Julien Chichignoud

We're not really famous for being good with English... You'd have more luck in Germany, the Netherlands, etc... but you never know!

I did end up moving earlier in the year, but to Melbourne, Australia, rather than France for now. It's a good "first step" to see how the relocation on the other side of the world would go. I ended up keeping quite a few of my clients, which is good, and because I moved with the internet speed in mind (if you know anything about the state of the internet in Australia you'll know why I was careful) and I've been able to do a lot more remote work than before. The problem is that some of my clients still send me hard drives and I'd probably lose some of them by relocating to Europe, but I also have a few with whom I work fully remotely that wouldn't care about where I'm based. I'm going to France in December/January so my plan is to start getting in touch with people, see what's around and if I could start working remotely for French clients. That would be fine on my end, but a lot of my Australian clients have terrible internet and I know they wouldn't be able to upload things to me. But as I mentioned just before, with the move to Melbourne I'm starting to see which clients I can keep and which I can't.

I don't do much Beauty touch ups, and most of what I do is pretty quick turnaround, so I just use the quickest tricks, personally. Lowering the "Midtone Detail" option in Resolve is great for that (which is based on frequency separation). And I use the Hue vs Hue curve when skin colour is inconsistent (bad make-up, etc...)

Hi everyone, I'm relatively new here, so first, hello! I was wondering if anyone had experience to share about relocating themselves (and their businesses) and tips on how to handle it, approach new clients, etc... My story in short, I'm originally from France, and moved to Australia over 6 years ago. I used to be a freelance editor and broadcast QC operator, and got my start as a freelance colourist in Sydney, Australia shortly after arriving. I'm now thinking of going back to France, and the idea of rebuilding a network is a bit daunting. I'm at a point in my career in Australia where I'm very happy with the work I do and the people I work with. I work with people I've met shortly after arriving, and we've all progressed together, and I get new clients from word of mouth, personal recommendations, etc... I work from home 95% of the time, and clients don't even come in, just send me a drive or an upload probably for 80% of jobs. I get to spend more time with my son and work mostly the hours I want. So my ideal plan if/when relocating is to quickly get to a similar point where I'm in control of all of this and am not chasing new clients around. Where am at right now in my career in Sydney probably took a good 3 years of heavy networking, doing a lot of favours to a lot of people, but I'm getting too old to do this again I guess the main thing I need to figure out, is how to find and approach clients, since I'm just used to them coming to me, but won't have the luxury of waiting for them to come this time around. Australia has a (deserved) reputation of being of a very easy-going work culture, where things happen a lot more easily than in Europe, and I'm dreading the going back to the (also deserved) reputation of French administrative red-tape, setting up a business, etc... Any insight welcome

I'd say that regardless what people think is the best software, there's a lot of insight to be gained from learning more than one tool. I can't speak for Baselight, but personally when I trained and worked on Mistika, after several years on Resolve, I came out with a lot more understanding of what each tool was doing and about colour grading in general. I use to swear by Resolve, and it is still my tool of choice, but seeing how things work in Mistika made me more conscious of how every grading software has strength and weaknesses, and learning a new way to work because to have to adapt to new tools can give you new methods and tricks that you'll use in other software. It's kind of all blended in my head now, but I think that even when working in Resolve, Mistika has taught me more about how to use blending modes (because of its layer system) and organise my grades better (again because of how the "layers" work and how you "propagate" changes. Symphony taught me how to use curves (because the other tools were rubbish), and I probably got something from Speedgrade too. Regarding that Pascal Dangin quote, it's something I've heard as a criticism of Resolve too, with its YRGB tools that are a bit of a bastard way of working since it's doing its own math to keep the luminance levels the same (so you're affecting all channels when you're changing one). Personally I think it has its strengths, but it puts off a lot of purists. So learn the two. Maybe throw in a third. You don't have to be proficient in all of them (I certainly would need a bit of a refresher before taking a job on Mistika), but you can decide for yourself what works best and learn new tricks in the process. If you need to choose, I'd also base my choice on what your clients and potential clients use, as well as the actual benefits of each tool. At the end of the day you often don't have the choice, and you'll get some jobs partially based on if you know how to run the machine they have or not.

That's called a nap, I think

I think there's been some strange community decision that the internal Resolve denoising wasn't good, and a lot of people have been ignoring it without actually testing it out. I myself used to think that, until I read the Resolve manual a few years ago and figured out how to properly use it. The spatial NR used to be pretty terrible, but the temporal NR has always been very good, not to mention extremely fast. And since 12.5, the spatial noise reduction is actually doing a pretty decent job too. I use Neat Video in Premiere and AE, and I have a licence for the Resolve OFX version but I never think about using it, to be honest. It has some advantages with big messy grain, but its workflow is very time consuming, and I wouldn't be denoising as many shots in a project if I decided to use it over the Resolve tools.

Hello everyone, first post here! I started playing with that type of look a bit, though didn't get the time to get very far, but my approach was to key broad ranges of colours, desaturate them, and bring back artificial colour back in. Depending on source material, I'd get 4-8 "slices" of chroma values that would each get a different colour added back in. So for example, to mimic the look of Serge's photo example above, I'd key the grass, the skintones, the sky, the dirt/bricks, the blue clothes, the red clothes, the gold objects + dogs, desaturate everything, and add a specific chroma value into each of them. Would also need to play with how to blend the colours into the B&W image (probably a bit of softening/spreading of the colours), maybe a multiply-type blending mode and playing with overall sharpness. Looking forward to following this thread!