Shot on RED. Graded to Technicolor.
Hollywood Color, Newport Beach
Color Grading Services in Orange County — Hollywood Technicolor Lineage
Color grading is the final stage of production and the most misunderstood. Most people think of it as a filter — a warm preset, a desaturated look, a cinematic LUT applied at the end of the edit. That is not color grading. That is a workaround.
Real color grading is a craft. It is the process of taking footage shot under real-world conditions — with mixed light sources, with cameras responding differently to different colors, with skies that are blown out and shadows that are too dark — and making it look exactly the way the director intended when they framed the shot. It is also the process of giving a body of footage a unified visual language, so that a film shot across three days in five locations looks like it was conceived as a whole.
We have been color grading to a Hollywood Technicolor standard since we founded this company in 2003.
Standalone Color Grading — Your Footage, Our Grade
We accept projects for standalone color grading — footage shot by another production company or videographer that needs a professional grade applied. If you have footage that looks technically correct but does not have the cinematic quality you expected, color grading is frequently the difference.
Requirements for standalone grading:
Footage shot in RAW, LOG, or flat color profile (not processed/Rec.709 out of camera)
Frame rate and resolution specifications discussed at project intake
Reference materials or style direction for look development
Need the edit done too? See our video editing services.
What Hollywood Technicolor Lineage Actually Means
Technicolor is the color science standard behind most of what you consider to be the cinematic look of professional film production. Our color grading approach draws directly from the Technicolor pipeline — the same color science that defines the look of high-end feature films and major advertising campaigns.
This is not a marketing claim. It is a technical heritage. The difference between Technicolor-standard color grading and a consumer color correction workflow is immediately visible to any eye — the depth of blacks, the rendering of skin tone, the saturation of primary colors, and the way highlights retain detail instead of blowing to white.
DaVinci Resolve — The Industry Standard
We color grade in DaVinci Resolve, the same platform used by the majority of high-end commercial and feature film colorists in the world. Resolve allows node-based, non-destructive color correction that gives us complete control over every element of the image independently — rather than applying a global grade that treats the entire frame identically regardless of what is in it.
Color Grading as Part of Every Hilo Production
Every production we shoot includes full color grading as a standard deliverable. We do not deliver log footage and call it done. The color grade is not an add-on — it is part of what makes the footage look the way it does when you receive it. It is the last step of our post-production process, and it is where RED and ARRI footage earns its keep.
Your footage is only as good as its final color. Whether it is ours or yours, we will make it look the way it should. Call (949) 449-4472 or email director@hilomotionpictures.com.
What Color Grading Cannot Fix
We will tell you honestly what grading can and cannot accomplish. Grading can fix mixed color temperatures, underexposure within reason, overexposure within reason, inconsistency between cameras on multi-camera shoots, and general tonal imbalance.
Grading cannot fix: focus problems, motion blur from incorrect shutter settings, digital noise from ISO that is too high, severe overexposure where highlight detail is gone, or footage shot in a flat JPEG or highly processed in-camera profile with no highlight or shadow detail left to recover.
We evaluate footage before committing to a grading project and tell you what is recoverable.