There are levels of awareness in most things.
Ignorance can be bliss, but knowledge can be even better.
I have been trying to learn what I need to be a decent videographer and in that journey, I have come across “levels” of knowledge, or more specifically levels of teaching and expectation.
I started wanting to know how to use a Panasonic G9 for professional work as others were at the time. The G9 without a paid firmware upgrade has a very decent video capability including red frame recording, 10 bit colour, HLG, Cine-D codecs and good levels of control, but lacked LOG. For many Natural with the saturation and sharpness further reduced was enough, starting more than a few careers.
Cine-D had more latitude, but did not seem to be overly popular, HLG even more so, so I stuck to the accepted norm.
The whole LOG thing seemed overly involved to me anyway, so I went with Natural.
Unhappy with my results (muddy whites), I tried flat line Standard profile one day out of desperation and got nicer, cleaner results to my eye (basically it looked like I liked to grade).
I was swimming against the tide of opinion, but it seemed to work for me. The sources I visited at the time leaned more towards the soft, warm, desaturated camp, where I wanted more punch, more of a match to my stills.
This was the breakthrough clip, the clip where I felt I broke free from the chains of reluctant expectations. It looked right, came easily and needed little adjustment.
Within that limited scope, I felt I must have been wrong, because nobody was using that profile, the accepted norm was at odds with what I was seeing in the TV shows and movies I liked. The modern videographer and Netflix with it’s uber-dreamy look was a different beast to the “traditional” cinematographers needs.
I did notice also about now the butchering of correct photo terms and understanding like depth of field/aperture, applying video profiles to stills and an ignorance of some basics. The signs were there, but I was in unfamiliar territory, the newbie, so I just watched and learned..
At this point, success in the field seemed to be tied to getting white balance and exposure right and avoiding flicker. This was all very “front of house” to a dedicated RAW stills shooter, but I had to adapt to the needs of the medium, not the other way around..
My habit was to keep a 17mm lens in my bag with a 5 stop ND filter permanently mounted (which helped with high sync speed flash use also), white balance became an obsession, something I had managed to avoid dealing with for most of my RAW shooting stills life and I even understood a little more about how the power grid worked.
LOG it seemed was the holy grail, the golden ring, the top tier and in many cases and it was perfectly fine as a professional aspiration. Combined with strong Black Mist filters and heavily (often self) promoted Luts that tended to lean towards soft and low contrast looks. That look was all-pervasive, even my decades of photo experience was reluctantly adjusting to this new way of seeing.
Sharpness, saturation and contrast were the enemy, clarity a foreign concept and I needed to conform!
Why was I chasing a look I actually did not like?
I tentatively moved towards LOG when I bought the S5, but quickly went “backwards” again to Flat profile, being a sort of Cine-D without the catches (odd skin tones etc). Exposing LOG required extra effort (I thought) and the intricacies of it were above my pay grade, requiring the application of Zebras, Luts (video pre-sets) and other foreign concepts.
Basically my grading skills did not make enough difference to LOG footage to better more main stream profiles and I could not commit to using Luts. It all seemed too pre-determined. I know Luts are only the first step in the editing chain, but they were somebody else’s first step, someone else’s opinion.
Better I go straight-line to something closer to my ideal, then push it a little from there. The whole LOG thing just seemed to over complicate the already complicated.
I felt like I was the videographer equivalent of a JPEG-only stills shooter. Limited, deluding myself possibly, but the whole video processing thing was just not doing it for me and LOG was more an enemy than a potential ally.
I did question some times why other people’s out-of-camera or phone footage looked great, my own older files even and my “semi-pro” level hybrid-cams were producing a whole other thing.
At this point I did not fully understand the importance of all the other stuff other than just the camera and lens, like lighting, which is actually more important!
Getting better at Resolve (well, so I thought at the time!), I decided to upgrade to Studio along with getting the Micro Panel, BMVA 12g and Speed Editor to get better at it, which opened the door to RAW formats.
I was assuming ProRes would have been enough, which it turns out the old G9’s can feed out to the BMVA 3G, but I went sytraight into B-Raw, based on dozens of reviews and opinions.
In a seeming whirlwind, I shifted through LOG, past ProRes and into a true RAW space. This was the same pathway the makers of The Creator used, a consumer cam with an off-board recorder.
Potential realised?
This was real and better than LOG, but again, so much more to learn.
The difference though was the elevated relevance of the information and language of the sources as I chased different questions, needing different answers, like “RAW vs ProRes HQ”, “what is Colour Space Transform”.
All of a sudden, in the blink of a google search eye, LOG was relegated to “baby” RAW, the new lingo was all about saturation, colour depth, high bit rates, Node trees etc, LOG was only the beginning of the next level not the end.
