Shooting RAW Isn’t Just To Hide Mistakes

I was reading an article this morning about all of the advantages and leeway that shooting RAW gives you. I love shooting RAW when it makes sense. There is nothing better than the huge dynamic range and latitude for color timing that RAW gives you, but make no mistake about it those are the key features not the fact that setting your white balance doesn’t matter. There is this growing trend where everybody is all about latitude in post and how much you can do with your video after you have shot it. While this is a wonderful world we live in where yes there is a lot you can do to footage when grading please don’t forget about when you are shooting. Is it really so hard to make sure you have set your white balance correctly that you need this to be a main feature for your footage. When shooting with film there was daylight or tungsten and you worked with that, and it worked great. The fact you have a huge variety of color temps or a custom setting doesn’t mean you need to worry about this to the minutia. Anybody that remembers the old days of shooting video if you didn’t get your white balance correct your footage was toast. Sure you could break out a TBC and try to fix your footage but it was never going to be exactly right. We need to get back to setting everything up correctly and then lighting it or shooting for a specific look, not shooting it and then messing with it to get the look you should have shot for in the first place. I love RAW but if you are just going to shoot in it so you can be lazy or not have to know what you are doing than all you are doing is creating giant files that are unnecessary. Lets as a rule get back to trying to make every shot as perfect as we can when we shoot it and then tweaking it in post not the other way around. It makes for much better footage and a much better look. I was talking to somebody the other day and they asked why even when some people get access to a RED or ALEXA it still looks like something from when we were in film school. Well this is an absolutely huge part of why it looks that way. Dynamic range, latitude for grading, and all of the other specs people drool over are nothing if you don’t know how to utilize them to your advantage.

Posted on July 27, 2017 in Evil, Rants, Uncategorized

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