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.