Accessible Remote Color Grading with Gradient

Founded by colorist Leo Hynes, Gradient is a color and finishing company that offers “live remote color services” for projects all over the world. Using Louper’s streaming platform while working remotely allows Gradient’s team to pass cost-savings directly to their production partners. We recently caught up with Leo to learn more.

Hey Leo, thanks for talking! You started in production and shooting but made the transition to focus on color… How did you start Gradient?

In my early career I worked at a production company in Dublin and would shoot videos, then see them get delivered with terrible color! I taught myself DaVinci Resolve so I could solve this. That was the start of a wonderful love affair with color grading.

I founded Gradient in 2021 as a way to connect with other colorists and open up more markets. I’m based in Vancouver, but we are primarily remote-based. We have several colorists on our roster around the world who can take on client projects. I still do some production work myself, so this allows me to manage some projects rather than work on them.

We all use DaVinci Resolve for color and Premiere Pro for some conform work. Our bread-and-butter work is commercials and brand videos, but we work on all types of content: features, music videos, documentaries. Due to the remote-based workflow, we can offer more affordable rates than traditional post houses, and therefore a lot of our clients tend to be production companies. Previously they would have just had their in-house editor grade their projects, but we believe that every project big or small deserves a professional color grade. There’s no point putting in all that work and then falling at the last hurdle!

Gradient.Film 2022 Showreel from Gradient Film on Vimeo.

What projects are you most proud of and why?

It’s hard to choose! Recent ones that come to mind are a great commercial for Best Buy and Meta Quest showing off the new Ghostbusters game, and a gorgeous branded doc for the National Dairy Council in Ireland. Personally, I can get even more satisfaction from the smaller projects that might not make the showreel – but have the client saying “wow”! That's what I love about the color grading process.

How did you find out about Louper? Were you replacing another streaming platform?

I tested various remote solutions for a long time.. they were either prohibitively expensive or not very good. Searching through industry forums and someone suggested Louper. I gave it a try and was delighted with it from the start!

Setting up Louper was very quick, and documentation is excellent. I was able to test it out using NDI and then bought a Blackmagic monitoring device to get a cleaner feed.

For remote color sessions, why is real-time so important?

Collaborating in real-time with clients is so important. It’s like any kind of communication: if it’s complex it's better to do it over the phone rather than email. The same applies here. We can take their footage in any direction, and live collaboration allows us to precisely do that. Anytime I have projects that involve a live session, everyone goes away much happier than if we just traded links.

“We love Louper’s quality and simplicity. The video resolution is high quality and tunable. Most crucially – lag is minimal. I’ve never had a technical issue on a call and not one complaint from a client. As soon as that happens you start to lose trust in your system. Louper has been flawless!”

Thanks for speaking with us. Lastly, what is your favorite thing about your career?

I love the variety of projects I get to work on. It’s fascinating to see all the different ways you can shoot, edit and direct things. It’s a joy to work on beautiful footage and see everyone involved get excited to see it come to life. The hard part of the edit is over and now it’s time to have fun with it!

To learn more about Gradient, visit https://gradient.film/

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