For many years the only way of automatically balancing the color in video footage was via a crude method of selecting, in the editing system monitor window, something that is meant to be either black, or white. Most editing systems would then remove any offset in the Red, Green and Blue channels to balance them all out, thus creating either a pure black or white. This had the benefit of, to some extent, helping to fix any strange offsets in the RGB channels. Very few tools changed exposure, brightness or contrast, or allowed the user to choose both black and white points to give an even more accurate result.
For many film, TV program or advert makers, balancing color on each shot became a necessity, even if well shot by the cinematographer or cameraperson, especially when multiple cameras were used at varying times of day and in different locations and weather conditions.
In more recent years, software developers have tried to create more advanced tools, which do try to adjust exposure as well as rebalance colour temperature offsets that are undesirable to the viewer.
Often color correction or color balancing video footage is used when there is material that has a poor color temperature set during shooting, or if the material was underexposed, poorly lit, or in the case of old archive film footage, either the film has deterioated, or is poorly transferred to digital. This means the video footage can look, to a viewer, that it is of poor quality, and if working for a client of any kind, reduces the perceived value or budget of the material that has been shot. Even for the viewer, any unnatural color balance in video footage can have the effect of putting an emotional barrier between them and the actors or subject matter.
ColorGradr was developed to help some of these challenges. As a colorist by trade, I came at this challenge (of automatically balancing video footage and color correction) based on my fifteen years of working in the industry specifically in this role. By discussing and working through the steps I take as a colorist to dramatically improve video footage, with my co-founder Charles, we were able to produce some complex algorithms that could work up to 50x faster than I am able to in rebalancing footage that has arrived to me with errors in shooting.
At times, ColorGradr has been able to automatically color correct and balance footage in under a second, anyone manually doing it in a piece of grading software with a mouse/wacom pen could take up to a minute using video scopes, waveforms and histograms, and even then not get such a ‘clean’ end result.
As such, having ColorGradr as part of an editing workflow can save a huge amount of time. After using it, the creative process can begin, and so move on to aesthetic manual and of course automatic creative color grading using ‘looks’ (LUTs/Cubes).