By Karen Moltenbrey

Color grading, like editing, is a collaborative process. However, there are times — even before COVID restrictions dictated so — when it is simply impractical for clients and colorists to be in the same space, thus necessitating the need to work remotely. However, when COVID hit, clients and colorists suddenly had little choice in whether to adopt a remote workflow or not. Suddenly, working remotely was the norm, not the exception. And some found it to their liking, while others see it as more of a temporary solution.

Company 3’s Siggy Ferstl
Where we work and live has a large impact on our happiness. Some prefer the hustle and bustle of a big city, others the tranquility of the mountains or desert. For Siggy Ferstl, his preference leans toward the tropical, specifically Oahu, Hawaii. So toward the end of 2020, with COVID stay-at-home restrictions still in place, he left the Santa Monica area, where he has worked since 2007 at post production studio Company 3, and set up a grading suite in a room atop his garage on the island.

In the early days of the restrictions, Ferstl worked primarily out of the Company 3 office, where strict protocols had clients mainly participating off-site. However, for the past five months and counting, he has been living and working in paradise, using a custom remote workflow to color a number of TV pilots, series and commercials, including “Field of Dreams” for Chevrolet as well as the movie Children of the Corn, a prequel to the 1984 horror film of the same name.

Ferstl set up his coloring suite himself, with remote assistance from Company 3’s engineering team. According to Ferstl, the team “built a box that makes it possible for me to work the same way I have been working at Company 3 in Santa Monica. Of course, for security reasons, we couldn’t have any media leave the Company 3 facility there on Exposition [Expo] Boulevard.” Therefore, all media resides on company equipment at the physical location there, with multiple layers of security in place. When the colorist makes a correction on his control panel, he is essentially sending “instructions” back to his Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve at Expo, connecting to the hardware back at the physical business location.

“It sounds simple, but it was a big deal to be able to do this. Our engineering team did a lot of work to make this possible,” Ferstl notes.

The process began with a collaboration between Company 3 and Blackmagic Design to add software to Resolve 17 that expands the way panels could connect to media beyond the standard USB cable, which had always been necessary. Then they built a small device based on a simple PC motherboard and several cards and placed that between the panel and the editor’s 400Mb connection.

“The whole device is maybe a little bigger than a Mac Mini, and it runs the connectivity between my panel here and hardware at the physical business location,” explains Ferstl. “Going the other way, the same device runs various kinds of streaming software, which can receive and decode the corrected image back from Expo. I’ve connected the device with coaxial cable to my Sony X300 monitor so I can see the image as I make adjustments. All this happens with almost no latency at all!”

Also in his converted studio on the island, Ferstl set up a Blackmagic Advanced Panel for Resolve and a Sony BVM-X300 critical reference monitor, which was calibrated at Expo for Rec. 709 and Rec. 2020 (standards for image encoding and signal characteristics for HD and UHD television, respectively) as well as DCI-P3 (standard color space for digital cinema). He added blackout blinds to the windows and painted the space a neutral white for further color accuracy.

While his surroundings may be quite different now, Ferstl’s workflow is very much the same. “I’m coloring with exactly the same equipment. And from my standpoint, the actual work [process] of coloring is the same,” he says.

The finishing editor also works in Resolve, either on-site or from a work-from-home secure workstation with the same connection as Ferstl’s. “Wherever they are, and wherever I am, we can both work on the same project and share a timeline so each of us sees when the other makes any changes,” Ferstl explains. “We’re both actually using tools and hardware that are physically at Expo. But our ability to work with each other and with clients is essentially identical, regardless of where we are physically working from.”

In fact, many of Ferstl’s clients had made use of Company 3’s remote services long before COVID, particularly with commercials. “That’s nothing new,” he says. “It’s the world we live in now, where people want to be able to work from anywhere.” Of course, communication continues to be important with clients, and for that he uses a remote communications app — and he’s used just about all of them.

Clients view the work from their own monitors or personal devices via a Streambox/Sohonet ClearView feed from Expo — no different from the setup they would use for a client working off-site if Ferstl were coloring at Expo. Several options are available to ensure that the client’s and colorist’s monitors are synched, with the new iPad Pros being the most consistently reliable, he has found. Clients are also provided with the settings Company 3 has found to be optimal for accurate display.

While opinions differ on remote workflow and its subsequent impact on employees, especially artists, Ferstl does not believe it has adversely affected his level of creativity. “When I’m working, I’m working. My location does not affect that,” he states. He does, however, concede that there are pros and cons to remote workflows.

