Just yesterday I discovered the approach to filming with post in mind. And by this I mean you film footage to be color graded. Prior to yesterday my thinking has been to get the shot looking as good as possible in camera so that little to no color correction will be needed in post. Yet there is something that gets lost with this approach, I have learned. And that something is dynamic range. What is dynamic range? It's the range of luminance within a scene, basically the amount of visible stops within a shot. When you film a clip with the set color presets of the camera, intending to get the best shot in production, you are limiting yourself to what the camera can produce. When the goal shouldn't be to acquire a dynamic range on set, but focus on filming as much detail as possible. By preserving detail in your shots, the dynamic range can easily be pulled out in post. The end result is more beautiful and aesthetically impressive footage. Shots with more depth and life, and more wiggle room before the footage begins to deteriorate.
Yesterday, being my first attempt at this new style, was marred with mistakes. I kept creating a lot of noise in my shots, not necessarily understanding exactly what I was doing. So I conducted more research today and found a great post on Prolost.com:
http://prolost.com/blog/2010/1/26/color-correcting-canon-7d-footage.html
Using their suggestions of shooting flat, shooting to the right (basically over expose the image without clipping detail) and sharpening the image after applying a color correction, I have been able to create more impressive results than yesterday. I have found that the preset "Nostalgic" in the GH2 gives the best washed out (flat) look and is on the lighter side of the luminance spectrum. As you will see in the video it out performs the darker flat picture style and blows the enhanced color preset "Cinema" (intended to get good picture quality ungraded straight from camera) out of the water.
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