I recently read an article on photofucus.com titled “The Biggest Lie In Both the Still Photo & Video Production Industry“. You may have seen my tweet about the article. Writer/Photographer Scott Bourne discusses the problems with technically inclined photographers and videographers thinking you can fix just about anything in post production.
I come from the computer site of graphic design, video and photography and in a lot of situations I too think to myself that I/we can fix it. Scott brings up good points that all turn back to realizing that most post work is not as good as doing the right thing the first time about and just reshoot it correctly in the camera. It doesn’t look as good, sound as good and in many cases costs much more time and money to “fix it in post”.
In my tweet about this article I mentioned never forgetting my first experience doing blue screen video. It was for a school project where we were to make a music video based off of any song we wanted. At the time I knew a small band and decided to do one of their songs as my project. They practiced in an old barn, and my idea was to film the band playing on a blue screen & key out the background to be replaced with scenery depicting what the song was about. So what we did was buy some blue canvas tarps, drape them behind the band and shoot it. All along I was thinking whatever is wrong we can fix on the computer later.
Boy was that an experience! To learn the ins and outs of shooting on blue screen and then what is required technically to remove the blue background in post. I learned so much about proper lighting, to watch for reflections, and spent many hours editing frames one-by-one. The end product wasn’t great but the idea behind it was good and the information I learned was tremendous. I think one of the most important things I learned out of this job was that it can be painfully time consuming to think you can fix anything later after it has been shot on the camera.
