Colorist Matt McFarland: The Career Of A Filmic Time Traveller And ‘Forensic Colorist’

Welcome to the Color Timer podcast.

I am your host, Vincent Taylor.

This is the podcast where

we speak with professionals

who work with color.

If you have not checked out my podcast before,

it is a 15 minute podcast.

I'm trademarking it as a micro podcast.

It quite literally runs off a 15 minute sand timer.

Gimmicky, yeah, a little.

It's really to focus the conversation,

keep it concise and get to the

heart of matter straight away.

Today, I am speaking with

the lovely Mr. Matt McFarland.

Matt is a colorist extraordinaire.

He came onto my radar

because he's done a couple of posts

recently about remastering,

remastering some classic films and beautiful films.

So we're gonna drill down.

We're gonna talk about remastering what's involved.

So let's go.

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Explore the craft, creativity

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Welcome to the Color Timer with Vincent Taylor.

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Matt, welcome to the Color Timer.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Oh, it's awesome.

So I saw a post that you did a few weeks back

talking about mastering.

I can't remember the film that you're working on,

but I'm fascinated.

But before we even get to that,

I've gotta remember to start my timer.

You ready for the game show to begin?

I'm ready.

All right.

(laughing) Let's go.

Let's back up.

First of all, tell me about yourself,

what your background is and

how you got to where you are now.

Oh, wow.

It's a pretty eclectic background.

I moved out to LA to be a

cinematographer and a writer.

And then I found a bunch of other people

were doing that as well.

So I got a job in post at a visual effects house,

P.O.P. film, which became Riot Pictures.

And so I got lucky with that job.

And they had me timing

visual effects pretty quickly

because I had shot film.

So that was my background,

was taking match clips from the lab

and put them on a light box

and matching our visual

effects shots with printer lights

and then getting the film back.

And of course in that process,

your LUTs had to be 100% accurate

and that whole process had to be really tight.

Yeah, and then as DI started coming online,

a lot of my clients were calling me.

I was running a scanning and recording department

and they wanted me to do independent DI's

because independent DI's were $300,000.

And they said, if you could do one for 125,

that'd be great.

So I opened up a small company at a Raleigh Studios

and did that for about four years.

And we had another strike at the time.

And so that took care of that.

But yeah, then I got a job at

Warner Brothers as a colorist.

So, and I've been doing that ever since.

Yeah, right.

And then your based, where, sorry?

Right now I'm at ColorTime,

which is the North Hollywood-Burbank border.

Right, right.

So you're in LA.

And then you've come into this world of mastering.

Can you explain to me what, first of all,

excuse my naivety on it,

but what's involved with that?

Where do you start with something like that?

Even with somebody

bringing you a project like that?

Well, first obviously you go back to the neg.

Right now, the big push is scanning 4K or 6K,

even 8K off the original negative,

where for a lot of years it was done off the IPs.

But now with, you know,

monitor resolutions being what they are,

we're going back to the original negative,

which makes it a little tougher in some regards

because there's no timing built in.

IPs have a ton of timing built in.

So that comes us in a way,

usually depending on the

project and the time allowed,

we do a lot of research as far as

looking at the old masters to see what was done

and to see if that was approved.

And then also too, the best part when you get to do

this is going back to the original prints.

The studios will usually have a print that is

marked as Best Possible or Client Approved.

And so you go back and watch that print because

that's going to be typically wildly different than

the previous master you had.

And you'll see the limitations you had on film at

the time versus what was done on the reference.

Because I had a friend once called me a forensic

colorist because you have to kind of go back and

look at that and say, why does this look like that?

Was it because that's what a director asked for or

is it because of the limitation of time or

equipment or even a colorist?

You know, sometimes somebody might have done a one

light and you're stuck looking at a reference

wondering if that was

really what the intention was.

And then from there you go and you start setting

looks and if you're doing HDR,

which I've done a lot of, you try to...

The biggest thing with the remastering is not

trying to create a new vision of the film.

You try to go in and go for the intent of the film

and not create a new vision unless

of course a director tells you to.

But if you're doing - what I'd do, Terms Of

Endearment, you know, I mean, we did that in HDR.

You're not going to go really crazy on that. You

want to keep the essence of

the look of the film alive.

And if you had a blown out window

now you can see some detail out of it.