“There is something to be said for having the direct interaction I have with colleagues and clients when I work at Expo,” Ferstl says. Although, with limitations still in place on in-person working, “it’s great to be able to work from here. My commute is a few steps! I like that when I have a meal break. I can just walk across my front yard to the main house, which is definitely nice for my mental well-being.”

So what happens as COVID restrictions subside? Ferstl expects many clients will want to work at Expo. But there still will be options for those who are away on location, on vacation or do not live close to one of Company 3’s locales.

As for Ferstl, his relocation to Hawaii is just temporary, and he will be based in the LA area once again. “There are advantages to working in the same room with a client, and many clients prefer to work that way and come into our beautiful facility,” he says. “I love having this option when there are so many restrictions in place, but I don’t see this as being a permanent way for me to do my job. Perhaps there might be some type of hybrid approach, where I could possibly work from here part of the year or something like that, but there are no immediate plans to do anything like that.”

Studio Feather’s Ana Escorse
When work-from-home mandates began last March, Toronto-based Studio Feather lead colorist Ana Escorse was one of the multitudes who began working remotely with clients. Perhaps lucky for her, the remote workflow was not entirely foreign, as she had already collaborated on a few remote projects prior to the nationwide lockdowns.

When the pandemic hit, forcing WFH situations, Studio Feather thought it made the most sense to keep all the grading equipment at the office since the rest of the staff there (visual effects artists, motion designers and so forth) would be working off-site. “I had the place essentially to myself,” says Escorse, the only full-time colorist who had been working out of the office.

Escorse needed very little additional equipment to accommodate her remote workflow, as she would continue to work on-site while her clients would be elsewhere. “We already had the base of our workflow established. But I will say that as it became clear that quarantine wasn’t going to go away anytime soon, it was really about experimenting with all the tools that were available and seeing how we could push our system and improve workflow,” she points out. For instance, they tried tools like Evercast, Streambox, Vimeo, Zoom and Blackmagic Web Presenter, testing out the latency and quality of each system and determining what worked best for Studio Feather and the clients.

At the office, the colorist uses a FilmLight Baselight system with three Eizo monitors, a Sony BVM-HX310 reference monitor and an iPad for videoconferencing. Communication with clients is being done via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, depending on the agencies’ preferences.

During lockdown, Escorse has worked on a number of projects, finishing spots for Sephora, Tim Hortons and EOS lip balm. The process has been relatively seamless, she contends, with most people having grown used to the remote workflow, herself included.

When it comes to color grading, it is important for the colorist and client to be on the same page. To that end, Escorse does not ask clients to make any major changes to the monitor on their end. “It’s really about best practices right now. I remind them to turn off any Night Shift or True Tone, make sure their brightness is not all the way down and, whenever possible, to check the project on more than one device,” she says. Additionally, clients are sent a link so they can download and view a high-resolution file from outside their browser.

That’s not to say remote workflow is without issues, particularly those that are technical in nature — adequate bandwidth, for instance. And sometimes it takes a while to get feedback, especially when connectivity problems arise.

Escorse emphasizes that during a remote workflow, it’s important to anticipate the additional time it might take to receive approval and feedback — “and not always having the luxury of quick notes in the moment.” She also points out that with everyone at home, people have a lot on their plates and are multitasking like never before. “Creating time and patience for that is really key,” she says, contending that the remote-work process has made her a more patient person overall.

However, she does miss the creative energy and buzz that is generated with a project while being in the same space as others. Also, working remotely negates the ability to sit with a client during the color process, and she does miss that personal interaction. And while difficult at first, WFH has become less of an issue for her over time.

“After a year of everyone becoming more comfortable with this workflow, we are no longer tethered to the geographical nature of who can attend a session in person. To account for not having someone in the room, we really made an effort to prioritize communication and make sure people had seamless access to me and the picture,” Escorse says.

While no one can predict with any certainty when things will return to normal, it is Escorse’s opinion that it likely will be some time before clients will be in the same room as the colorist. “But hopefully, that will be sooner rather than later,” she adds.

Even when there is a return to normalcy, many believe the industry will retain some elements of a remote workflow, and Escorse is among them. The pandemic, she contends, has opened our eyes to the need for change, and this industry has proven there’s a lot that’s possible to accomplish remotely. “I’m a fan of problems that force the need for reinvention, and I’m excited to see what else comes out of this experience in terms of technology.”

In fact, the colorist foresees something of a hybrid model in the future, an option for whomever cannot attend a color session in person, either because of schedule, logistics or working within a larger global network. “The horizons of collaboration have expanded to include other markets, other cultures, other styles, and that is really exciting to me,” says Escorse.

Main Image: Siggy Ferstl in his home studio in Hawaii

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Karen Moltenbrey is a veteran writer covering visual effects and post production.