Arch Pro was born out of a little bit of a frustration. During the pandemic I was assisting orchestral and theatrical productions with livestreaming their shows to stay afloat and while they were thrilled with the results—and what can be accomplished by a one-man band—I was never 100% satisfied with the image coming right out of camera.

Given the time and budget, a skilled colorist could make nearly any footage look good. I am not a skilled colorist, but I like to think I know what looks good. Pair that with being unsure of how long we’d be livestreaming or working remote, I decided to start down this path, if only for my own edification.

I had access to some high-end cinema cameras to shoot reference shots of color checker charts, then I shot those same charts with my favorite camera at the time: Blackmagic’s Pocket 4K Cinema Camera. Now it was just a matter of fiddling around in the color pane of DaVinci Resolve to find what I was looking for using the high end stuff as my reference.

After much learning, color warping, and a lot more frustration than when I started, I arrived at a look I loved. Things began getting back to normal. I’d get hired as the DP on a gig here and there and bring my then-nameless LUTs along for video village. Folks really liked the look, some smaller productions asked to get a copy. Neat!

I decided to package them up and try my hand at selling them. Worst case would be: no one buys them and I paid for a few months of hosting. To my shock, I sold over a thousand copies in the first year and received a TON of feedback and supporting footage to enable me to make tweaks along the way.

Now we enter the next phase! I’ve rented a ludicrous number of cameras and tried to make the process as scientifically consistent as possible by using the same lens to shoot the very same color checker chart. This is Arch Pro 2.0.