If you had some crushed blacks you could now see a

little more detail in there.

But you don't want to change that. That's not

typically something you would

think of as a HDR showpiece.

But it allows us to put that content out there on

HDR, Blu-ray, Dolby Vision typically.

When you're doing that initial research, like when

you're watching, when you've got that amazing

privilege to watch those prints,

this might seem like a silly

question, but do you take notes of that?

How do you kind of, or do you just get a sense of

the film when you watch it?

Yeah, no, I take notes and sometimes every once in

a while I take a little snap of the screenshot of

the projection just to

remind myself what I've seen.

Not that it's accurate, but just remind myself, oh

yeah, those highlights were really cyan.

Or, yeah, that was a really warm scene. But yeah,

that's usually the notes are,

hey, interiors are really warm.

Exteriors were, you know, skies

are really cyan versus very blue.

the blues leaning in the skies and things like

that. Just general notes.

And do you, I mean you kind

of touched on this already, but

how much do you then go, hey I

think this was a mistake, like

maybe you're looking at a print that is, the

quality has changed over the years,

you know, how do you ascertain whether or not

that is an accurate representation? Yeah, a lot,

and that's where experience

comes in. I've been fortunate in that

you know I started out in film,

you know shooting film, but also

scanning film and recording out film

and really being familiar with that

print process and knowing that you know what layer

of film, how does that print

fade over time, you know,

was the print too dark and too

bright and you could, it's

really just experience knowing

that that print shadows might be a little lifted

and also too knowing which

projector you're watching on, you know.

There's so many different

aspects to to think about, you know,

is the projector at nine foot

lampets or 14 foot lamperts, is

is there a hot spot? And

you have to just know that.

And then also too, but I mean we see, we use HD

references, old HD references

more often than the film print.

And that too is another thing you have to think

about because, you know, an old HD

reference is going to be at 100 nits,

whereas the print would be at 48 nits.

So now you're doing a thousand

nits and how's that all translate?

And it depends.

I've had filmmakers want me to make it as true to

the original master as possible and

not get detail out the windows.

others would want to see that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So even though you've got the ability

to see that information, maybe they don't want it.

Yeah.

I don't want to say specific films,

but one that I was doing that

was a very famous older film

from the 70s.

As you're panning across the room,

there's a bunch of 2Ks out

the windows with high rollers

and sandbags.

And obviously, that was never seen before because--

and actually, I used to shoot films.

So knowing that as a

filmmaker, if I sat there with my light

meter and said, oh, don't

worry, that window's blown out.

We're never going to see that.

Well, now we do.

So I have to know, well, they probably

didn't want to see that grip standing out there

smoking a cigarette.

So we have to bring that down.

And so then you have to create

artificial clips and soft clip

roll-offs and things like that.

But sometimes it's really pretty out the window.

Hey, cool.

Hopefully they want to see that.

So yeah, it's usually using your best judgment

unless you have the

director there, which I've had good

fortune having quite a few

really good directors and DPs.

What's the sense there when the director gets

to see an HDR version of an older film?

They must be pretty excited.

They are very excited.

And sometimes you have a director coming in

if they're still a very active director.

Sometimes they're really hesitant that you're

changing the look of their film.

And they have to put them at

ease and let them know that, no,

we're here to respect your film.

Some of the older directors are really excited.

And I've had a director get kind of emotional

because the film he had

over the years, the HD version,

it was a cult film.

Not a cult film.

It had a cult following, but

it was a studio release back

in the day.

And it always had a bad master.

And he was always afraid to see it in the screen.

Because people would go and have screenings of it.

And he just despised it.

What we did-- we even redid some visual effects

and created some things that he always wanted.

And yeah, he was really moved.

And it was really nice to do.

That's--

And it's satisfying.

Yeah, it's very satisfying.

It was great.

And he brought his family in

to look at it and all that.

And he's even reached out

after just seeing recent screenings

around the world of people wanting to see it,

how happy he is.

So that's always great.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, that must be brilliant.

This is a weird question, but do you

know what is the

motivation for a studio to go, yeah,

you know what, that film.

We want to remaster that film.

What provokes that choice?

Well, it depends on what the film is.

Because at any studio, you're going

to have an archive

department and a mastering department.

The mastering department's usually driven by money,

like what's going to sell.

