Monthly Archives: August 2012
Color correction of your footage
Color correcting your footage is pretty much unavoidable, these days every movie or music video clip you watch has been post processed and color corrected.
This is an art in itself and that is why it requires skills, training and a dedicated professional.
Fact is that on smaller productions, budgets are quite tight, and you end up doing it yourself… much like it happens for other traditionally separated roles, such as a director of photography, a camera operator or an editor. In the end, it’s all good. First you have to learn it all to understand and then truly appreciate the work of others you might team up with.
Color processing is part of the post processing work that needs to be done on the footage you shot, which may include other tasks like re-lighting or re-framing a particular shot, or VFX work.
There are some tools of the trade that come into rescue and one of the most well-known is Red Giant’s Magic Bullet. Mostly, it works with presets, and it’s a one-stop process. Super easy to use and with visually catching results.
C-mount lenses on Micro Four Thirds
One of the great things about the micro four thirds format is that you can simply mount anything on these. It’s just a matter of finding the right adapter, among the variety of available offers. In this particular case, the C-mount to M43 one pictured above is indeed well made, but there are cheaper ones starting from just a few bucks.. Fotodiox comes to mind.
C-mount lenses are still in use, no longer as 8mm or 16mm cinema lenses as they used to be but as security devices lenses, namely closed circuit television lenses. Normally they are pretty fast lenses as they need to work 24h and they come under the commercial term of TV lenses (from the CCTV acronym).
This is why some may be interested in the vintage C-mounts on a cropped sensor. Fast glass is expensive and C-mounts are not.
GH2, 5DmkII, 5DmkIII, Blackmagic Cinema Camera and Sony A99
You have certainly noticed that I mostly write about the GH2. I used to own the 5DmkII, it was the first DSLR I shot video with. It has indeed been the first love for many and still truly is. But since the coming of the hack for the panny it was sudden divorce for me.
I still love the colors you get out of the Canon, there is a certain richness and overall dynamic range you simply cannot get out of the GH2. I feel that the whole color pattern has a grey, duller base throughout the gamma, with a green bias.
You have to work hard around this in post to make it look great, but it’ s doable. I have an upcoming post dedicated to color correction and I will discuss this matter in greater depth soon. The way your final work looks it’s too much of an important subject to be done with a few lines.
While there is no doubt the above sticks as a con, 0n the pro side
– the panny it’ s true 1080p as opposed to the lower resolution of the Canon, that claims to be full HD but looks like HD ready (720p)
– magic lantern it’s a very nice addition, but even in its latest incarnation cannot deliver as much as Vitaliy Kiselev and all his community have so far achieved with Ptools and the patches
– it’ s got a swiveling screen in place of a non sens fixed lcd
– it’ s way cheaper