Challenging yourself in post

Tim Jones · Jan 5, 2018

No doubt composition and capturing the right base footage is critical.
But I have found that to make aerial video work, post processing is more of a challenge.
And it is no doubt the best way to set your work apart from the crowd.
My weak area is color grading. I tend to really like a crushed blacks look. It is just part of my style.
But that crushed black look has an emotionally dark response in people.
Not something you are trying to convey when filming a sunny beach property.
So I have been looking for resources to challenge my thinking.

Pretty cool facebook group if you want to see opinions on color grading.
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PatM · Jan 6, 2018

Capturing the footage is indeed the tip of a very large iceberg. To produce a quality video that others
will find interesting to watch requires many skill sets. I have been on a quest to build the skills for a long
time and I find that the quest itself is one of the more challenging aspects of videography. Getting the
workflow right and knowing how to use the tools at hand, requires time and dedication. It seems however,
just about the time you get everything worked out, technology blows that away and you get to start all over.

I have been using the Adobe CS4 Suite for video editing for over tens years, but now that it has gone to
subscription, I have dropped that as my editor and am looking for a new one and am in the process of
building a new computer to work with 4K and beyond. I suspect about the time I get everything just right
and the work flow is clicking 8K video will be all the rage.

Color grading is certainly very important but I also would advise that one of the most overlooked yet
important parts of video production is the audio. Not music selection, but the actual attention to
detail of everything heard in your video. Another aspect of video production that I think a lot of us
overlook is output; or what I call the Dark Art of Video. A lot of modern editors have these dumbed-down
presets for export that use far more compression than necessary. Knowing how to manually choose
the specific setting for both audio and video will have a tremendous effect of the final product, especially
when uploaded to sites like YouTube, Vimeo or what have you.

Tim Jones · Jan 6, 2018

About a year ago, I bought a Tascam recorder.
Ambient audio is not something I have much experience with, but have started working it into my work flow. It is even more important on aerial footage.
have you tried HitFilm or Resolve? I have both and play with them. Just have to much experience working with Premier Pro to walk away. I do hate the subscription model.

Red90 · Jan 7, 2018

Hi all,

I run a production company and use Final Cut Pro for our post work. The latest version of this ($199) has a fantastic colour grading suite built in. Up until now we have used the Color Finale plug-in, as we shoot everything in Log format to allow us maximum creativity with the exposure and tones.

That said, as the pervious poster mentioned Davinci Resolve is a brilliant (free) piece of software that allows grading to the nth degree. The audio facilities are also far superior to FCP - it’ll take you quite a while to get used to it, but once you do your images will never look the same again!

Cheers,
Martin.

PatM · Jan 7, 2018

Tim Jones said:
About a year ago, I bought a Tascam recorder.
Ambient audio is not something I have much experience with, but have started working it into my work flow. It is even more important on aerial footage.
have you tried HitFilm or Resolve? I have both and play with them. Just have to much experience working with Premier Pro to walk away. I do hate the subscription model.

Looking at Resolve, PowerDirector and a few others. I love Premiere Pro and if I started doing a lot of production work I would renew.

Tim Jones · Jan 7, 2018

Resolve is amazing I just have not had the time to build up my skills
For the longest time I would shoot a still in RAW typical of the over all shoot, and use Photoshop to grade the still, and load it into PP as a lut

Dave Pitman · Jan 7, 2018

I'm pretty much an advanced-beginner with Resolve. I think it is really amazing and considering that it is free, well... It is missing up-scale transitions and text and line work that can be had with AE or FCP without jumping into Fusion which I find very complicated.

I like what I have seen with what guys are doing with FCP but I'm not a mac guy cause I'm too cheap to pay the "it's apple" fee. Especially when we're talking hardware to smoothly edit 4k and up. A guy on another forum just posted that he paid something like $12k for the new imac pro pumped up with the good stuff for editing !! A similarly priced diy pc is around half that.

Tim Jones · Jan 7, 2018

yeah no, me neither. I like that I can upgrade my machine over time.
My I7 is an older 6 core hyper thread processor.
Just recently I updated my dual graphics card to a new modern one with more cuda cores and it was like a totally new machine.
I got this Zcam E1 on sale on black Friday, and it uses .mov codecs and for some very odd reason Premier Pro struggles with the footage out of it. But I am sure it is something in the file format

Dave Pitman · Jan 7, 2018

Tim Jones said:
I got this Zcam E1 on sale on black Friday

I haven't seen that, cool. Looks similarly spec'ed to the X5. Would love to see that form factor in something with 1080 @ 240 fps. How are you using it?

