Camera presets, getting the look in camera or in Post

Originally published Apr 4, 2008 at the Bonnie Blink Productions Blog

After reading Paolo Ciccone's article on his TruColor preset for the Canon XH-A1, I began to rethink whether it is better to use a camera preset to obtain a certain look, or to get that look in post. The goal of the TruColor preset is to set the camera's response as close as possible to neutral. To do this he used a calibrated target and monitored the output on a waveform monitor and vectorscope.

I like the idea of not introducing any bias into the image that I am capturing on tape. In photography, I almost always shoot raw, rather than jpeg, because I feel that it is better to be able to preserve as much data as possible, even if it means doing more work in post-production to get the right look. Nothing is "baked in". In wedding video where we are often working under pressure and have little control of lighting, this makes a lot of sense. In Hollywood no expense is spared to get just the right lighting, and they can always reshoot. But they still have colorists who tweak the film in post.

As Final Cut Studio now includes an excellent color grading tool, there isn't any reason to not to create the desired look in post. As long as we shoot with the right white balance, and exposure, we should always be able to get the look that we want, and if we don't like it, we can easily change it.