Thursday, April 11, 2013

La Roux

I'm not 100% sure that Red Giant's "Bulletproof" will really do the thing for us. It may be that it's a better tool for making ProRes files from the ridiculous .mts files we're shooting right now.
I think that one thingy about Bulletproof is that the philosophy behind it is that you want to save all your decisions about color correction until the very end of the post process.
I'm a big fan of making decisions early. If I could set the color of highlights and shadows right there on the floor while we're shooting, I would totally do that.
Bulletproof lets you import a LUT and do a bunch of things with your original footage. I can imagine there's a world where working with that kind of workflow makes sense, but that's not how we do things in our shop. I expect this is partly/mostly because I am lazy we have a fairly short period of time to get movies completed and we have no money or time to re-think details of color-correction which haven't basically been made when we were shooting.
In other words, we don't shoot "flat". I try to have some 100% video and some 0% in every shot. We try to go ahead and make the picture look like something and do minimal CC in post.
If we were shooting commercials or even movies with budgets exceeding $250K, we might think about staving off our color decisions to post. But maybe not.
There's a whole thing about mixing in the audio world where you keep telling your new recordists not to EQ things, not to compress or add reverb, because you'll deal with all that in the mix. It's hard to "un"-EQ things and virtually impossible to un-compress and un-reverb sounds. So dry, dynamic, and unmodified is the go-to wisdom on the subject.
And a journeyman sound person won't EQ recorded signals (except perhaps some high-pass to get out some rumble). But as my old buddy Alan Douches says "commit!" Alan is no journeyman. And up there in the lofty heights of the master level yes, you want to make some decisions about sounds and commit them to tape. No waiting. Make decisions now. As long as they're the correct decisions everything will go faster and the mix will be easier.
I'm not a master in audio. And I'm certainly less a master as a DP. Yet still recklessly I'd rather go in and get close to being finished at the acquisition stage.

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