I am shooting a project for the goal of screening it at film festivals. I just want to know if there are any drawbacks in doing heavy color correcting (such as red giants magic bullet software) in the final product. I am just assuming its best to have a clean image. Any advice would be appreciated.
hvx200 for film festival: color correcting drawbacks?
- Thread starter PIMP
- Start date
My theory is shoot how you want it to look in post, and test out your color corrections before you work with your final product. Testing is the number one way to make sure your looks work.
And, to my mind, looks shot within camera will always help the looks added in post work better and seem more natural and less electronic. The camera samples everything at 1080p, with something like a 14bit color depth. Comparing that to the 8bit, 720p (I am assuming), and you can see the ability to affect great change in the image data decreases....
For example, I shot a short a few weeks ago, and we used this scene file that made everything seem a bit yellow, saturated, and contrasty. Which is about 80% of how I wanted it to look. I bring it into CC and desaturate the background, which, usually runs way hotter or cooler than the forground character, and it looks great. To try to do that only in post with 0 preparation from a "clean" image and you may be able to pull it off, but to even get the image to the point it was in camera would have likely taken ten times longer.
And, to my mind, looks shot within camera will always help the looks added in post work better and seem more natural and less electronic. The camera samples everything at 1080p, with something like a 14bit color depth. Comparing that to the 8bit, 720p (I am assuming), and you can see the ability to affect great change in the image data decreases....
For example, I shot a short a few weeks ago, and we used this scene file that made everything seem a bit yellow, saturated, and contrasty. Which is about 80% of how I wanted it to look. I bring it into CC and desaturate the background, which, usually runs way hotter or cooler than the forground character, and it looks great. To try to do that only in post with 0 preparation from a "clean" image and you may be able to pull it off, but to even get the image to the point it was in camera would have likely taken ten times longer.
Mr24p
Active member
I never use camera raw footage for narrative work. But that's my personal choice. I always color correct to some extent. I've never noticed a loss of quality. However, doing certain kinds of color correction will offset another aspect of the picture (like contrast for example) so be careful with that. If you overdo it you could lose detail but I mean really overdo it. If you're doing standard color correction or using the Magic Bullet plug ins I'd say you're fine. My advice is to test it on different TV's and/or monitors. I can see what the waveform says and I see how it looks on the monitor but I'll burn it to a DVD and watch it on my HD projector, then on an HD/16x9 set, and on my friend's old tube TV. If it looks as close as possible to how I want it on all three then I know I'll be good for almost anything that it'll be shown on.
Hope this helps.
Hope this helps.