COLOUR GRADING
Post-House quality colour grading, without the post-house price.
Commercial broadcast quality colour grading can be prohibitively expensive with the cost of grading a project in a post-house colour suite coming in anywhere from £100-500 per hour!
At Scarlet View Media we believe commercial broadcast quality SDR and HDR grading should not be out of reach for small and medium sized production companies. We colour on pro-studio hardware and software (the same software used in those pricey post-houses in fact), but we operate from a home studio meaning no overheads on a facility and we pass those savings on to you.
The magic of HDR
HDR, or high-dynamic range, is a relatively new technology which can elevate the image you see on your TV or smart device to an entirely new level. It’s found on nearly all the best TVs, including midrange and high-end TVs as well as many budget models and smart devices. On a good-quality TV displaying real HDR TV shows, movies and games, you’ll see brighter highlights, better contrast and deeper, more realistic colours. The image overall is just more lifelike.
The majority of our work is in the current standard, SDR, however if you or your client requires HDR masters, our colour suite is enabled to grade, monitor and deliver HDR and the visually stunning results that come with it.
Our tools of the trade
Our in-house colourist, David Diley, uses up-to-date Da Vinci Resolve Studio software with a variety of plugins for film emulation, noise reduction and other key elements of building your bespoke project looks.
Our grading and edit suite is an Intel i9, 64GB PC able to read and write from/to both Windows and Mac formatted hard-drives, fitted with a Nvidia RTX 4070Ti GPU and a BlackMagic Decklink Mini-Monitor 4K to ensure true colour reproduction.
That true colour reproduction is monitored on dual calibrated 10bit monitors, a 4K, 32” ASUS Proart HDR and SDR Mastering monitor, and a 4K Benq Rec709 monitor meaning we can accurately master your project for whatever delivery platform you have in mind.
What we do with your project
The complexity of what you want for the final look of your project will dictate how much we need to do to achieve a particular aesthetic, however, there are certain elements of building a final look which are essential in every project.
1. Colour Correction
This is the process of balancing every shot in your film, so the whites, blacks and colours are matched and the highlights and shadows are consistent. This is the first stage of every grade we do; no project leaves our studio without proper colour correction being done first.
2. Primary Grade
This is where colour palettes are applied, colour is boosted or desaturated, contrast adjusted, areas of focus and shadows, midtones and highlights are manipulated, and the look really starts to take shape.
3. Bespoke Look Build
We can use LUTs if you want us to, but we very rarely do. We like to build everything manually, meaning we create a look unique to your project and in-line with the message and feel of the whole piece. Every shot has the same precise attention to detail and flexibility working underneath a LUT may not allow.
4. Mastering & Delivery
This is where we create your final graded masters as an optimised, quality controlled master file. Whether in SDR, HDR or a HDR10+ format for use on either compatible platform, we can create a graded master to go back to your editor, or create the final masters for delivery.