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About color correction

We can mainly differentiate between three kinds of color correction:

• Primary color correction
  Overall correction in a color space
• Secondary color correction
  Change of specific colors
• Spot color correction
  Change of colors at specific places inside the frame

In the HD postproduction workflow, we can color correct at two places:

• Digital color correction
  Can in theory change any color of a pixel to any other color in the color space.
• Film color grading
  Can only change the density of each color channel.

Color correction depends always on the talent of the grader and of the director of photography and of their common creativity to build a color look of their film.

Current color correction systems

The HD digital color correction can be done today in different ways:

• Tape to tape color correction
  Using high end equipment like DaVinci Color Correctors, one can achieve a powerful control of the color look of your film. However, the renting of the equipment is so expensive, that the resulting time is very limited. Also, there is no possibility to do the correction in Switzerland.
• Built in color correction of online editing systems
  Current nonlinear HD editing systems offer color correction using color effects. These effects are, however, basic, not realtime and do not offer a productive interface to compare scenes to match them with each other.
• Compositing or image processing software
  Offer sophisticated control, but are single-frame oriented and raise big questions about matching and media management.

We had to conclude that there is no system which allows production companies with european style low budget films to work in a creative way without prohibitive costs.

We observed however, that talented people are color correcting in swiss postproduction companies, but on standard equipment. We looked for a method which can preserve this talent and use their experience for HD production.

The Mimikri method

The color correction is not done in HD directly, but offline in SD from a downconverted copy of the movie. The color correction can be done on any equipment which can work in standrad definition, for example on an Avid Symphony.

Mimikri then uses the color correction and applies it to the HD.

Mimikri does not have to know how the color correction actually was done. It analyzes the video in SD before and after the correction frame by frame and the applies the result to the HD.

Mimikri can deal with primary, secondary and spot color correction and is an automatic process which does not need much setup time.

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