I am completely losing my mind over the "color correcting" bullshit for TROM II. 5 people, recorded over some 6 months period. For each we recorded 2-3 days, for me a few weeks probably. Each recording was some 3 hours long. We had to pause every 20 minutes because the camera was overheating.

Now the idea was to have everyone filmed on a dark background. We had a dark piece of material behind us, but a small room, and powerful lights. That created a non-dark background. At times it looked grey, at times blueish, at times brownish....

Combine all that with so many interruptions while filming over a period of months, and of course you realize that you can't have the lights placed in the same way. So you end up with some interviews being super exposed, some having different shadows, etc.. Georgi had a very white tshirt which made the lights reflect back a lot making her face washed out; I had a dark-blue shirt which made it so difficult to try and make the background pitch dark....

Also, people change colors while recording...Sasha for example has bright red cheeks at times :) - it is a feature of her own genes. haha. So at times she is normal looking, at times very red in one cheek. And so on....

And my task was to make them all look like it is ONE recording since I often switch between recordings in the same scene.....

And I did it but I made us all kinda darkish and Sasha's cheek overexposed :)).

Now combine this with the fact that originally I did the color correcting on my old laptop that had an LCD screen, and later on, I did it on the new laptop that has an OLED screen and I realized that some things looked very different. I had to redo this so many times. Also when I do color correcting at daytime vs night things look different....

I am going INSANE. And for what? The message matters....

Oh and add to it that Kdenlive is buggy when it comes to this so pretty often when I color correct it ruins the entire documentary and I need to move the clips (tens at times) from one track to another...it really fucks the entire documentary.

And I have to do this for a 5h documentary.

This is not healthy. I will give it 2-3 more days to see if I can do something, if not I'll probably give up and leave it as it is. I am telling you this is something no one notices unless you start to talk about it, then you start to notice some things. And if you want to "correct" that, then you fall into this black hole where there is no end in sight in terms of what and how you can improve.

#tromstuff