With the 4k rushes shot S-log on a Sony F5, the first challenge to overcome was that all the footage was upside-down! Director And Hutch’s vision for the video was to have continuous takes shot ‘in the round’ with the camera rotating 360 degrees in the centre of the studio with the talent following the lens around as the camera rotated. To achieve this the camera was mounted on an inverted DJI Ronin gimbal on a tripod. This gave the DOP, Jack Webber smooth wireless remote control of the camera with the ability to control the speed and direction of the rotation. A remote follow focus was used on the carl zeiss prime lenses, it was a tricky day for the focus puller with all the movement of the camera and talent whilst shooting with a shallow depth of field.
To avoid having to use a processor hungry motion flip across all the footage whilst editing, I used the display preferences on the preview/output monitor to rotate the output 180 degrees and then nested the final edit in a new sequence and added the 180 rotation DVE to the master clip.
We shot the video 4k in order to give us the flexibility in post to be able to crop into shots, which worked well and definitely helped give more options for the edit.
Adobe Premiere CC, music video edit timeline.
Having initially sync’d all the footage up on separate layers on the timeline, once the edit was complete I then deleted unused footage and separated scenes onto different layers for grading.
Adobe Premiere colour grading using Lumetri LUTs and tools.
I have been very impressed with the addition of the lumetri colour effects within adobe premiere cc so decided to use them and grade the video completely within premiere. I used a LUT across all the footage and tweaked the intensity of it for various scenes and individually tweaked shots where exposure and colour balance needed tweaking. I then added adjustment layers to the various scenes and used the ‘creative’ effect LUTs to further enhance the grade and bring out the colours.
I used magic bullet ‘Cosmo’ filter in places to enhance skin tones on the close-ups and also an FX Factory plugin named “Flarelight" for the “anamorphic glare” effects used in some scenes.
Here is a comparison video which shows the ungraded s-log footage along with the final graded version: