Color Grading Smartphone Video
Grading or colour correction is a tricky part of the filmmaking process, no matter what camera you are shooting on. Smartphone filmmakers enthusiasm for the subject is perhaps not matched by our understanding of the subject.
My personal opinion is that colouring your smartphone video is something which is best kept as simple as possible. I’m also of the opinion that footage from a smartphone does not stand up to much more than minor tweaks in colour, contrast and so on.
We run a facebook group for mobile filmmakers and I once had a discussion with a filmmaker there who didn’t agree with my opinion on this. I said focus on the story and basics of filmmaking first, he disagreed. I disagreed back until eventually he gave up and never commented again.
How do I make my video look cinematic?
What looks cinematic is of course entirely subjective. Some people prefer the sound of cats screeching to a professional harpist caressing a beautiful melody from 40 perfectly tuned strings. And some others prefer their midday sky to look pink and people’s faces to be glowing a radioactive form of orange, rather than more comfortable-feeling colours.
There isn’t really a simple way to make your video look more cinematic. Practicing cinematography is one way. And great editing also plays a big part. Other than that, many people want a shallow depth of field (blurry backgrounds), widescreen anamorphic ratio, sexy lens flares, and maybe that orange and teal look.
Are these things just cliches now? Probably, but that doesn’t stop people wanting them. But beware that anything that’s good and easy will be used by everyone and therefore your videos will not stand out. Rather the opposite.
Tired brain, tired eyes
I was a professional composer and songwriter for 20 years. One of the hazards of writing and producing your own music is ear and brain exhaustion.
We had our song, so we started producing it. Drum track, base line, guitars, keyboards, vocals, backing vocals and so on. By the end of this process we had heard our song thousands of times.
At this point, your brain is bored to death with hearing the song. This means any change you make sounds good to your exhausted mind. Simply because it sounds different.
It was a real danger that we would overcrowd our song. Track after track of instruments, effects and so on, could end up ruining it.
So the same thing happens with filming, editing and colouring your film. If you are doing everything yourself, by the time you get to adding colour you have seen your film many many times. Your brain is bored.
When you change the colour, your brain is temporarily excited by the difference. You can easily believe you are improving the look of your movie when in fact you are just changing it. So be careful you are indeed grading your movie rather than degrading it.
For this reason, when tweaking the colour of my recent smartphone films, I try to do as little as possible, as quickly as possible (before my brain gets too tired to know any more).
What kind of monitor do you have?
Again, when I was a professional composer we had speakers which were “boring”. At the time, Yamaha NS10s were known to give a flat response, which made them kinda dull to listen to. But this is what you need when you are mixing audio.
If you have speakers which are pushing the top and bottom frequencies, how can you hear what you are mixing? Likely, you will mix down the bass and top end, resulting in a final track which is pushing the middle frequencies. When someone listens to it on different speakers, they will probably wonder why you mixed it so badly.
The same goes for colour grading. If you don’t have a monitor which has been corrected to give as true a colour response as possible, it’s very hard to colour your film correctly.
What if your monitor is pushing blue? What if it’s very bright? When you’re colouring it, you’ll likely turn down the brightness and the blue channel. Now when someone with a different monitor watches it, your video looks dark and too red.
But Log format, and LUTs and stuff!
It’s become one of those “everyone knows” facts of filmmaking. In this case, everyone knows that if you want professional, cinematic footage you need to shoot in some kind of flat or Log format.
“If your video—like most video—is not recorded using a log picture profile, chances are the exposure is being recorded in a linear fashion. Video that is recorded or encoded this way looks nice on your average computer monitor/television and will have a good amount of visible contrast from the blacks to whites. This means that with little or no processing, that video will look reasonably good on almost any display device, provided that the exposure and white balance settings were correct while recording was taking place.” David Adler
He means your device is designed to shoot video which looks good on most screens. If you shoot some kind of Log format, you are throwing away that look. Your hope is you’ll have the equipment and skills necessary to replace it.
Just read the rest of that David Adler article linked above to get a sense of complexity of the job you are getting yourself into.
Expose your footage well, light it well and make minimal adjustments
In my opinion, it’s better to get the image looking good in camera and make minor adjustments in post. Preferable to trying to make average footage look “cinematic” using LUTs and Log colour profiles.
Just remember that your smartphone was designed to capture the best looking video with the minimum of technical knowledge. If you focus on framing, camera movement, using available light creatively, correct exposure (and creative exposure) so that the image looks great when you’re shooting. Then you’re already 9/10th of the way to cinematic, professional looking video.
There’s a great tutorial by John Harvey where he shows how to grade footage shot on a Samsung S9.
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