Class on Demand Report Card

News, views, and information from COD | March 2010

In Living Color!

Colorful Characters COD got a massive boost this month with the addition of John Diel, who joined the team as Director of Sales. John has a tremendous track record and reputation in the industry and has, over the years, fostered outstanding relationships with both vendors and their distribution channels globally. John has hit the ground running working on partnerships for NAB. We’re all looking forward to working with him as a valuable member of the Class on Demand team. Read more about John Diel by clicking here. Color is here As we reported in January’s Report Card, Steve Hullfish and Bob Sliga have finished the ultimate training course for Apple Color. No other training company has such a complete course as Class on Demand for this outstanding post production tool that is part of Final Cut Studio. We’ve covered Color for years in our FCS training at an introductory level. The new training courses: “Basic Training for Apple Color” and “Advanced Training for Apple Color” provide almost ten hours of top-quality instruction from two of the industry’s leading experts. Both titles will be shipping shortly so take advantage of our phenomenal three-day promotion and get your order in early. Even more Colors We’ve been approached over the years by vendors who recognize our training as a reflection of their own value and quality commitment to the industry. We decided for our new Color titles to partner with some vendors who offer complementary products to Apple Color and whose coverage during the training would add value to the software training. Products and companies covered on the new COD Color training include: Tektronix Waveform Monitors and Rasterizers, Cine-tal Cinemage monitors, Datacolor Spyder monitor calibration, Tangent Wave Panel control surface, and Nattress Productions' Plugins for Color. Each product receives a dedicated chapter that describes how their product is used together with Color to produce professional color grading results. Colorful Company We couldn’t resist sharing with you some exciting news from our friends at Amazon. Our award winning instructor, Sue Jenkins, who teaches many of our Adobe training titles, received another COD accolade this week. Class on Demand’s immensely popular Designer’s Guide to Photoshop training reached Amazon’s top 10 video titles this week. Placed between Gossip Girl; The Complete Third Season and a somewhat dubious movie titled “Pleasure Factory,” the COD title continues to climb the ratings on Amazon (see below). One assumes that after watching and learning from Sue, anyone’s facility will be more “pleasurable” place to work.

Paul Holtz Fires Back

In the heady post production days of the 90’s, a top flight colorist could call their own shots and name their king’s ransom of a salary. Hollywood facilities would routinely coax colorists away from competitors by dangling blueprints of new rooms and glossy multi-page product brochures under prospective employee noses. Battles would be waged with the price tag of the Italian leather sofa for the client to lounge on. Da Vinci was the name of the game in color grading technology. Expensive proprietary solutions that came in a choice of color, black or sub-black sported sexy red, green and blue trackballs that lit up in the light muted color grading rooms. Windowless boxes, where thousands of dollars were spent on the neutral lighting around the Barco color grading monitors.

But things started to change as integrated workstations and software came on the market. When I was demoing the Pinnacle Alladin in 1995 I showed stunned audiences how to achieve secondary color correction (an effect of changing an object in the scene from one color to another) in real-time on a box that sold for less than $10,000. Today, there are fantastic color grading products incorporated into dozens of software products like AVID Media Composer and Apple Color. While there are still high-end rooms for the colorist, many of the corrective techniques and artistic tools that still cost over $100,000 are available to the producer as part of their production tools at a fraction of the cost (albeit with a significantly longer processing time).

I have to admit to some concern when Steve Hullfish and Bob Sliga approached me with their idea for our brand new Color training titles. They pitched me on the idea of bringing in partners to cover the topic in greater detail and to set up, as Steve put it, “a real world color grading environment.” It was a first for COD to have two instructors on camera let alone third party systems to cover. But as Steve explained the overall process of grading and the fundamental requirements to get good results, it became more and more obvious that what they were suggesting was really the only way to go.

I’m really proud of our new Apple Color titles. Steve and Bob do an outstanding job of demystifying Color and discussing the fundamentals of using color grading to fix issues with captured content and creating different effects with the software. They also explain the basics of setting up your room to get the best results. From Cine-tal Cinemage monitors, Tektronix Waveform Monitors and Rasterizers, and Datacolor Spyder monitor calibration to the Tangent Wave Panel control surface, every aspect of the color grading process is meticulously covered in over ten-hours of training. It’s so good I’m blushing, or is that a secondary color correction?

Color Blindness Simulator
If you are not suffering from a color vision deficiency, it is very hard to imagine how the world looks when you're colorblind. This color blindness simulator by Corblis is a great way to see how images look to others – you might want to check this out before you start your next Color project.
http://www.colblindor.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/