I have just completed the final colour grade for the project. Luckily the project was a joy to grade because of the camera that was used to shoot it. The A7S has an incredible dynamic range of 14.1 stops. That is a huge range that eclipses cameras that are more than double the price of the A7S and even rivals some of the professional industry standard gear nearing ten times the cost:
The dynamic range of the camera dictates how well it performs at capturing darkness and light within a frame. It specifies the amount of detail the camera is capable of capturing within the darkest and lightest point of the image. Dark parts of the image can clip when exposing for the lighter parts of the image and vice versa when exposing for the dark. A camera with a high dynamic range can capture both light and dark clearly. The reason this is so desired is because our eyes have a huge dynamic range and so a really high dynamic range in a camera makes for a more natural and cinematic look. This is an example of the dynamic range the A7S is capable of:
As you can see the sky is well exposed without anything clipping to pure white and yet there is still tons of detail in the street on the left of the frame. Nothing has clipped to complete blackness. This is really impressive and makes the camera a joy to use when colour grading. The camera achieves this through it's picture profiles like Slog2 which is a professional sony profile that they brought to this price bracket.
When colour grading it is important to have as much latitude and detail as possible to work with. You don't want to have to boost the blacks or dip the whites when they're already blown out because it will just look ugly. The goal is to shoot as flat as possible so as to have as much detail as possible in post.
With this grading the A7S is a joy. The director Jamie wanted a nice subtle push of the original image. Nothing too crazy just adding detail and dynamism to the image through adding contrast, sharpening and accentuating certain colours. Luckily Jamie's DOP Angus is really talented and set up some really impressive lighting rigs to make the actual RAW image really attractive anyway so the colour grading was a simple process which was just sweetening everything and adding sharpness.
This is a before and after from one of the scenes:
Before:
After:
As you can see the difference is very subtle and just accentuates the qualities already present in the image in the first place. However, although the changes are subtle they make a huge impact. The image is far more appealing to look at and visually interesting. The subtle drop in saturation really adds a palpable intensity to the scene and the subtle darkening really helps draw attention to the focal point in the centre of the frame.
Throughout the whole piece the grading was a really pleasant process and really powerful to help bring the images to life and add the final layer of polish. Throughout the next few posts I'll go through each scene explaining the colour choices.
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