Make the difference that will lift you to another level

For years, the post production of an image or an animation was understood as something pejorative. The same thing happened when he said:”Of course, it’s retouched in Photoshop.” No doubt there were comments from people outside this industry. Retouching an image or an animation is not fixing shortcomings (well, sometimes it works for that too).

It is simply part of the process. Talking about this fact as a criticism is as barlish as discrediting the traditional developing process by saying that it is a manipulation to have more time or less paper in the developing tray. (I assume that you will only understand this last example if you are passionate about photography and its history or you are over 40 years old).

The video post production is that: part of the process.

Giving up video post production is giving up the possibility of improving our rendering work and that would be unforgivable.

All the nuances of the image or animation can not be achieved with the render just finished. We must work them later on. In addition, there are jobs that do NOT have to be done in the render. That have to be incorporated to the video post production later. I’ll tell you about all of them now.

Color correction on video post production

If you’re as old as me, you’ll remember the filters that were used in analog cameras. It was a pre-production mechanism.

For example, to achieve a sepia effect in the image, you had to make the photo with the filter placed on the front of the lens.

Therefore, the result was in sepia.

The current digital processes, allow this modification AFTER the image has been taken and, in addition, being a non-destructive process. This is an advantage that opens up a multitude of possibilities. The author has absolute freedom to retouch because the final result, although depending on the original, occurs AFTER and not BEFORE as in analog photography.

Once this possibility of work is understood,

the only limit is our imagination and the visual intention that we have.

It can be a slight retouch if, for example, the render has gone to magenta and we want it back or we simply want to touch the brightness and contrast or saturation of certain colors of the scene.

Or, being more ambitious, to turn the complete production or some of the sequences towards a general tonality colder or warmer.

Take for example Fargo, although any of the current Nor Noir TV series are also good examples. It is obvious that the plot runs in a very cold territory. It’s appreciated by the continuous presence of snowy landscapes, even icy. The costumes of the characters highlight this environment. The mist that comes out of their mouths when they speak also does. Light of these latitudes is a key factor in creating this hostile environment.

But it is no accident to use color correction in cases like this. Without going into details, the color palette and its shades were well thought out: cold, cool colors.

The plot needed it and the correction of color helped to convey that feeling of white desert, of hostility, of violence, of discomfort.

The best recommendation to understand all this I have told you now is to see this video: “Color In Storytelling”. It is explained wonderfully with very recognizable examples of images from the history of cinema that we all remember. I invite you to, after seeing it, in the next movie you see, you notice this visual aspect.

We are human: patch assembly

As I said before, things do not always go well at first. You could forget to incorporate an element to the scene or simply an object was not well textured and we did not realize until the scene was fully calculated.It is usual for the dead line to get on us. We do not have time to repeat the scene with the error fixed and we will have to resort to calculate only the affected part. Mount that patch in the affected sequence and get the result fixed.I mean with the assembly of the patches. To a lesser or greater extent, you will always have to make patches. You must have planned the time for it as well as organized your file to do the composition. You are not bad or clumsy.

Simply, you are human and, calmly, it is a task that happens in all studies either you are GAYARRE infografia or PIXAR.

Do you want to discover the third secret? : SECRET 13 | VFX resources