Originally Posted by
John Tissavary
Of course it's possible that the grade is going in a direction you're not wanting. Scratch is a color correction tool just like DaVinci, Baselight, etc..., and has no 'tendency' to make footage look like something other than what the user is directing it to.
Yes, Red can have a tendency to fall off a bit quicker in the bottom shadow range than film, but it's largely correctable unless the footage is too underexposed.
When you compare to 35mm, perhaps you need to break that down a bit to the components that you are going after to communicate effectively with the colorist - if they're not sure what you want, it's really tough to dial in long distance. Perhaps you're asking them to bring up the shadows a bit without raising the actual black level?
However: as others have mentioned, if you're viewing Quicktimes you're going to have a very hard time because you're dealing with a 'moving target'.
Overly dark (conversely, washed out, elevated blacks) are common symptoms of quicktime gamma bug (perhaps Apple considers it a 'feature' since it's been there for over 10 years and not yet been fixed). There are some codecs that are better in consistency - ProRes, DNxHD come to mind - but .h264 is an absolute mess from one system to the next.
Ask the facility to send you tif or jpg images (or sequences) instead. While these will be much larger files than .h264, at least you can judge what you're looking at. Also, you'll need to make sure you're viewing on a calibrated monitor - this is another place that the viewing chain often breaks down.
I just spent an extra week on a job because the (remotely viewing) client wanted QT, and the turnaround cycle called for .h264. The ensuing cluster#$%^ let to major discrepancies between what the client was seeing, what we were seeing (even in the same QT), and what the final DPX output was.
cheers,
JT
