Filming Tips :

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? Happy birthday to our beloved country Nigeria. May God consume all your enemies with His fire, may you become a great nation in Jesus name. Amen.

Last week I made mention of the reason why you have to be careful when dealing with dslr footages in your colour softwares. I also said it is better to light well and shoot well without need for any colour work in post because of the limitations of the codec. This week,  I will like to go a little deeper in my explanations.

Codec stand for Compression and Decompression. Co is the act of compression while the Dec is the act of decompression. The media storage being used by dslr cameras are too small in size, the amount of data to be stored on it will need to be well compressed to make it fit into the media storage. This compression then leads to reduction in the strength of the footage compare to what the camera actually record. A filmmaker like Tunde Kelani often use external recorder that can record with a better codec like Avid DNXHD and Apple proress HQ. With this format, he will be able to have richer and stronger footages, you can now see why you may use thesame camera and come out with different results. You may now say, what if I convert the footage shot on h.264 codec to apple proress HQ, well, think about it logically, can you force a bag of salt into a small paint bucket, then try to put it back into the bag, can it fill it up again. The answer is no, what is lost is lost.

Bit Depth: The second thing that affect the footages, that can determine whether the footage is good enough for serious colour job is the bit depth. A camera that shoots with 8 bit depth can not be compared with those that shoots with 12 bit or more. With 8 bit you get 256 color per channel while with 12 bit you get 4,096 color per channel, though this will consume more space but you will have enough color information to work with.

Chroma Sub-Sampling is another way through which compression is also being effected. I shot my movie in Raw format on Blackmagic, so it doesn't have any form of compression at all. When I finished the color job of some scenes, I wanted to export it into the highest resolution possible since I can't export it out in Raw. I decided to export it in Ultra HD using Apple proress HQ but 444 chroma sub-sampling. The file was too heavy and bigger than I thought, I wondered why, until the research made me see that the closest codec to Raw is the one with the chroma sub-sample of 444.

There are cameras that shoot with 420, you can also shoot 422 and you can shoot 444 depends on your budget. 444 means out for pixels  (by the way, pixel stands for picture element) each of the pixel have their own color saved, this then means you have lots of your raw data stored up for use, then this will consume lots of space on your storage device. 422 means out of 4 pixels, 2 will store the color data while the other two will make use of what the first two has. The last option is 420 which means out of 4 pixels, 3 will disregard their own color and take the color data of only one. All these are efforts of compression and you can see that they all have advantages and disadvantages.  We will continue from here next week Monday.

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Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.