Dynamic Range is ruining your grade.
Hey Everyone!
Dynamic Range is a lie. Here, I just said it, but let me explain.
Why do some videos and/or movies look striking while many YouTube videos look so flat? The answer is dynamic range - but your camera is not the problem.
Today, we will assess dynamic range as a concept and find out what professional colourists do differently.
To achieve better colour grades, you need to overthink your notion of dynamic range. The logic that has manifested itself over the last couple of years is: The more dynamic range, the better.
I'd argue filmmaking-youtube took a wrong turn when consumer and prosumergrade cameras became more powertul.
See, as cameras improved, videos on YouTube became flatter and flatter in contrast, because people think that you really need to see everything, because otherwise, it's not 14.6 stops of dynamic range and people really need to see that...
That's hogwash and here is why:
Imagine you go on summer vacation and you start packing your things. When choosing the things to take, would you consider all the things you possess? Your nice winter coat, because people should see that? Of course not, because it is not relevant for your summer vacation.
The same is true for most information your camera can capture. If exposed correctly, modern cameras can capture almost as much as we can see, but this is only one part of the equation.
We also need to consider our deliverable.
To understand the dilemma of the deliverable, lets go back to packing your stuff for your vacation. We just discussed why you should leave your winter coat at home. Let's focus on the main limitation that makes prioritising necessary in the first place: space. In your suitcase, you have space for 100 things. But, of course, in your house are 10,000 things.
You have two options. Option one is focusing on the 100 things that matter (and leave your winter coat at home). Option two is slamming all your belongings into a press and fitting it into your suitcase. Most of the things are then, of course, useless after that. But hey, you brought them all along.
This is what happened in the last couple of years. Cameras became more and more advances but the Rec. 709 spec didn't change. (And it will not change)
That means we're trying to pack more and more things into the same sized suitcase. Of course, the image information doesn't become useless, but a flat image isn't particularly striking, is it? Hence, packing more information into the same tonal range of Rec. 709 comes at the expense of contrast.
Consequentially, this means our job is to actively make decisions about the importance of things in a scene because we need to tell our story between 0 and 100 IRE. With such a limited amount of dynamic range available, we should choose carefully what to preserve and what to discard.
What you could do today is trying to go further on contrast than you would usually do. And it you start to lose information, ask yourselt: does it advance my storytelling or do I just want to preserve all that dynamic range because I can?
If you frequently gravitate towards the latter, l'd encourage you to meditate on your intentions when colour grading. Because nobody cares about your camera and its dynamic range.
By the way, here is a fantastic (meme?) video I found the other day. He is a colourist, so the things he talks about are quite advanced, but he makes fantastic points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lugTH2VwDk
As you can see, there is only so much you can learn through tips and tricks on YouTube. If you want to become better at colour grading fast, consider booking a 1-2-1 call with me.
See you next week!
Eric
