the tools, with every variation you might like.Baselight also includes a powerful Curve Grade toolset.Two tabs worth of curves are available. In Y’CrCb mode, contrast expansion decreases saturation. In RGB mode, contrast expansion increases saturation. ![]()
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