matt barlow wrote:it would make sense to capture a Macbeth Colour charts, or something similar, a white balance tool would save so much time in getting to a "neutral" start point.
This is particularly a problem with multicam set ups, three sensors are rarely identical,
matt
There were so many attempts to harmonize transfer intentions in the days of telecine rushes -- LIft, Gamma, Gain, Eastman Cine Tools, and sending probes back and forth -- all undone in a moment if someone went off the page... don't worry about sensors (or film stocks, or batches) ever being the same -- no two lenses are the same, and very often you will see a difference in a zoom from full wide to full tele. Projects and years went by... long discussions, heated meetings, standard charts, promises to shoot a MacBeth with every setup... and then you'd never see them... or worse, because of scheduling, there "will be" a chart but we had to shoot it before the first couple of takes, and then we had to do a split, and you won't see that Camera Roll until tomorrow... so eventually you start wondering what's the point?
Often I go back to some received wisdom "Make it look nice, anyway"... And when you definitely
don't have charts, say, a locked cut won't have them -- then it really is up to a judgement -- picking
something to make R=G=B.... may or may not be the right choice. Certainly a blown-out sky won't be helpful, or an over-exposed practical -- that may or may not be in the correct scene-related color temperature range. Maybe its supposed to be really warm, or really cold, or really green. And what you are doing is screwing up someone's artistic vision.
If you took away the Auto feature, I would never miss it, it would probably take me some time to even find it. My guess is that it wouldn't give me what we wanted anyway, and would find my own balance sooner - at least while discussing where we really wanted to go with the treatment. Color is a human interpretation and I have no enthusiasm for giving it up to the robots.
I see that FxFactory is introducing an "AutoGrade" plugin for a wide range of applications including Premiere, FCP7 and X -- which samples flesh tone and makes it something... maybe close to the "Inphase" axis. So, there, you don't even need the "I" bar on your scope, anymore.
jPo