My first experience with the 5D DI color correction was for the Terminator Webisodes produced by the Bandito Brothers through Wonderland Sound and
Vision. McG asked me to be the Director/Cameraman for these alternative marketing shorts that were going on the Internet. They would release one a week leading up to the opening date of “Terminator:Salvation.”
I wanted the look and feel of the Webisodes to feel like a prequel to the film, so the style and color that I had done on “Terminator:Salvation” would be the consistent thread throughout the project.
When we began the color correction process we quickly realized a new grading process was necessary as the old rules did not apply. We started with a LUT (look up table) that gives you the look and feel of Kodak Vision print stock in the digital world and the Codec just fell apart. Andrew Huebscher, the colorist at Bandito was earning and learning as we dealt with this very compressed Codec for the first time. The old rules of color correcting film and when Andrew would turn the knobs to make a change the color would shift radically. We soon understood that with this fragile color space you had to move the knobs very delicately. We learned not to use the Vision LUT when color correcting digital footage.
I treated the 5D like I was exposing reversal film stock, you had to get it close to what your final product would be. Any extreme manipulation in color was difficult. For example, if you were in an interior and then moved outside and forgot to change the color temperature and shot footage. Then, all your exteriors would be blue. It would be very difficult to just fix it in post and difficult to swing. You can do it but it never matches well. It just feels wrong.
Our solution was to go back to the RAW Cineform 444 files and start anew. This worked very well and it seemed to give us much more range. I also realized too late that this camera needs light. If you don’t feed it enough light the 8 BIT compressed color space quickly goes to 4 and then to 2. You can always create contrast by stretching the image by pushing the whites and pulling your blacks down. Underexposure is a powerful tool with this camera, but the whole image cannot be underexposed. It will result in noise, fall apart quickly in color correction and just look muddy.
After this first experience I knew I needed to educate myself. I read about different picture styles that gave you more digital latitude but I wanted to create my own and each camera’s sensor is different. It is not a plug and play technology. I set out to tackle the EOS utility and the Picture Style editor to create my own RAW look. I took a RAW still image then dragged that image into the Picture Style editor window.
I then moved my mouse down to the lower left corner where there is an icon that has two squares in it. You click on that and two identical photographs show up on the screen. I then move over to the right side where you find a curve graph.
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