Let's make some Blu-rays here of this title.

Maybe there's an anniversary

of the film release coming up,

that kind of thing.

But the archive department usually

is to get that decaying film

onto a nice archive master,

a digital restoration of it.

And so they'll usually do a nice 4K or 6K, 8K scan

to put that into the archive.

And so a lot of times, you're just scanning it

and putting a grade on it to

have it archived for posterity.

So that if that film

degrades any longer, they have it.

And you keep also a library available.

But yeah, a lot of times, it's obviously financial

or anniversary.

I did-- I will say one title.

I did Wayne's World a year or so ago.

Fantastic.

Yeah, no, that was great.

And the director came in, and that was Falmo.

And yeah, that was because

of an anniversary coming up.

And they did a big

re-release of it at various screens.

And that was cool.

Yeah, and so that was--

because the negative on that

is still in really good shape.

And they have film dupes of it.

But a lot of these old films don't.

They'll piece together some

O-neg here and some IP here,

a fine grain here.

And they'll piece together

the best pieces they can find.

We did-- when I was at Paramount,

one of the first titles I

did there was oddly a black

and white title, Elvis, King Creole,

which is actually a really good film.

And I remember they have a really-- their archive

department is really strong.

And they do a lot of diligent research.

And they don't really give up on elements

until they find what they want.

And the movie came out looking really nice.

There's a lot of work done

for some of the obstacles.

Because some of these old film obstacles

were dupes of dupes of dupes.

And they get really grainy.

We did a lot of work on those.

But the main title was really rough.

It was a lot of B-roll that

had been duped multiple times

for dissolves and for titles.

And it was just-- the whole movie looked great

except for that main title.

And the guy researching it at

the time wouldn't give up.

We're trying to find all

these-- he found all these B-roll elements

that were hidden under different names instead

of being called--

your main title is called, it was called, you know,

pickups or stock footage or

whatever, and it was some really great, and it just

saved the movie because if

you start out the first few minutes, looking really

rough, it kind of ruins it

for you, and this ended up being fantastic, and I

had a visual effects guy key out

because it had very explicit, or very specific

titles, title design, and so we

had a...

guy comp those out and we took those out and kind

of rebuilt the whole main tile.

And so that stuff like that's fine. It's really

rewarding, you know, to see that when it's done.

So yeah, stuff like that's cool.

With the archiving of the films, like you've got

your scans, you've got your grades,

what, you know, going out to the public, that can

be on a Blu-ray or I imagine that even have a

remaster that would be for

streaming or something like that as well.

But what is the archive held on to keep it? Is it a

digital format or is it something like a hard copy?

Well, again, it depends. I know it's usually stored

in the cloud as a digital copy.

They have a huge cloud archive of everything. Some

studios, when I was at Warner Brothers,

I don't know if they still do it because it's been

a while, but they would record out YCMs

of certain films, you know, very important films.

Because that's the best way to archive it.

It's a YCM film that black and white stock isn't

going to shrink or have any problems.

And we know now even with color film that if it's

stored properly, which it is now,

could last, you know, 100 years without any issues.

And so some places still record out

a digital copy. You know, some don't, but they have

it on the cloud. Makes me nervous, but you know,

there it is. So yeah, but yeah, and that's and now

they're doing a good job putting metadata in that

information too. So if they need to look something

up, they can find it because because right now you

go back to old versions of films and you know, they

spend months digging through files that

knowing that stuff isn't labeled correctly to try

to find elements. I did a -- right when the pandemic

started. I was working on a big film that had a

director's cut and they had, it took them forever

to find the cut list, you know, the old avid cut

list and pull list for the film. And for a while,

they were trying to eyeball it and it was

impossible. And so they, you know, it took

probably a couple months for them to find that. So

that, you know, and that became critical.

But in the future, that'll all be tagged with

metadata and people can find it a lot more easily.

I've kind of just very, very recently rediscovered

Blu-rays and got a Blu-ray player for the first

time in, I guess, 10 years. And the world of 4K

HDR, I mean, they look fantastic. I'm so glad I

did it. But what's going to happen when, you know,

this technology changes again? Is this archival

stuff, you're going to have to do all the, do them

all again or do you think it's?

Yeah, you know, unfortunately, as a colorist,

sometimes, well, there's issues with like,

how things are handled at the top versus I've been

a big advocate. I've been a big advocate for ACES.