Tim Jones · Jan 7, 2018

It is going on a DIY build that I have going, I am acutally considering a gopro 6 that has 1080 at 240 fps, just waiting to see if they make the flat lens for it

Dave Pitman · Jan 7, 2018

Thanks for sharing, looks good. What FC are you using? (sorry for the O/T)

edit: NM, saw your other thread.

Tim Jones · Jan 10, 2018

Yes that is a Pixhawk 2.1
the build is coming along.

The camera is a ZCam e-1
strange little camera that is not getting a lot of support. But it has the same sensor as a GH4. with a gopro chipset.
For a drone it should work fine
Color grading the footage was giving me fits until I just used the 709 ground control lut as an input. Now it is grading nicely
Here is a low light shot from the camera

Tennessee Drone Services · Jan 12, 2018

Not sure if you're still looking for recommendations on a NLE, but if you are, I use Magix Vegas Pro, formerly Sony Vegas Pro, formerly Sonic Foundry Vegas. I've used it for over a decade. It started out as an audio editor and video was soon added well before Sony bought them out.

I also license the full Adobe suite and use it for Lightroom, Photoshop, and Illustrator mainly. I've never been able to make the switch to Premiere.

For me, Vegas is very intuitive and solid. You could open it up and kind of just figure it out. LUTs are not its strongsuite, but the newest version does offer the ability to utilize them. Every video on my website was edited and graded on Vegas Pro.

Just a disclaimer: I was a paid demonstrator of their software at Sony's booth at N.A.B. But that has no bearing on what I wrote above.

Geoff G UK · Jan 18, 2018

Dave Pitman said:
I'm pretty much an advanced-beginner with Resolve. I think it is really amazing and considering that it is free,

I think you need a powerfull graphics card to get the best out of Resolve, especially if you want to play with H264/5 files. We use an i7 machine which handles RED R3d raw files without problem but can't play back tiny H264 files without conversion.
It also has a superbly detailed manual.

Tim Jones · Jan 18, 2018

That is one of the things you have to give adobe, they know how to leverage hardware. Hitfilm would be a great little product if it made better use of system resources

David Boulanger · Jan 21, 2018

Tim Jones said:
It is going on a DIY build that I have going, I am acutally considering a gopro 6 that has 1080 at 240 fps, just waiting to see if they make the flat lens for it

View attachment 24

I think Peau has lenses for the Hero 6

Tim Jones · Jan 21, 2018

Yes confirmed that they do.
I already have one on my Black.
Once I get this Zcam in the air, I may look at modding a 6
it is about time to retire my 3

Davidblezard · Feb 19, 2019

PatM said:
Capturing the footage is indeed the tip of a very large iceberg. To produce a quality video that others
will find interesting to watch requires many skill sets. I have been on a quest to build the skills for a long
time and I find that the quest itself is one of the more challenging aspects of videography. Getting the
workflow right and knowing how to use the tools at hand, requires time and dedication. It seems however,
just about the time you get everything worked out, technology blows that away and you get to start all over.

I have been using the Adobe CS4 Suite for video editing for over tens years, but now that it has gone to
subscription, I have dropped that as my editor and am looking for a new one and am in the process of
building a new computer to work with 4K and beyond. I suspect about the time I get everything just right
and the work flow is clicking 8K video will be all the rage.

Color grading is certainly very important but I also would advise that one of the most overlooked yet
important parts of video production is the audio. Not music selection, but the actual attention to
detail of everything heard in your video. Another aspect of video production that I think a lot of us
overlook is output; or what I call the Dark Art of Video. A lot of modern editors have these dumbed-down
presets for export that use far more compression than necessary. Knowing how to manually choose
the specific setting for both audio and video will have a tremendous effect of the final product, especially
when uploaded to sites like YouTube, Vimeo or what have you.

Have you taken a look at DaVinci Resolve 15 | Blackmagic Design I'm new in this space and looked for a full featured yet inexpensive solution. They have a Free (not just Trial ) version.