Indie filmmaking 101 - To Fix or Not To fix... in Post Production

[DjfunkmasterG]

Over the course of making two indie films, on micro budgets, sometimes you have to make choices, and one of those choices are do it right the first time, or just roll with it and worry about it later, aka "Fix it in Post" During the making of Deadlands 1, my DP would get annoyed when I would say "ok man lets get moving, if it looks a tad dark, don't worry I will fix it in post." You would see a look of disgust in his eyes that would sort make you laugh, but in the long term you know deep down inside hey... maybe I should listen. With Deadlands 2 a similar situation arises when you are in a time crunch, however, my new DP was more understanding, and he understood I would most likely be using some sort of fucked up color scheme anyway, so Fix It In Post can be applied a little easier in this situation than the other. So the question is when is the best time to fix something in post? Well that really depends on the situation. If you are shooting outdoors and your shots are overblown because of over exposure, can you fix that in post? Yes and No. Believe it or not CONTRAST is your friend in post production. When you have an overblown shot, upping the contrast and adjusting the gamma will help take the edge off, but it will not be the "be all end all" of fixes. Underlit shots are another issue entirely, now since I don't have access to a 100% professional lighting kit and I have to shot 50 set-ups in 6 hours I tend to go with a loose lighting style, but when you have the blacks and other colors crushed in your camera, you now have to take the time to decide is it worth fixing on set or do you wanna deal with it in post. One under lit shot can really screw up a scene badly, and adding gain and gamma isn't going to help because they will only bring out the Grain structure worse than you can ever imagine, so now you have to make another decision... reshoot or color correct the whole film so that it looks over exposed. If you're me, you go the overexposed route, plus I like the look of blown out shots when you add a nice amount of contrast it actually gives it a surreal balance, sounds strange I know, but I think when you guys get to see Deadlands 2 you will understand what I talking about. Right now I encourage other HPotD filmmakers to share their horror stories of lighting and post production fixes. We can make this thread a great resource on what not to do, or what you may need to do when that time comes. Gary

[xxMikeyDubzxx]

I will add that when shooting dark, horror style scenes, digital video tends to be noisy in the 10-40 IRE range. Crushing blacks help, but sometimes you lose too much detail. I recently discovered a great de-noise plugin, that has done wonders on some DVCPROHD footage I shot. Check the link: http://www.neatvideo.com/

[DjfunkmasterG]

Luckily I do crush blacks quite a bit in Deadlands 2, but that still doesn't help underlit scenes from time to time.

[GingeUK]

I've usually found that over lighting a scene usually helps. Not to the point of annoying those pesky zebra's but enough so that there is as little grain as possible

[DjfunkmasterG]

The grain to me is part of the fun and gives it the 80's horror vibe. However, I have had my share of overlit scenes in the first film and let me tell you... that has been a problem, but not as much as some of the underlit stuff.