THE IMPORTANCE OF COLOR CORRECTION
Video Credit: Arbuckle Industries
Before-and-after examples from some of our recent productions
Color correction and color grading often go unnoticed to the untrained eye, but they can have a huge impact on the quality and feel of your final product. Color correction is the technique of matching and balancing colors throughout your film, while color grading is intended to give the video a certain tone or feeling. Video footage should be treated similar to photography. There is a huge amount of post-production work that must go into making the final product look the way it does.
Certain recording formats can be limited when it comes to color correction, but most modern video cameras are capable of capturing large format files. The ability to manipulate and color grade footage in post-production is directly related to the amount of "information" a camera records. Hopefully you're shooting in a format that can capture a wide "dynamic range." Dynamic range refers to the range within which a camera can successfully capture the lightest and darkest areas of an image without losing detail. Dynamic range is rated in "stops," which essentially means the more stops, the better the camera. At this moment, a high-end camera has somewhere around 14 stops. But don't worry, many new smartphone cameras are equipped with a "high dynamic range" setting.
Video Credit: Arbuckle Industries
A recent production that was colored with a CLUT built into Adobe Premiere
With the growing number of CLUTs (color look-up tables), a device used to transform a range of input colors into another range of colors and recording formats, footage is now commonly captured in many different states. Keep in mind that the more information you can capture while filming, the more flexibility you'll have in post-production.
