The shoot today was a mixed success.
My wins were satifying;
My lighting was soft using a double sheer to cover the window and a hair light.
Focus was spot on using eye detect continuous.
The filter look subtle but effective adding a lovely Bokeh to background lights.
Sound was good with the Zoom H5 and SSH6 used as a boom and most importantly.
I have learned a little Da Vinci colour grading (see below).
Negatives were not terminal, but eye opening.
The light changed a little over the morning as morning sun slipped in and out of cloud cover, sometimes during a useable clip, which was reduced somewhat by the double diffusion used, but changed by about 1 stop in extreme cases.
The footage shot in Natural colour style was fine and had room for adjustment, but my white balance discipline was poor, creating headaches for me later, which thankfully DaVinci sorted.
The H5 goes to sleep when the camera is turned off, needing to be touched to wake up, which justified my using headphones to monitor audio.
Using Da Vinci, I managed to colour match all six clips well enough, the hard way I am sure, but matched none the less. I will provide a few different looks to the school, just to see what takes.
A steep learning curve, but one I am keen to take on. The main thing for me was separating the creation of a timeline based event and simple colour grading and sound adjustment. Once I realised I did not need to go through the process of making a full movie, but could just drop a clip in, compare it to others and adjust them to match each other, then render them together or individually, life got a lot simpler.