Sun Dec 18, 2022 5:20 am
I eyeball it and use scopes. All the matching is done by hand -- none of it uses "Color Match" per se. Density problems are a huge problem with old B&W movies, because they frequently use what I call cut-in opticals, where a second before a dissolve begins, there's a splice and a 3rd-generation optical effect pops in and does the A/B roll dissolve. And then once the dissolve finishes... there's another splice and it goes back to camera negative.
Making these precisely match is incredibly difficult, often because there are shading problems -- meaning that one side of the picture is brighter or darker than the other. I often have to jump through hoops to reduce or eliminate these problems in B&W. The dupe stock used for the optical effects (titles, transitions, composites, etc.) sometimes ages at a different rate that the camera negative, so what may have matched perfectly 30-40 years ago no longer matches today. Sometimes, a keyframed dissolve won't handle the bizarre, non-linear level shifts in film, so you wind up having to laboriously go frame-by-frame through the sequence, which is the only way to fix it.
It all takes effort, but given enough time and experience, it can be done pretty effectively. B&W for sure is a difficult medium to work in, since it becomes more of a struggle to provide depth in the image -- you don't have the luxury of color to create the depth, only light and shallow. If the DP lit it well on set, then there's no problem.
Of course, this all assumes you have a calibrated display, a color managed output (like a Decklink or UltraStudio), and decent scopes. Gallery Stills are also a must.
marc wielage, csi • VP/color & workflow • chroma | hollywood
