Today I borrowed a camera form UCA and decided to film a few things at Capstone. I have been watching a lot of videos to expand my knowledge on cameras and how to shoot videos using DSLR’s, and what are the best setting for then having to colour grade the footage later on.
Shooting in a flat profile (log) is something that I wanted to try. Although colours look less saturated in log, a lot of videographers choose to shoot in log to retain the information in the shadows and highlights, as colour can easily be replicated after. Shooting in a log profile preserves more of the images dynamic range and tonality.
Images showing how shooting in log looks like.
Canon has it’s own log setting (C-Log), however, they are only available in Canon’s Cinema EOS range, and not their other DSLRs. So instead, I watched some videos on how to be recreate a log profile, and then over exposed the videos I was shooting so I could add the colour back in later.
I really wish I had access to higher quality video cameras, as getting a good image in the first place is essential for the colour grading to look good. That is why I find it so easy to colour grade other people’s raw footage but struggle to colour grade my own.
I set my cameras settings to*:
-ISO 100
-Shutter speed 50 (for some shots I had to increase the shutter speed because it was way too over exposed)
-Aperture 4.0 (the lowest it could go)
*I still need a lot of practice on learning how to properly use cameras, but I think there settings were the best for the effect I was trying to create.
Colouring:
The whole point of doing this, was to show different people the two videos, and get their reactions on how they feel when watching the two videos, to see whether colour really does affect the mood.
The video I ended up using, a woman walking her dog down a country path.
I coloured the same video in two different ways to try and convey opposite moods. I am aware that I have done two very different themes, and maybe being more subtle with the colour would have been better for the experiment I tried, but I wanted to try two extremes.
Before I created the effects, I first colour corrected the video, and then created more nodes to add the two effects I wanted.
Clip #1
For the first effect I added a vignette and cooled the temperature, white adding blues to the shadows and desaturating the yellows in the video.
I was also messing around with the effects and came across a colour compressor effect, which I used to isolate certain colours and reduce the saturations.
Clip #2
For the second effect I warmed the temperature and emphasised the greens and yellows in the image. I also created a circle mask to increase the brightness of the path the dog walker is walking along.
Before and after of brightening mask in Clip 2.
Reactions to the clips:
To get peoples genuine reaction to the clips I asked my family what their reactions were to the two clips.
This is some of the words used by them to describe the two clips:
Clip 1:
Peaceful, tranquil, lonely, spooky, lonesome, chilly, empty, scary
Clip 2:
Peaceful, warmer, more comforting, would rather be in this scene, sunny.
Overall:
It was interesting to see other peoples reactions to the two different scenes, and it just confirmed what I already know about the psychological effects of different colours. I will definitely do this again, but maybe using different clips, and more subtle differences between the two. I’ll show one person one clip and another person the other, and see how they react.
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