Coronation Street Grading
In studios we always do a chart line up with a known colour temp light.
Broadcast colour management is how I spend a lot of my time when not editing or grading timelines. Effectively it is live grading.
“Live grading sounds scary.” I hear you say, and whatever is it?
Well on drama and TV we always manage the colour pipeline.
In studio we line the cameras up on a line up chart and then sit at F4 and let lighting do their thing. We are looking for picture faults and lighting issues, booms in, sharps, shadows and the like.
The engineer also does the recordings so we drive the server and work with the script supervisor to label the clips in a sensible way.
On TV material like Coronation Street it is pretty standard. Rec709 1080i HD. We have control of all the camera parameters such as iris, black level, colours and gamma, knee etc.
In tungsten studios we line up to 3200K and in bi colour LED studios we line up to 4300 to ensure even use of the warm and cool LEDs that make up a panel..
When we are out on location we have vehicles and separate trollies that we use for the grade and to record. We do sometimes use Arris and other specialist cameras and drones.
We do have a lot of pressures in post so we do try to make the rushes as camera ready as possible.
After grading we also sit at tech review for a final pass after the audio has been laid back and file exported. Broadcast colour management has kept me busy for most of my life.