Already blessed with 10 bit colour from the humble G9, suddenly 12bit or even 16 bit was more the go.
It occurs to me, I made some good choices early on, exclusively using 10 bit was one of them.
All the vloggers I had been following now seemed like they were only scratching the surface, their own journeys, granted more aligned to their working work flow seemed more parcelled.
I could place different shooters into the camps of young and popular “self taught” videographers following the pack, well trained “emerging professionals” often coming from a pro-colourist or sound engineer backgrounds and established professionals, the “true cinematographers” sharing their experience with the wider world.
The first group had set a bar, a bar for a long time I felt under qualified to reach for, then suddenly it was only a low hurdle, something to be jumped over and moved past. I am not saying I had the skills, just an awareness of the path to follow and confirmation my gut was right all along, for me anyway.
Why keep shooting LOG when for as little as $800au an off-board recorder could record RAW to an SSD or for $1700au, get a “ real “cinema camera” like the BMPCC4k with it built in? I did not even bother with ProRes HQ from the G9II.
My current work flow is B-Raw constant quality Q5 unless I need multiple cams at once, then i switch to in camera LOG or Flat if just casual work.
If you can so easily access what real cinematographers use, why not do it?
Suddenly I was in a similar space to my stills work flow. White balance was only a suggestion (not really, but mistakes are no longer cruel), exposure more forgiving and what I saw, was actually close to what I was getting without the need for viewing Luts or other forced expectations.
Now Power grades were the thing now.
For the first time, Resolves mind boggling options have started to even out and I am learning what to ignore.
Storage and work flow are as much to blame as ignorance I guess for avoiding RAW, but fr this RAW stills shooter, it turns out that the 4k/All-i/LOG (even ProRes) creators, making massive files and adhering to good, but not great work flows are missing out.
I used to shoot 1GB/min for Flat/10bit/1080/422 quality, I now shoot C4k/B-Raw/Q5/12Bit at about 1.5GB/min (it varies by subject, but not by much), so a vastly better result for an insignificant increase in storage space or media needs. Q5 runs as low as ProRes Proxy or up to ProRes LT, not the monster LOG/422 HQ files tht are actually a level below for editing.
It was hauntingly similar to my years of teaching stills. RAW avoidance came from unfounded fears of over complicating the seemingly easy, but “fixed” jpeg files, usually modified ironically with layers in Photoshop, a skill in itself. I have been a RAW shooter from day one and my pathways have always been straight and clear..
The reality is, you do have to process RAW files, but you can easily and logically fix problems. Jpegs are potentially processing free, but fixes and even changes are limited and complicated.
Below is an example of a relatively stuffed-up file from a basketball game the other night (mixing video and stills, I took it by reflex as I saw it, then adjusted). This level of recovery is simply not available with a jpeg file.
It was a doorway to controls and manipulations I could have only dreamed of as a colour slide or black and white film shooter.
B-RAW (as the example I have adopted) effectively shifts the whole LOG/All-i/ProRes paradigm into something much friendlier to use, more forgiving and sometimes, actually lighter on your system. It is easier to learn the editing flow when you have settled on the single most flexible and supported format in Resolve.
The files can be big, although not always, but the uncompresses RAW footage is easy on your computer because they do not need to unpack heavy compression and SSD’s are significantly cheaper and faster than SD cards.
I am now watching and reading about best Resolve work flows and the results match the expectations, which are top tier.
It turns out that the things I only recently learned are already old hat. Primaries, even LOG controls, a recent discovery, are now limited and dated. HDR Global, Colour Slice and Linear are the improved ways.
Now my language is one of “using what real colourists use”, the behind the doors expert tips and tricks. This information would have been mostly wasted on me earlier in the journey.
The reality is, the higher up the chain I go, the clearer the messaging and the easier it is getting to find answers and get results. We are often self shielded from growth by placing barriers between us and the reality we need to face. Cameras with codec limitations, programmes with multiple levels of control, a swamp of information plagued by the mosquitoes of doubt all contribute to slow and sometimes stunted growth.
B-Raw with as much skill as I can apply is finally becoming natural to me, but I have a long way to go.
What strikes me as I write this though and the reason for writing it in the first place is my journey, only a couple of years and hundreds of hours watching videos in the making, has had defined turning points, levels of awareness that on one hand I wish I had cut through earlier, but on the other, I see the need for the steps that I have taken.
My work flow is now B-Raw into the ProRig GH5s or S5, LOG if I need multiple matching cameras or sometimes just becasue it is the past of least resistance in a cramped bag or Flat in 422 ProRes for low stress jobs. My future may include another BMVA12g, maybe a Pocket 6k, or 4k, maybe not, but from this point I will only compromise when compromise makes sense.