This Video Shows Why It's Important to Flatten Your Movies

Most photographers understand the benefits of shooting their stills in RAW. By avoiding compression, RAW files preserve all the image data in a scene, giving you a good deal of freedom to tweak parameters like color and white balance during editing.

When it comes to shooting video on a DSLR, it’s not quite as simple. There are uncompressed video file formats, but they require an external recorder to store the footage as the files are enormous. Camera makers like Canon and Nikon have responded by offering video profile settings that under-saturate and reduce the contrast of their video to give you a flatter image–one that’s easier to tweak during editing but don’t necessarily deliver a completely uncompressed file.

If you’ve hemmed and hawed about using these flat settings, have a look at how colorist Taylre Jones of Kansas City-based Grade leveraged post production color grading in this video for the movie “The House on Pine Street.” The film was shot on a Sony F55 using the S-Log2 encoding, so it’s not directly equivalent to a flat setting on a Canon or Nikon, but it’s close enough to demonstrate the point that you should really treat video files the same way as stills by choosing video settings that maximize your dynamic range.

Color Reel – The House On Pine Street from GradeKC on Vimeo.

Via: Reddit