Color Grading

Grading is where the emotional voice of a Chinese production is finally set, and the country's finishing setup is built around that craft. Our colorists work in the Dolby Vision-certified rooms at Base FX Beijing — the team behind Pacific Rim and Game of Thrones finishing credits. They also use the Baselight and DaVinci Resolve Studio bays at More VFX, Beijing Film Group Post, Shanghai Film Studio Post, and Pixomondo's Beijing branch. In each room they shape contrast, palette, and skin tone to match the director's intent.

That might mean the rich wuxia palette of a Hengdian period drama in the lineage of Zhao Xiaoding's Zhang Yimou collaborations, the noir-blue Shanghai street tones of a modern thriller, the dust-warm Xinjiang exteriors of a road film in the Jia Zhangke vein, or the muted near-future palette of a Beijing-set sci-fi feature. Hero scenes are graded first and signed off with the DP and director. From there the look is carried across the whole timeline, so the visual language stays steady.

China's grading tradition draws on Beijing Film Academy alumni and the Hong Kong camera lineage carried forward by Christopher Doyle's collaborator pool. Many of the colorists we work with have sat in rooms with Zhao Xiaoding, Hou Yong, Yu Lik-wai, or Bao Dexi at some point in their careers. HDR work is done natively on calibrated Dolby Vision and HDR-10 PQ trim displays, with SDR Rec.709 passes made for legacy release and rec.2020 trim where streaming platforms need it.

Remote review runs through Frame.io, ClearView Flex, or local tools. Directors and showrunners in Los Angeles, London, or Hong Kong can sit in on grading sessions in real time. Masters bound for the Wanda Cinemas, CGV China, or Bona Cineplex theatrical circuit are graded against DCI projection standards. Series bound for iQIYI, Tencent Video, Youku, Mango TV, or Bilibili are tuned to each platform's encoding profile.