I've been using ACES since probably 2015 or 2016, I

think before, before I needed to use it,

I knew I was going to want to use it. So I would

use it as my color science, even on a single

output remastering job, just so I could get

comfortable with how the curves and everything

works because it is a little, is a little unusual.

Yeah. That being said, I've tried to push studios

to use that because in 10 years time, you know,

when you come back to pulling these elements off

archive, if it says ACES CCT, you know, you can

then jump in and just apply transforms. Even if

ACES has become obsolete, people will know of it

and be able to apply certain things because,

and I know from, I did DI's too in the past and,

you know, people will make, you know,

well, I'll put a log, log graded, and then they'll

have, but they'll have their own specific LUT on

it. And if you don't have that specific LUT, the

log graded doesn't mean anything to you. You know,

you can guess, put something close on to it. And

even in my job, I'll get some of the remastering

will do be, will be something from the DI era and

you get a log graded and you know that they had a,

you know, what's that log

graded from? Was it from their HD

trim or from their theatrical

because those two things are different.

It's most likely from the theatrical, so you apply

a theatrical LUT that makes sense, but

it's not really the one

they had based on their lab.

It wouldn't be because you always had to

recalibrate recorders for

the changing lab chemistry.

Even if you had the right LUT,

it wouldn't be exactly right.

A lot of places, if they had good color sciences,

would have had a LUT for Rec 709

And they would have done trims on top of that.

So that's why I like ACES.

If you can have that ACES information.

And you could then apply

that, even using Dolby Vision.

I love Dolby Vision, what

they've done for remastering,

because I do that, the 1000NIT,

and then I do the Dolby

analysis, and it's really close.

And you just do a modest trim,

and sometimes you have to make bigger adjustments,

and other times, depending if there's flashes

and things like that.

But it really makes it, if you have all that,

if you end up having, if you do things in ACES,

and you have that all logged,

and then you have your Dolby Vision metadata,

I mean, 15 years from now,

if you pull those scans up,

and throw them into a color corrector,

and you have that information,

you should be able to reproduce it.

pretty easily. Unfortunately, it's kind of all over

the place because a lot of places

it's up to the colorist. I like using aces and in

other colors I hate using aces. And

so where do you go from there? But I hope people

I would start using

something kind of uniform like that.

I wave the flag so loudly about my podcast going,

it's a 15 minute podcast, you know,

but I always go over because, you know,

but I'm trying to behave myself,

but I wanna throw one more question at you,

which is more of a personal opinion,

but your top three films.

Oh my God, my top three films.

Nasty, right?

Nasty question.

No, I have my favorite film of all time,

"Cinema Paradiso."

Love that film.

And then "L.A. Story."

I love "L.A. Story."

I love Steve Martin.

"L.A. Story."

I was very excited that he

has this documentary out.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

Because I had been a writer,

and so when I realized he was a great writer,

and not just a funny comedian, I was like, wow.

So "Cinema Paradiso," "L.A. Story."

And probably any Cameron Crowe film,

like "Almost Famous," or maybe, yeah,

probably "Almost Famous."

So those, I would say those are,

I love to be a Cameron Crowe fan as well.

That would be it probably.

I didn't do it if you're stuck on a desert island,

and you only had one film.

Ah, question, because that's so mean.

But Matt, thanks, a zillion.

Thank you so much for jumping on the podcast,

and there's a whole heap more questions.

I wanted to ask you about time restrictions.

But thanks, mate, I appreciate it.

Hey, you're welcome, anytime.

Matt, thank you so much.

That was fantastic, it was really, really cool.

I asked Matt at the end about his top three films,

and then after we stopped recording, he goes,

"Oh, oh, there was one more, there was one more."

And so we chatted about a

film called "Strange Brew,"

which, yeah, just check it out.

He told me the premise, and

then I've just looked it up

because I hadn't seen it before.

It's, I'm gonna watch it, it's really, really cool.

But Matt, thank you so much, you're awesome.

Thank you to my executive

producer, MixingLight.com.

If you are watching this or listening to this

on their website, you already know what they do,

but if you don't, check them out, mixinglight.com,

they can help you with all things color.

Thank you to you, my wonderful listeners,

and for all your feedback.

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