The design of a metadata-based color management flow, in which software tools such as livegrade are implemented, ensures that all decisions made by the PDO are present throughout the project.
By: John Castro Macías
The rise of streaming platforms requires producers and creators to develop new high-impact original content; this need poses a highly competitive scenario where technical and aesthetic quality are a differentiating element.
An audiovisual product depends on the consistency between its visual, sound and narrative components. To achieve the balance between these elements, the producers appeal to talented artists in the different phases of the project, creating technical schemes and workflows that suit each show.
However, before implementing these workflows it is necessary to have the stories that the writers elaborate, who devise an attractive premise and shape the narrative intention that the project will follow.
Bringing the idea of creators to fruition proposes particular technical challenges. This is where the specific workflow design accompanies and supports all artistic aspects, including color. This element potentiates and unites all the components within a program and defines the look and feel of the work.
It is precisely here that color management appears as a tool that provides solidity and homogeneity in photographic processes, in order to bring consistency to the work during the production and post-production process.
The implementation of a data flow with color management from the set traces an artistic and technical scenario, in which all the parties involved in the process of creating an audiovisual project can continuously monitor the visual characteristics of the product.
Color management should ideally be present from the "table work" phase, in this way all those involved in the creative process (director, PDO, art and costume director, among others) contribute their ideas for the construction of the look of the work, while simultaneously collaborating with the photographer to outline the technical guidelines that condition the workflow and propose the way forward for the show.
Once the aesthetic guidelines have been established, it is the task of the work team to represent these ideas in the most solid way throughout the process and to inherit them to the post-production group.
In this phase, the position of digital image technician (DIT) becomes essential, since it is responsible for verifying the correct processing of the signal and keeping track of the colorimetry, as well as monitoring the aesthetic evolution of the piece. This with the purpose of there being coherence in all phases of the filming by offering follow-up and solidity to the decisions of the team in the face of the coming processes.
The close collaboration that occurs on set between the director of photography (DOP) and the DIT produces various creative resolutions, which impact on the approach of the project by the different departments. By implementing metadata-based color management flow, these decisions solidly and traceably permeate the next stages of the process.
The design of a metadata-based color management flow, in which software tools such as livegrade are implemented, ensures that all decisions made by the PDO are present throughout the project.
On set, through signal monitoring, the specialist's instructions travel in the form of metadata to the following processes, so that they materialize in the creation of executive dailies that the producers review remotely, and are reflected in the proxies (formats) that the editorial team receives. This is so that they are distributed efficiently to the VFX team and used as a reference when composing in the project.
At the end of the process, all these decisions will reach the color room in the final stage, which will become the starting point of colorization and that the photographer's decisions at the time of shooting remain in force.
Currently there are technologies that work as an extension of color management based on metadata. Such is the case of Dolby vision and, even, the final screen, a resource that helps preserve and promotes the artistic aspect of a project, which guarantees that creative decisions are present from conception to exhibition.
Thanks to the color management workflow, all areas of production are directly impacted to give solidity to the aesthetic process, optimize resources and ensure that the intention of the creators finally reaches the viewer as it was conceived from the script.
*John Castro Macías, has more than 20 years of experience in the film industry. He has held various roles in the areas of production and post-production. He currently holds the position of post-production supervisor of Labo Mexico.
