Pomfort products such as Livegrade Pro and Silverstack Lab come with a broad range of color grading features and share the same, flexible concept of grading nodes. In this article, we want to take a look at what you can do with these grading nodes, illustrate a few best practices for using them in real productions, and point out the consequences for the production’s color pipeline and workflow.
When starting a secure copy process of clips with Silverstack, you first ingest the video clips and all other related files into the Silverstack library. Silverstack supports you in detecting video clips automatically, to then supply playback, metadata etc. in its library. To work most efficiently with the clip library after the ingest, it makes sense to be aware of some basic concepts and also of spots in the UI of the app, that give you important information about what is currently displayed. This blog post aims to give you the most important basics when handling video clips and files with Silverstack.
The curve nodes in Livegrade and Silverstack Lab are powerful grading controls for applying creative looks and secondary color corrections. Having these grading tools available for live grading and dailies creation adds a lot of flexibility and allows to work more precisely compared to grading only with ASC-CDL compatible grading nodes. This article explains third-party compatible export formats and shines a light on the benefits of staying within the Pomfort ecosystem.
There certainly is no general, always valid guideline for executing on-set data management in film productions as the requirements can diverge a lot and are influenced by many factors. But there are certainly basic principles that practically nobody in the data wrangling and DIT world would argue about. Often these principles touch topics of security, speed, and clear organization.
For graded dailies creation, looks created in Livegrade can easily be transferred to Silverstack Lab. The provided looks act as a starting point for rendering dailies from camera original raw data into multiple formats. Livegrade and Silverstack Lab just added new color grading nodes and the option to adjust the intensity of grading nodes, so that color grading in Livegrade and Silverstack Lab gets boosts in speed, precision, and flexibility.
Pomfort ShotHub closes the gap to establish a seamless cloud based look workflow between the point of look creation and creating dailies with the intended look from original camera negatives. Looks created with Livegrade during the shooting process of a scene can be made available in a cloud project and then be fetched by Silverstack Lab directly for creating proxy clips with the right look. This enhances the existing file based look matching process, making it more seamless to receive look metadata and to associate it automatically with the clips from the camera card based on metadata.
One of the DIT’s responsibilities is to create and preserve on set looks plus make the corresponding metadata available for further processing beyond the film set. Especially if working remotely or shooting with multiple teams it becomes quite a challenge to fulfill these requirements. Here you can benefit from having a cloud connectivity on set for look metadata as well.
It is always a plus if a team has previously worked together – workflows are often already established, and the communication is easier. The Netflix action comedy ’Coffee and Kareem’ was not the first collaborative project for DIT Leon Rivers-Moore and the camera team he worked with, which made it a lot of fun for everyone to shoot. Silverstack and Livegrade Pro were two old companions for him as well, which he used for the media asset workflow, QC and color grading on set of this particular production.
The film set is the origin of a huge part of the creative work for a film production. The camera department’s responsibility in particular is to deliver the best possible images – as close as possible to the artistic intent of the DP.
Data management on a film set has grown into a multidimensional activity. In many cases the camera card offload is just the starting point and the responsible person can become the central hub for many questions as she or he manages the central assets of the production.
