I’ve written posts before about then benefits of shooting with a very flat camera profile in HD DSLR cameras.
Looks like some shooters have taken this another step and are shooting SuperFlat so they can color correct in post. And another group religiously believes that you need to get it right when you shoot it.
What’s right for you? Here are the basics of these two perspectives…
Shoot it flat
- If you take down the sharpening and saturation and reduce the contrast you’ll get more usable data recorded.
- You can do more color correction in post with a flat image before getting too many artifacts.
- Most all video is captured with compression. Deal with the artifacts and learn how to get the look you want in post.
Shoot it right
- So much data is lost when the camera compresses the image and sends it to the card that you can never really do much with what’s left.
- If you want to grade in post, use your footage to pull chromakeys, or composite layers with it in After Effects you have to shoot with a RED or some other camera system that offers a 10-bit uncompressed 2K image.
- Spend the time on the set with a good reference monitoring system and get the look you want in-camera so you avoid all the artifacts produced by heavy color grading.
What both agree on
- Out of the box all DLSR cameras shoot a crunched image with too much contrast, too much sharpening applied, and over saturated colors.
- You need to shoot tests using your lighting in situations as close to your production requirements as possible and take those tests through the rest of your workflow to see what’s really going to happen.
- If your only distribution channel is the web or even standard DVD’s you can get away with a lot.
- If you plan to distribute on Blu-Ray or project in theaters you need to be very careful as artifacts that are invisible or tolerable on smaller screens (including your killer 60″ plasma) can jump out and kill the image when projected on a 50 foot theater screen.
My experience
I prefer a mix of these two approaches. I like to get the image as right as possible when I’m shooting. I almost always end up grading my projects so I fall on the “flat” side of right.
I recently edited a project shot live with three cameras. One of the cameras had the white balance incorrectly set. I had to use all the tools available to try to match the color of that footage with the other two. This is not a rare problem so I knew I could fix it.
Then they lost a light fixture in the middle of a keynote presentation. Then the light came back on. The light flickered several more times over the next few minutes then stayed on until the end of the presentation.
I’ve also fixed lighting problems in post but I’d already used so much “push” getting the white balance corrected on that one camera that there wasn’t much room left to correct for the change in lighting.
So, getting the shot as right as possible in all regards will save you lots of work later. But you’re likely to always need to do some grading so I believe it’s wise to leave the image a bit flatter than you want and work with it later.
Then, of course, I’m always delivering on DVD and the web. If I had a project headed for theaters I’d want to take lots of test footage all the way through the process and see what really worked.
And that’s what I recommend you do so you’ll know what works for you.
Links:
Flatten Your 5D – the post that started it all – ProLost
Flattening the Flat Look – Eugenia’s blog
HDSLRs – Flatten your Flat even Flatter – a collection of links about the subject at FreshDV
