Hullfish on Color

Steve Hullfish, author of Color Correction for Digital Video, explains his new book where the focus seems to shift from Color Finesse to Color. From the Telecine Internet Group:

"At the risk of making a commercial plug for my own upcoming product, I recently toted FinalTouch around the country to 12 of the top colorists that I could find who would take part in a little experiment. I am writing a book on color correction and at the time, FinalTouch seemed like the cheapest and easiest solution for presenting a semi-da Vinci-like color corrector using the same footage to all 12 colorists. I didn't want to use da Vinci itself because as I wrote the book, I needed to have access to the screen grabs and specific color correction data that the colorists created in their sessions.

The concept of the book is to show how 12 different colorists approach the exact same images. It's a very interesting study. Some images diverged widely from colorist to colorist. Others took the image to the same basic place, but through different routes. All of the colorists that I did sessions with were da Vinci colorists with the exception of one Nucoda colorist (who has also had plenty of da Vinci experience.) All 12 colorists sat down at the system with little training and were able to accomplish fairly sophisticated grades including secondary work. All 12 colorists certainly had complaints about the system and had requests for certain da Vinci-like tools. Some were a little frustrated by the workflow, but all were able to do their work quite successfully and creatively. It is definitely NOT a da Vinci killer." ...more at [Tig] color