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Stussey

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I started out in music recording almost 20 years ago, when recording, for the most part you recorded dry and added effects later. Then I got into post, learned my way around editing/effects and such.

Then I got into the production side of things. As an editor I hate hearing 'we'll fix it in post'. But found myself doing it on projects I knew I was editing myself because I knew what I could get away with.

The question I have is when you're shooting, how do you decide if you're going to do a certain look in the camera or in post. I'm not really talking effects per se. But things like color temp, etc.

thanks for any thoughts on this....

Stussey
 
If you're going for clean whites, ALWAYS make sure that is set correctly in the camera. Different codecs will give you more flexibility, but in the case of DV and HDV you want to do as much in camera as you can.

Personally most of my shoots are with the Canon XH-A1, and there are plenty of presets floating around to get certain 'looks' in camera. On other shoots where I've used the F900 or EX1, I've let the DIT/Post supervisor dial in the presets he prefers.

Personally if I want something to kick more blue or more orange, I'll dial in the white balance manually. If my exposure and white balance are spot on, I'll do no more in post than crush the blacks and bump the highlights. As far as creating color in the frame, I'll do that with 1) lighting or 2) manual white balance if I want to kick it a bit blue. Can't say much for film, though...
 
I try not to make that decision "when [I'm] shooting." It's best decided in pre-production. Whenever possible, I prefer to get "the look" in camera (and whenever possible, I do it with the lighting or filters, treating the camera like a film stock, using WB presets). That said, sometimes it's just not possible. Sometimes a certain project has a pace that just won't allow such meticulous control. That said, sometimes I'll have the time, but on-set something will cause me to rethink my approach.

Once, I made the call (with the director's approval, of course) to shoot a scene with a lower contrast ratio than we knew we wanted. We had the light and light control to bring our shadows down as much as we needed, but with the location we were in (small room with very light, off-white walls), it would have taken a lot of time. We probably had the time to do it, but it was towards the end of principal photography and up until that point, we were banging out scenes very quickly while still getting exactly what we wanted. I figured that if we took the time to do it, we'd have broken our momentum, so I decided that they could just crush the blacks in post and we rolled. It was for the good of morale and the really good energy our pace helped create and maintain from the cast and crew.

In doc work, the "fix it in post" mentality shows up a bit more. As much as I try with lighting and light controls and gels and blah blah blah, sometimes I just can't match everything perfectly. So we don't do it in camera simply out of necessity. But we get as close as we possibly can.

Hope this helped.

~~Dave
 
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