Thursday, June 24, 2010

A Look at Color

In the previous post, we explored what goes into a video production. I want to go a little deeper, and take a moment to talk about color grading. Color grading is an art form in itself. I almost never produce a video without some color correction. This is typically done last, when the edit is complete and all the sound design is taken care of. Not every shot, especially outdoor footage, is perfectly lit, and this is where I go in and adjust the brightness and/or contrast. Sometimes I will "warm up" a scene with some orange or yellow, or cool a scene down with blue. To give my productions a "cinematic" look, I will employ various filters to achieve certain effects such as a glow, black and white, or vignette's. And there are some productions where I need a "hollywood" sort of look, and use filters to achieve that as well. Whatever the case may be, color grading is something you may not be aware of since you don't usually get to see what the raw footage looks like, but it's very important to the final look of the piece.

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