Writing For Academy 5%

Priority: High When: in production

Images are best represented in gorgeous HD videos, but reading will always have great importance in education. In this series of free short articles I will write about the most important topics in our field.

Producing Codexes 5%

Priority: High When: in production

The learning evolution, and the bridge between the Academy and the Workshop will be the Codex. A series of premium short videos to learn about color correction and related topics. It will also feature interviews, and case studies.

All-Star Format 15%

Priority: High When: locking details

I love basketball, but I love my job even more. The All-Star format is a tribute to all the best colorist that were part of the Workshop. It is of course open to all current members of the Workshop, and it will be a burst of education. More details soon.

Letter of Recommendation 25%

Priority: High When: locking details

I’ve been asked, a lot, if I provide a certificate of attendance for the Workshop. And I don’t, because I honestly believe that “attending” something doesn’t mean you actually improved your skills. And I saw committed, hard-working colorist here. So I’m preparing a page, and a system, were I will be able to represent your work, your advancement. This will be paired with a personal letter of recommendation with real data that you will be able to share.

Advanced Glossary 30%

Priority: High When: Q3 2017

An ambitious site-wide project. This will allow me to add a new kind of link , if you choose to use it an unobtrusive pop-up will appears with the definition of the word you clicked. It is a modern, extremely handy and important way to side new users and avoid the overwhelming feeling that hundreds of new unknown words will cause. The code is ready, now I’m writing down the definitions.

March Madness Format 5%

Priority: Low When: Q4 2017

Another basketball related idea, that will involve new users. Not a priority for now, but it will be interesting to pair with a group of users that do not know about our methods. This will be another chance for a quick burst of work. Will share more later.

API Tuning 60%

Priority: High When: continuous evelopment

With its current version, 9.1, ColorDuels was switched from a step development to a continuous one. I’m still using versioning to ease internal development. ColorDuels is also deeply integrated with different platform and services, it will be necessary a great deal of refinement to fully capitalise on these by tweaking all their APIs.

SSL deploy

Update: Live!

Security is a big concern of mine, SSL is an industry’s standard on e-commerces (although we leverage the architecture of different services for your payment details). ColorDuels is now fully encrypted, switching from “http” to “https”. I also wrote an entire page where you will find all the details.

HTTP/2 transition

Update: Live!

The new protocol’s standard is faster, it allows multiplexing, and it was also mandatory for SSL implementation, so it had a huge priority for me. The entire platform is now faster, safer and more private.

Framework CSS Update

Update: Live!

ColorDuels is built from scratch by me, and uses a completely custom hand-made design. This took an excruciating amount of efforts, but it is now more or less finite. One of the latest needed improvement was to switch from a columns CSS grid framework, to a modern Flexbox one.

PHP7 Upgrade

Update: Live!

Our premium hosting allowed for the upgrade to PHP7, we’ve been early adopters for a while with this, and it was a smooth and easy transition.

CDN Deploy

Update: Live!

A Content Delivery Network can be a huge thing for a worldwide, modern, website. It can allows for static assets to be served from location that are closer to you, improving loading time by a great margin.

WebP Investigation

Priority: Developing When: Q1 2018

Countless articles on the web have infos about JPGs, PNGs and GIFs. ColorDuels is a project about image quality, and we want the best. But this usually means huge files, and a very slow website. But there is a new image format called WebP that may improve greatly quality/size ratio. We will investigate more in the coming months.

H.265 Stress Test

Priority: Developing When: 2017

Video quality is something I obsessed about for a long time, a new format will be soon available, H.265, HEVC will be trials that will be started and continued for a long time. Around the end of the year I should have more info to share.

4k Support

Priority: Developing When: 2018

When I started ColorDuels italian version in 2011 Most of the video were in 720p, but were recorded in 1080p because I was sure that was the right format. Now we’re approaching the same quality revolution with 4k, and soon decisions will be made. The only thing that is holding this switch is that 4k files are enormous.

Archive Revamp

Priority: Developing When: 2018

When I will be able to fully support 4k publishing I will take all old images challenges and will record the entire archive ex-novo. It will be a tremendous effort, ona that will gave a great value to all our work.