I have worked with a few videographers on big shoots, but don’t have much experience myself other than little behind the scenes type of videos shot with an iPhone. One thing I noticed is that the initial footage is always super washed out. Then they color correct it, and bam! Awesome footage.
Why do they shoot it that way? It’s obvious to me that there’s a reason— they’re I professionals, and they know what they’re doing— but I have no idea what that reason is!
In: Technology
I’m not sure why it looks washed out since that depends on your workflow, but the correction is done to ensure continuity across the entirety of whatever they’re filming. If colors and grading are constantly changing it’ll take you out of the moment. Also it depends on light sources as well. Fluorescent light sources will make things look blue for example and need to be made to look not natural.
When recording video you want to avoid hitting pure white or pure black. You might have seen it yourself if you’re taking a picture on a cloudy day and the sky ends up pure white, and no matter how much you try to edit it you can’t see any of the cloud details.
So when filming the camera turns the contrast right down to avoid any areas being too bright like that, or too dark at the other end.
This means it all looks washed out and you need to spend time color grading, bit better that than have the color set on camera then after the shoot find the footage it’s useless because parts of it were too bright/dark and it can’t be edited.
They’re probably shooting log. That’s a video format. Basically, it uses some math to shift the brightness values of the image. If you don’t edit it, it looks washed out, but the reason videographers prefer it is because it captures the most detail in shadows, which gives you more options when you’re color correcting. Maybe you don’t need that detail and you can throw it out, but if you do need it, and you captured the video normally, you may not have the detail that you want when you go to edit.
They shoot it that way because that’s how the cameras work. Every camera has a certain color profile, but it will always look pretty dull, because they’re designed around getting as much information as possible rather than emphasizing certain colors.
Then you color correct the footage to get the look you want. Despite being called “color correcting,” it’s not about fixing the color profile to make it “correct.” It’s about designing the colors to look a specific way.
If you know the look you want, it *is* possible (in some ways) to shoot it that way. But you’re losing out on information in your footage that way.
You’re seeing the footage in a log format when it looks ”washed out”. It gives the editor more dynamic range and basically just more control over the shots.
Lots of correct answers here, but let me try a true ELI5.
You shoot as neutral as possible, to retain the most information possible, to color it how you want after the fact.
It also makes it easier to give longer films a coherent color space, with footage shot in a variety of locations and lighting conditions
Because when you shoot, there is only so much you can do to make it look a certain way. Filming “flat” yes, looks dull and desaturated, but this is a lot better because it retains way more information in this form. Ever notice how old black and white photos looked pretty dang good detail wise, but recording in color when it came out it got a bit iffy? You can also use scopes to adjust everything properly, monitors and lighting conditions can change how color comes across to your eyes, but the actual hard-coded data of scopes is accurate. Is that blue sky the actual proper shade of blue? Is that green t-shirt actually green? Is that white wallpaper actually white? This lets you figure out the information of if a shot has too much of one color, whether red, green, or blue. Maybe that dark room shot looks a little too warm, lets dial the red back and add a small bit of blue.
You have four primary things to focus on for colors. **Primary color correction, Secondary color correction, Continuity, and Artistic choice.**
**Primary color correction**, this is going to be things like contrast, saturation, gamma, white balance, etc. You balance the shadows and the light out. If the footage is outside, you want to balance it for daylight conditions. If you’re outside at night and there are a bunch of sodium streetlamps blasting yellow all over the shot, you can compensate for that as well. This is the overall ‘look’ of the film.
**Secondary color correction**, this is going to be the more finer details of the shot. You’re picking small aspects of what is on screen and further correcting them to look a certain way. Let’s say you have a car in the middle of a parking lot, maybe you want to make the color pop a little more, so you create a ‘power window’ to apply just to the car, adjust the exposure/brightness, do whatever else you want, and it pops out much more now.
**Continuity**, lighting conditions can change very easily going from different shoots, and of course different times of the days. If you shoot a scene at noon, then the second scene at 2pm, but then have to redo shot #1, it’s going to look a litttle odd with the different lighting conditions. Let’s also say you have something you’re filming during winter, but it’s a movie set during summer, you can adjust the color and make it more vibrant!
**Artistic choice,** Different colors will go with a certain mood. Let’s say you have a shot of someone walking through a foggy forest. Well, a horror movie might invoke a dreary blue tinge, making it look spooky. Maybe it’s an action movie, so the character clothes are brightened, and the fog might take up a lighter brighter haze, and maybe you have a sad drama, you can go with more mtued colors. This is slightly more complicated than ELI5 but I hope the point gets across.
Let me try and maybe fit it more into ELI5: There are four things to focus on. Primary, and secondary correction. Primary is like messing with the lighting level and making the colors a little more natural, making the entire movie one ‘color’ scheme. Secondary correction is more picking smaller details out of a shot and changing their specific colors rather than the entire shot. Artistic correction is more where the director can add their own ‘pizazz’ and continuity is just balancing everything a tad to ensure the shot B that actually came *before* shot A, looks like it was recorded *after* shot A
For an ELI5 answer, higher-end cameras are able to shoot in a special mode called “log”. It kinda mutes or flattens the color. There are lots of complicated reasons why it was decided to work like this, but to simplify… videographers like to have creative control of the color palette in a shot. Make it more blue, or more orange, or warm or dark or golden… etc.
If you start from a neutral, it’s easier to control the end result. You can always return to a more standard color profile in post.
Please note, this isn’t the REAL ANSWER. There’s lots of color science reasons why it’s a better system, but this is ELI5. For more information, do a quick YouTube search for color science or log color.
Cameras can only “see” a certain range of brightness. Even in the very best cameras, this is much smaller than the range that people can see. Something that is too bright will just appear as white, and something that’s too dark will just appear as black.
To get around this, videographers use something called a “LOG” color profile. This makes the dark parts a little brighter and the bright parts a lot darker, allowing the camera to “see” more but also making their footage look very dull. They can then adjust the footage in their editing software to get the colors just how they want them.
There are some great technical answers, but there’s another answer.
Let’s say you want a particular color profile for your film. You set your camera for that profile. You shoot some test footage. You look at it and it looks good. Now, you go and shoot the actual scene, take the footage, and go home.
Now you’re home and editing, and you realize the color profile you chose isn’t what you wanted. You need to fix it. You have to go back, set everything up again, pay all the people you needed on set the first time to come back, and shoot the whole thing all over. Lather, rinse, repeat. There’s a whole extra day’s work.
If you shoot neutral and color correct after, it’s more efficient. Do the color correction. Don’t like it? Re-do it in a minute. Don’t like it? Re-do it again. Heck, take an hour to get it right. It’s one person, working for one hour, at a desk.
Laziness is the mother of invention.
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