Grade — Field Card

• One working space. Convert on input, display transform on output — never grade through a baked look LUT.
• Resolve: CST nodes in and out. Premiere: let color management interpret the logs, then verify every clip actually got caught.
• Conversion is not the grade. It just gets everyone speaking Rec.709 so the grade starts from zero.

• Waveform for exposure: lit-side skin lands around 55–70 IRE (tone-dependent — calibrate to your own footage), whites under 100, blacks kissing 0.
• Vectorscope for color: skin hugs the skin-tone line regardless of who's in frame. Neutrals sit dead center.
• Every shot, before any look. Balance is per-clip; the look is global. Mixing them is how grades become whack-a-mole.

1. Exposure first.Split-screen against a hero still; waveforms should overlap.
2. Then white balance.Match on a neutral in the shared scene, confirm on skin.
3. Then saturation.The GoPro and phone run hotter out of conversion — pull toward the α6700, not the reverse.

Capture the GoPro at low sharpness and soften the rest in post — you can't un-sharpen. Shoot the phone in Log so HDR tone-mapping never enters the timeline. Sensor character that survives all this gets buried at stage 6.

• Build on one hero shot — the frame that defines the piece — then ripple it everywhere.
• Look on its own layer/node at 60–80% strength. Full-strength LUTs read like presets; restraint reads like taste.
• Protect skin from the look. A secondary keeps faces honest while the world goes wherever the grade takes it.
• Audition before committing — run candidates through LUT Preview against real frames from the shoot, not the vendor's beauty stills.

• Fine grain is the great unifier — one grain pass over four sensors and the cut stops announcing which camera shot what. Cheapest match trick in the pipeline.
• Halation and glow to taste, applied globally so it belongs to the film, not to a shot.
• Never sharpen. Sharpening is how footage says "video." If it needs edge, it needed focus.

• Upload 4K, H.264/HEVC at a generous bitrate — YouTube hands 4K uploads the better transcode, even for 1080-native content.
• Rec.709 tagged, no surprise color shifts on upload. If it looks different on the platform, it's a tag, not a grade problem.
• Audio locked: −14 LUFS / −1 dBTP — see FIELD 07.
• QC the actual upload on a phone speaker, a TV, and headphones. The export on your grading display is not what the audience sees.