color grading

J

joey46

Well-known member
It a waste of time trying to color grade t2i footage? It seems most of the tutorials I look at make them look a lot worse then what they did.
Is raw the best way to achieve a good film like look.


color grading
 
If your footage had a lot of noise then yea. It will not help with color grading. Best it shoot with a flat style (marvel, cinestyle or flaat) and then do color grading in post - for video.
 
If decently shot, T2i footage is perfectly fine for grading. A lot of people really don't have enough technical knowledge of what digital imagery is to achieve a desired result, or they just have an aesthetic taste different from yours.
 
CF01 said:
If decently shot, T2i footage is perfectly fine for grading. A lot of people really don't have enough technical knowledge of what digital imagery is to achieve a desired result, or they just have an aesthetic taste different from yours.
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+1
 
joey46 said:
It a waste of time trying to color grade t2i footage? It seems most of the tutorials I look at make them look a lot worse then what they did.
Is raw the best way to achieve a good film like look.
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1) No it's not. I've done enough color correction to my short films that I can tell you it worth the time, when it's done properly. (nothing to sound arrogant here)
2) It's not because you have a good hammer, that makes you a good carpenter. These people should learn how to use them, properly.
3) RAW is ultimately the best solution if you want to "play" with your image in post (gives you more room to adjust). But as for now, with the T2i, it doesn't worth it. Lower resolution and the workflow is PITA imho.
mdifilm said:
If your footage had a lot of noise then yea. It will not help with color grading. Best it shoot with a flat style (marvel, cinestyle or flaat) and then do color grading in post - for video.
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1) I've been able to shoot in low-light (available city streets lights) using my T2i, CineStyle and the 18-55mm lens at f/3.5. ISO boosted to 2500. With NeatVideo (99$ plugin that really worth it), I've denoised it a bit and color corrected the picture. Added a fine layer of grain at the end and it looks, to me, more "film-like".
These screenshots aren't the best due to compression, but you'll get the point:
MVI_1107 (0-00-22-23).jpgMVI_1116 (0-01-20-15).jpgMVI_1121 (0-00-21-11).jpg
CF01 said:
If decently shot, T2i footage is perfectly fine for grading. A lot of people really don't have enough technical knowledge of what digital imagery is to achieve a desired result, or they just have an aesthetic taste different from yours.
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I second that!
About knowledge, I would say that many people tend to rely on plugin or presets for color grading. I don't recommend this. Copying something won't gives your work something "unique".
You can do pretty much what you want with Levels / Hue/Saturation / Curves in post. These all comes with the NLE. You simply have to know how to use them.
 
I'm primaraly a colorist, tv movies, indie features & decent budget commericals are my main beat, 99% of what i work on is shot on Epic, Alexa or F3/5/55.. but last week i had a feature doco shot on T2i exclusivly, HBO picked it up dependant upon a proper grade and making QC.. it prevoiusly had failed...

My thoughts after a week with the show are;
- when exposed spot on, and inside it's rather limited dynamic range it's really very good, but it falls of a cliff very quickly once it's limits are exceded... know your limits, and stay within them
- approach gamma curves carefully, esp with skintones on the line, the largest time suck we had was dealing with the damage caused by using a flat profile in low light and underexposeing with an important interviewee... the fimmaker could have bought a C100 for what was spent to get that to a place where it would not be rejected instantly.
- excessive damage from rolling shutter is a QC fail as well, be careful with camera movement

End of the day it was not a waste of time to grade the show as the sale was dependant upon it, and was more expensive than buying a C100, and then avoiding 90% of the issues - we could have had the show through in a day but for the crap skintones / noise / rolling shutter, instead it was 5 days in a real color suite, and 4 of those days were spent fixing what need not to be fixed

I would encourage you to try gradeing to a high standard, and not give in early... i can do a first pass of a tv movie in a day, i'm fast and have great tools at hand.. still took long 14+ hour days to turn around 79 min of T2i and have it to the standard of a first pass.. but it can be done

The eposide of House that was shot on 5D cost more to fix than it would have been to shoot the episode on 35mm.... the T2i/7D/5D can be very expensive camera's once you try to get them past the prosumer/youtube/Vimeo/local tv/bottom feeder cable bar...

d

ps... just looked at my time sheets, it took me 7.5 hours to grade a first pass of a tv movie shot on F55, and it took 63 hours to get the T2i show to a similar place.
 
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Always thought this guy does incredible things with his T2i grading:


Would love a professional opinion on this. I suspect a working pro would be worried about that the looks are aggressive, destructive with questionable skintones. Having said that I find his images so incredibly resonant and beautiful and am an enormous fan. If interested, his more recent work might be a bit more polished. Incredibly he says everything is done in After Effects using just curves and levels!
 
This is the nicest Canon footage I've seen so far. Really awesome. Shot on a 5D3 with Flaat, then graded using FilmConvert.

The T2i has a worse codec (no all-I) but it's not far away from this, if you forget about aliasing/moire.
 
Dermot said:
I would encourage you to try gradeing to a high standard, and not give in early... i can do a first pass of a tv movie in a day, i'm fast and have great tools at hand.. still took long 14+ hour days to turn around 79 min of T2i and have it to the standard of a first pass.. but it can be done

.
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If you don't mind me asking:
What did you use for working with the t2i video?
 
Well, he's a pro, so don't expect me to emulate the kind of work that he's doing. But the list he posted in the comments is really useful. Plus, he's a really knowledgeable guy, there's a lot to be learnt from him, check out his earlier posts on similar matters here.
 
Samuel H said:
Well, he's a pro, so don't expect me to emulate the kind of work that he's doing. But the list he posted in the comments is really useful. Plus, he's a really knowledgeable guy, there's a lot to be learnt from him, check out his earlier posts on similar matters here.
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Thanks for the reference.
 
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