Don't Outsource This One Thing

In light of surviving tax season, I remember a lesson that my CPA once taught me:

“Even though you have someone handle your money, you still need to know how money works.”

The same goes for your business.

You see, in this industry of creative storytelling, we wear a million different hats.

We are filmmakers, editors, marketing agents, PR, HR, and the list goes on and on…

Naturally, you are going to be better at some things,

And other things you will need to outsource because they are your bottleneck to scaling your business.

And today I am talking about a very specific portion of that outsourcing process:

Color Grading.

A lot of us outsource our wedding edits,

But what’s concerning is that many creatives simply receive the edit back, send it off to the client, and move on to the next one in the queue.

What if the color is completely off?

We live by the 80/20 rule, and although color might seem like one of those things that doesn’t really matter,

We are here to tell you: it does.

People notice good (or bad) color just as much as they do the story.

It can seriously enhance a wedding film, or completely take away from it.

The most beautiful, portfolio-worthy wedding can be ruined if you don’t pay any attention to the color grade.

The good news?

Coloring doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t need a 30-node tree in Davinci Resolve to achieve cinematic colors.

Here are three basic rules to live by in order to level up your coloring:

1. Nail Your Exposure In-Camera

Unless you are shooting raw, pay close attention to your in-camera exposure.

For us, this means using the histogram to make sure that our highlights aren’t getting clipped, and our shadows aren’t being crushed.

Don’t rely on just the multi-metering mode. It’s not smart enough to adjust for certain scenarios with intentioanlly bright sources of light (like windows or the sun)

Perfect in-camera exposure will make your life much easier in the editing room.

2. Consistent White Balance

Your best option is again to nail your in-camera white balance.

But we all know that in the run-and-gun live event world, that doesn’t always happen.

Few things are more distracting that seeing an all-white dress on a bride, then it cuts to a scene where it’s muddy yellow because the white balance is off.

Make whites white and blacks black.

Most times this will also help you match the inconsistent tints and hues in different rooms as well, or get you 90% of the way there.

3. Add Contrast To Make Subjects Pop

Something we see a lot of is when filmmakers convert log footage to Rec .709,

And they wonder why the image still looks flat after their grade.

They ask us what went wrong?

Technically nothing.

But you need to be adding some slight contrast to the image to make it pop more.

Our favorite way is using the S-Curve and raising the highlights and lowering the shadows.

Then we adjust the midtones as needed.

When you do this, make sure to keep an eye on your exposure and not blow out your highlights and crush the shadows, this usually ruins a perfectly good image.

Wrapping It All Up

Whether you are in Premiere Pro, FCPX, or Davinci, these steps all apply.

Don’t over-complicate it, just figure out a system that works for you.

You don’t need a million nodes or adjustment layers.

But you do need to make sure it looks good, and it’s consistent.

If you want to get your foot in the door with dream planners and clients, why would they hire you if you can’t make their event look true to the color they made it?

These three tips will get you there.

But if you decide you want to go deeper into your coloring game, we got you covered my friends.

We have tons of free resources on our YouTube channel

And we go way more into depth in our online course:

A Filmmaker’s Guide to Wedding Videography (👉🏼 60% Off Link Here 👈🏼)

And to top it all off, we like to talk about our “(not-so) Secret Sauce” that we developed with Gamut

The Prestige LUT Pack that gives your final color grade a beautiful color grade

You can use the code “Runaway” for 15% off

If you enjoyed this email, reply back and let me know and I’ll be sure to make sure more content like this reaches your inbox 📥

Talk soon Runaways,

Nate | Runaway Vows

P.S — Anybody out there see Warfare in theaters this past week? Jake and I went on Tuesday and we are still in shock from it