What is grading

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Ken
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I've seen the term grading mentioned on several occasions in this forum, but as a newbie at this game what is it, do I need to do it, and if so how.... puzzled of Tunbridge Wells :D
 
Grading is getting a certain feel/colour to the image, different to colour correction where you try get it as close to the real picture.
 
I presume this is a bit like adjusting white balance on a RAW shot as in my Canon Digital Photo Professional, but how do you do that with video footage.
 
Firstly you need to load it into a video editor such as avid, premier pro, final cut, sony vegas etc and then usually it will be done in effects. Different programmes have different effects and just like photoshop, a variety of ways are available to achieve a desired result.
 
Its just the colour balance of the footage, during editing all the footage is 'graded' to have a consistent look.

With traditional film editing this involves making positive contact prints from the negative/inter-negative which are 'timed' to a specific colour balance/contrast/brightness using different combinations of Red, Green and Blue for a positive colour model system or Cyan, Magenta and Yellow for a negative colour model system when exposing the film. These will be reviewed by the director and director of photography who will say frame XXX add +2 of red and -1 of blue for instance until the balance they want is satisfied and the relevant correction for every frame is used when producing the release prints.

With digitally shot or digital intermediate (the film is scanned, edited, graded and then wrote back into film by a laser) edited footage, the same process is done in software where so much of each colour channel is boosted/reduced to create a constant colour balance look for every frame. Generally digital 'grading' and tradition 'timing' can create the same look except for extreme examples like print bleach bypassing which can only effectively be done on traditional 'timing' as the silver is retained in the print and where some films such as 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?' (first film to use digital intermediate editing) have a look which would be very difficult/impossible to create traditonally as whole colours are removed for example.

Hope this goes into enough detail for you.
 
Another use of colour grading is to change the weather! I've seen footage shot on cloudy days made to look sunny and vice versa. Handy if you shoot scenes on different days or it clouds over.

P.s. Bleach bypass is often done digitally, I.e. Spielberg used the technique in saving private Ryan.
 
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Another use of colour grading is to change the weather! I've seen footage shot on cloudy days made to look sunny and vice versa. Handy if you shoot scenes on different days or it clouds over.

P.s. Bleach bypass is often done digitally, I.e. Spielberg used the technique in saving private Ryan.

The bleach bypass on Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report was done traditionally on the internegative, with 'Saving...' it was before digital intermediate technology came out (as mentioned the first film to use it was Oh Brother Where Art Thou? in 1999 and by todays 4K scanning standard it was extremely crude, only about 1.5K according to the cinematographer Roger Deakins who suggested they use it for the film after being unable to get the look they wanted by any traditional way, in the end though the 'crude' effect suited the films tone) and Speilberg has famously edited and finished all of his films except War Horse traditionally. What I was referring to was actually doing it on the release print rather than the interneg or interpos, because of the retained silver you get a depth to the effect on top of the increased contrast and de-saturated look, its not possible to get the same sort of effect digitally because of the physical presence of the silver but its only rarely done on the print (Roger Deakins used it for '1984' for its infamous 'bleak' look as he was denied being able to shoot in B&W by the financiers) as the lab can't recover the silver so they charge accordingly.
 
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Colouring the video in post. Colour correcting and colour grading are kind of the same thing.
 
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