Color Correcting Stock Footage

If you have come to stock video from a still photography background, you will have experienced a steep learning curve and if you were persistent the rewards have been pretty good. Your skills as a still photographer are very necessary from the composition and understanding exposure point of view, but in the early months of starting to produce stock footage we tend to get overwhelmed with the new editing software, transcoding, codecs,  rendering etc. The finer details of video production tend to get forgotten or lost in the avalanche of new information. Hopefully now you have the basics of video editing in a workflow that is second nature, now is the time to look at your final stock video clips you are producing and start to fine tune them to be professional quality, to justify a price tag of $70, $99, or even $500 each.

Some common problems we encounter with video and still photographs from DSLR cameras like the Canon 7D and even smaller camcorders like the Panasonic TM700, is the performance of auto white balance. Canon do not make it quick or easy to do manual white balance and many times we are shooting quickly to grab clips or we are too reliant on auto white balance from the still photography side, where we leave the settings on auto and shoot RAW files and correct at the computer. With footage we don't have RAW available, we have video editing programs Like Sony Vegas or Final Cut on the Mac that can do some adjustments, but here is the dilemma you will face as you become more proficient in the video world. Adjusting footage in post processing  is like JPEG's in still photography, you only have so far you can bully the file into submission before the loss of quality compromises the final image.

You need to adjust all footage you shoot in post, giving the levels a small tweak and taking a good look at the color of your footage. DSLR cameras do tend to have a color cast either a magenta or green cast, the green is normally an auto white balance mistake, possibly due to mixed light sources, the magenta cast I find is a sensor color cast. To correct both these issues in editing software you add the opposite color that the cast is, so green and magenta are opposite each other on the color wheel, so to correct magenta add greeen and vice  versa for a green cast. It is worth your while to set a white balance for stock footage, as a few moments at the shooting stage will cut down on computer time.

Just remember to be light handed with your post processing and allow your Buyer of the clips an opportunity to color grade your clip so they can match their overall project look without losing the initial quality. If you have been doing stock footage for sometime now, it might be worthwhile going back to older clips and reviewing them to see if they could need help from your new found knowledge that experience has brought to you.