June | 2024 | Hello, I'm Vidar Andersen

Recently I was honored and excited to be invited to the new publicly funded (to help counter the energy transition woes for the regional – and the German as a whole – economy) and innovation project called Startup Village by Brainergy Park outside of Jülich, Germany to check out the second batch of their ZEBRA green tech and impact “accelerator”.

It’s a huge investment with the capital – and a huge area – already committed to building out a massive innovation campus, and I do enjoy experiencing new startup initiatives outside of the major cities in this area of the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia first hand. So much is happening outside of Cologne and Düsseldorf that is often overlooked.

It’s still very early days (not many buildings completed yet), but keep an eye on this area and do visit if you have the chance – even getting there can be quite the adventure…

And if you’re a green tech or impact startup, maybe you want to apply for the next ZEBRA batch?

Update 2026: I did a thing… introducing:

Lens Debaser OFX

Digital super16mm antics: Second grade / look pass

Update: There’s an update on my grading in 2025

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UPDATE: Lo’ behold! Cullen Kelly made a new accessible overview page of ALL THE THINGS!

Looking at the stats for this page, a lot of you seem to be googling for a free trial of Cullen Kelly’s (excellent) “Contour” lookdev plugin for DaVinci Resolve – or his very helpful (I use it) ckc P3 preset viewing LUT to correct for Mac displays when grading in DaVinci Resolve.

And why don’t you grab a free trial of his (and collaborators’) insanely good film emulation, the “FPE” plugin “Genesis” for DaVinci Resolve while you are at it?

Also, some of you seem to be looking for Juan Pablo Zambrano’s excellent and free 2499 DRT DCTLs for DaVinci Resolve (can highly recommend, keep reading below for how I ~~use~~ used it. UPDATE: I now use the latest version of OpenDRT for this job instead – also free, easier to use, tasty).

Full Disclosure: I’m not getting anything in return – Cullen’s work, both with educating us n00bs and creating incredibly useful and beautiful tools for us, is awesome and I just think he, Mr. Zambrano, and Mr. Smith – deserve all the good Karma they can get. (For some inexplicable reason, Cullen Kelly seems to have the most bizarrely convoluted web presence for his tools that I have ever come across – and I’ve been in the web dev biz for +30 years and seen some things – but that’s not the rant you came here for…)

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A while back, I posted about my Live Streaming Studio V3.1 setup, because many people wanted to know what gear I’m using and how I get the “cinematic” look on a live Zoom call. And to achieve the look I was going for, one of the things I had to (well, more like “desired to”) learn from scratch – in addition to operating a digital cinema camera and properly use lighting – was how to color grade.

Reference: Non-graded image without look and effects applied, only BMD Film Gen 1 (camera log aka RAW) color space transform to rec709 / Gamma 2.2 (what a monitor can display) via a classic CST applied. (See results of using OpenDRT instead of CST below for comparison.)

Below, after some grading, applying a ton of stuff for the look, and even throwing in some effects to emulate anamorphic edge distortions and a fake film gate crop for ~~too much~~ good measures:

In this post, I’m sharing a bit about my further ~~digging myself into a hole~~ adventures into color grading with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio (free download of the non-studio version). It’s an incredible piece of software, by the way. If you’re thinking about ditching Adobe Premiere – just do it! It’s a joy to work with and I’ve never regretted it for a second.

This is not a primer on color grading. It’s just me ~~dumping~~ writing up and sharing what I’ve learned that works best for me so far. If you too wish to start (or continue) on a color grading learning journey with DaVinci Resolve, Cullen Kelly’s YouTube channel is probably the best place for that.

The following assumes you’re already familiar some of the concepts of color grading – or at least have a faint interest in how to create a cinematic image with digital tools. If not, fair warning, this post ~~will bore the living daylights out of you~~ is probably not for you.

What started as a necessity during the lockdown era (aka building a professional-looking online tele-presence) turned into a path of rediscovery, reigniting my passion for the cinematic image. Little known fact: You might not know that I actually started out studying cinema with the goal to become a film director – but I dropped out after only two years as university as studying film wasn’t really my thing – and then the commercial Internet happened and the rest is history.

As a person most likely somewhere on a spectrum of some kind, of course I can’t, I won’t, and I don’t stop digging until I’m getting somewhere interesting, somewhere where I can feel a sense of mastery and understanding of the full stack (in this case lighting, lenses, physics, camera sensor, cinematography, color grading, look development – everything that goes into the sausage factory of a nice – to me – digital “cine” image), aka being able to make predictable outcomes and making those outcomes look cinematic and pleasing – to me. It’s become sort of a new ~~time sink~~ ~~obsession~~ hobby of mine (in addition to still helping other startup founders go farther faster, don’t you worry).

And I’m still digging.. .

Read on below for this long non-startup (but hey – still full of tech & geekery) post.