@Shian I dont know if its apparent...But I often wish I could have someone like say..Roger Deakins as my mentor.........but I realize now that no... I would rather learn from someone like you. This is 2012...you are on the CUTTING EDGE of an era where a $700 camera can shoot a feature that looks damn well good enough to pass on the big screen to most viewers.YOU have the REAL WORLD knowledge based on experience... and you have a passion and tenacity about cinema and sharing what you know and continue to learn with others. In 15 years people may be talking about YOU the way they do Ridley Scott and will say this I for one respect you sir...and if I could choose an Obi-Wan in my life as a filmmaker... right now I would choose you. If other people on the forums don't want to heed your wisdom.....f-ck them. -

I'll say it again, "Being a good filmmaker means you have to make decisions whether it be on set or in post. Great filmmakers make great choices."

@stonebat I never want to lose the EDL info because I don't want to have to do further editing. And to get separate clips in AE, Resolve, etc, you need the EDL. No. what I mean is; you are done futzing with the cuts. The film is done, locked, no more editing, moving on to grading, FX, sound, score, etc. decide and deliver.

I realize that for many of you, this is a foreign concept. We are used to doing everything in one program. Maybe we'll bring in elements created in another program, send certain shots to AE or Motion for FX and such, but always finishing in our NLE, rendering it out, and calling it finished. And for most tiny projects, this works. But feature films and television, the standards by which we usually measure our work, are not produced this way. In fact until FCPX, FCP had a 10bit max limit for rendering, but mostly it was 8bit. "Hello, color banding." I would always finish in AE just for that reason. But now current NLEs have 32bit capabilities, so it's not that big of an issue in that regard, unless you are still using FCP7.

Most people, and I was one of them too until I started doing it professionally, who work in a NLE environment think that a visual piece should always be fluid... and they tinker with it endlessly. Which is why most indies take forever to finish, they just keep getting tinkered with, and some just go away, and are never finished. You have to decide. AND Finish...

Finishing is the hard part. With my film "Singularity", I agonized over whether or not to say, "It's good enough. Not perfect, but good enough given my resources." After consulting with many of my filmmaking friends, I had to just call it: time of death, September 10th 2010, and submit it to the world. We had film lock on it for over a year (2009), but I was unhappy with the VFX. So I and the VFX team kept tinkering. Was I happy with the delivered film? No. Would I have liked to spend another 6 months to a year making that one final FX shot I wasn't happy with perfect, and reshoot a couple of moments I feel didn't really work? Yes. But it had to be finished. And it did what I wanted it to do - it showed people I could direct one hell of a movie, won some awards, it gets me invited to movie premieres, gets me meetings at the studios, TV work, etc. It was a very productive $1500 investment. One that would still be sitting on my hard drive if I didn't decide that for the budget, it was as good as it was going get, and release it into the wild. Move on to the next project. Learn from my mistakes, and move forward.

I've adopted the "hollywood workflow" if you want to call it that, because it produces better results. I suggest you do the same if you ever plan on working in production as a career, so that it will become familiar to you. Or if you just want to get better results than you are getting just working in an NLE alone.

@tonalt Film Lock = The edit is locked - no more changes.. time to finish and deliver.

@shian what is film lock?

"My workflow consists of the following (All Pro level Film workflows are similar)

1) Edit in an NLE. ----GET FILM LOCK!---- (can't stress this enough)"

...Number 1) I'm having difficulty with, especially for feature length. I think a (budget) workflow should allow editorial round-tripping for both grading and sound. Flame Premium has this tight iteration going, but it's not for mortals... I guess the alternative is to break down the project in 9-10 sub-projects and get Picture Lock on those as they happen.

@shian cheers!

@shian Quick question.. would any of your ghears work as a diffuser / or how would you suggest I go about it to make a hazy (non-flat) look? Maybe it's something that is covered in a tutorial in which case I'll be glad to watch it.. I've been using MBLooks for this kind of thing before but I would like to try it out in AE if possible /if it can yield better results.

@Shain No need to qualify yourself here. I was pretty upset with the things that were said too as it was pretty much said you did not know what you were doing. All of us in this thread know that you know what you are talking about. What bugged me most was like you said, opinions were given, but they weren't presented as opinions, they were presented as facts without evidence. Keep up the good work, we all appreciate the work you put into Color GHear and the work you put in to the tutorials, I have learned so much from them.

Okay, back to the original topic. The GHrain killer tutorial helped out A LOT!! I do have one question though. When applying it to an adjustment layer, should I apply it to the layer directly above the source, or is it just a matter of personal preference as with the other layers??

To be as concise as possible on the subject:

My workflow consists of the following (All Pro level film workflows are similar. Keep in mind, most 35mm feature films HAVE a Digital Intermediate that consists of DPX sequences. So the workflow was established using a model that had separate audio from video.)

1) Edit in an NLE. ----GET FILM LOCK!---- (can't stress this enough)

2) Export to Soundtrack Pro (or) OMF to Pro Tools or Logic (or whatever) for final sound mixing/editing. (If doing music video type work, this isn't necessary, just skip to step 8 for audio)

3) Export Edit via XML, AAF, or EDL to AE/Davinci/SpeedGrade/Baselight for grading

4) Grade

5) I do all my titles and graphics in AE, so that's never a problem. BUT if they're created in Motion, or in your NLE, export them in a format with an alpha channel for compositing. (Quicktime Animation with Alpha, PNG sequence, TGA sequence, etc.)

6) If titles and graphics not done in AE, composite titles and graphics onto Graded Narrative in AE.

7) Export final narrative video track with Grades and composites to ProRes 444 or DNxHD 444 file.

8) Export sound mix as wav or aif file. (or in the case of surround, multiple files, or ac3 file)

9) Marry sound to video either in NLE with 32bit processing, or in Quicktime Pro (which just connects them with a wrapper. QT PRO users can hit "save" and skip to step 11 because all QT will do is weld them together with no loss.)

10) Export final product to high data rate 444 codec.

11) Using final product - make DVDs, Blurays, web videos, etc. (replace stereo audio with Dolby ac3 where appropriate)

Adopt this, and thrive.

Appreciate that, I only offer my advice/opinions to help. One thing I think we can all agree on is that Color Ghear is awesome , regardless.

Yeah but the issue with DYNAMIC LINKING ...is this 1 This method will precomp everything in PP if you select several clips- so do "save as" first if you do this... (Which I didnt which Is why Im stuck with my archaic method...)

2 Kiss your RAM goodbye...BOTH PP and AE have to be open to do this.... 3 PP is PAINFUL to work with after you grade the clips

IN MY OPINION>>>> ..If you understand compression and choose proper settings in Media Encoder upon export you will NOT have "degradation" that's noticeably different from exporting via After effects.

Note this is my opinion and doesn't constitute internet bickering...

This issue applies to pushes and other transitions of that sort...I had some in my title sequence and discovered this myself. Now TYPICALLY unless your making Oceans 14, or a Star Wars knockoff you wont have allot of non-disolve types of transitions but still this is a tricky issue. My current work around, albiet archaic is I am grading all the clips and sending them back to PP as Prores 444 Linear off Quick times. I left the titles(I built in Motion) In PP deleted the original edit and am re-building with the graded shots...