Color Correction & Grading Details

After much study, I was able to successfully profile and calibrate my monitor... and be confident that it was correct (or good enough). One program that was instrumental was DisplayCAL, a free application that walks you through the profiling and calibration, testing, and verification processes. It will also create LUTs that you can then use in your grading application, or any application like Premiere Pro that is not color-managed under Windows and therefore will not utilize your new monitor calibration to show you correct color.

After profiling my Dell U3011 monitor, I created a LUT that I then used as my calibration LUT in Speedgrade, which is specifically designed for this purpose. It takes the data in Speedgrade representing your footage, assumed to be Rec 709, and uses the LUT to translate it into your monitor's representation of Rec 709. Otherwise, just like with sound, if my monitor was adjusted via knobs to a severe blue tint, I would be adding a lot of yellow to remove that blue tint on my screen, but when that color data is ultimately projected at a theater, it will be far too yellow, because that is what the data actually is. Your badly calibrated monitor will prompt you to make the wrong adjustments for a properly calibrated theatrical screen.

Once I had my footage corrected for both color and brightness/contrast, for shot-to-shot consistency, and the overall grade settled on, I could then output my footage and pull it back into Premiere to add titles, credits, etc., and finish for final delivery. This involved exporting each shot as a DPX file (frame) sequence that I then inserted on my timeline back in Premiere above the original footage. Since it was the same footage basically, just graded, it matched up perfectly and was an easy import. With that done, every time I modified the grade in Speedgrade, I simply needed to re-export from Speedgrade, and the changes automatically appeared in Premiere.

During my 6 screen tests, although my color was very close to what I remember in my room, the brightness was not, and I brightened the grade a little more after each test. Since Dead Run was to be set at dusk, I feared having the film be too bright on screen in a darkened theater, and daylight just wouldn't be spooky. So I erred (too much so) on the side of darkness. As an independent filmmaker, you can only do what you can do, and hope for the best. The rest is out of your hands. Professional Color Stages use $40,000 cinema-grade projectors and large screens to simulate the theater environment to eliminate as much variability as possible. The good news is that I was able to get good, consistent results with my Dell high-end consumer monitor in three different theaters where it was tested prior to release.

Return to Dead Run Film Page.