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Can’t get a great look with 5D footage. Any advice?
I need some advice about color correction of Canon 5D material. I have worked quite a bit with video shot with a Panasonic Lumix GH1 HDSLR, which comes from the camera looking (to me) excellent. And while I know that the 5D should be even better — and I’ve certainly seen many examples online — it doesn’t come from the camera looking that way to me. It’s very heavy on the blacks; they seem crushed; and (this stuff is hard to explain in words) the image just doesn’t seem to have much “life” to it in terms of color/contrast/etc. It just has kind of a dull look overall. And, in fact I’ve heard the same from another producer/edit.
I do think that the problem is me. I’m not the world’s greatest expert at manipulating an image in post although I’ve been getting a lot better, partly with the help of Walter Biscardi’s fine DVD Color tutorial.
But all that being said, does anyone here who works with 5D material have similar impressions — that 5D footage generally needs some work in post to coax those great looks out of it? And if so, do you have any guidance/hints/words of advice that you can offer about which tools and techniques you use to deal specifically with 5D footage?
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6 Replies
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The first step to getting great looking footage is shooting it properly. If the footage looks too black, too crushed, then perhaps the shooter didn’t expose properly. That can happen to any format. I have color corrected 5D footage, and my own footage shot with the baby brother, the T2i, and it looks great. Heck, images directly from the camera looked great. But they were shot with an experienced shooter.
Shane
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You certainly make an important point, Shane. But I’m using stuff shot by a highly experienced DP with many years experience, beginning in film, with several awards on his shelf. The 5D is just one of many cameras he uses.
Also, we’ve shot 5D and GH1 cameras side-by-side on the same set and gotten these results.
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Post a couple frames, images are always better than words.
With these cameras a lot of people are starting to shoot them very flat in camera but most of the image should be in the mids not crushed blacks. Because of the codec it is hard to open up the contrast range from black to mid gray. but really nice things can happen when you go up and down from the mids.
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Wow, well that is a very interesting post, Michael. If you have a moment, could you expand on that a bit. I’m not experienced enough at this yet — although I’m certainly working on it — to fully understand your terms and meaning. What tools are you using for this and what do you do exactly to bring out those great looks?
Thanks in advance for this…
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Not really a FCP issue. You probably could get responses to this question on either the Canon Camera or DSLR forums.
Have you checked to make sure the menu settings weren’t tweaked in some severe way? And, doesn’t the 5d generate a histogram? Wouldn’t that get you in the ballpark, exposure-wise? (btw, there is an interesting test of the 5d’s histogram here: https://www.brisk.org.uk/photog/histo7.html – author claims the 5d histogram is based on a downsized version of the image, and is not very accurate.)
Bob C
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Not really a FCP issue. You probably could get responses to this question on either the Canon Camera or DSLR forums.
I will check out the other forums but there’s plenty of talk here about 5D footage and how to handle it with FCP in post production. Which is what my question is about.
Any further help here would be much appreciated.
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