A long delay since the last blog post – apologies for that. After a quiet winter with lots of hibernating between myself and clients, late spring and early summer came on in gangbusters.
To start off – I have refreshed the three food videos on my site. Each now has a punchier look and I’ve spent some time digging deeper via masks to optimize clips. As a still photographer who came to video about six years ago, I have always been anal about color and calibrating my tools (in this case my monitor.) With the shift to video I do spend a lot of time looking at the scopes as I grade my footage, waveform and vectorscope, but I’ve come to realize that I need to check in with the histogram more often.
The histogram is thought of as more of a tool for still images. It is but in the video realm I think it can give a truer sense of the overall contrast of an image than you get from the waveform. Only going by the waveform was causing me to tend to leave clips a bit too flat and sometimes a touch too dark. With the Canon C300’s c-log footage this left some skin tones just shy of where they needed to be. C-log seems to have a tipping point when putting the contrast back in during post, once you cross it the colors all come to life.
For all of the above, not only was the contrast updated but masks were use to burn and dodge so that eye is more naturally guided to the subject.
Here are the three remastered videos, one from the El El Frijoles project, and two from my work with 44 North Coffee:
I have also updated the 2014 blog post, Cool Beans, Lighting and Grading 44 North, to make it current with the recent work.