Micro Video Complexities
One thing you can’t help learning about photography is how your work compares to others. Just as if someone placed a file on your desk with something wrong with it, photographic source material can have the same problems. Looking the lens of another photographer can be painful, and teach valuable lessons for your own craft.
These shots of Marcus Gilbert are phenomenally difficult to extract in the heightened quality current image standards demand. Working with frame captures from your own HD video will have better quality than video two decades ago. Even the most modest new DSLR has better video grab quality than an unfocused production lens from 1983.
I was working some screen captures from some favorite Youtubes of mine, and despaired of the value of the long focus pulling ability of whomever was filming this series. The trend in the 1980’s to infuse atmosphere via material on the lens or deliberate mid scene focus. The close ups of the actors are in focus, but every midrange shot is unfocused and difficult to extract.
When second unit photography of landscapes is in crisp detail, and facial close ups pick up every arch of the eyebrow and every freckle, but scenes played four feet form the camera are blurry and background detail blurred as well, the quality of any video frame capture is decayed. Repairing the damage can be challenging to most adept micro stock photo editor. The raw image file is not what modern photographers are used to dealing with.
The problem with video in this age of HD television is that in the last twenty years photography and video equipment has gotten so much more affordable and so competitive that the technical strength of any video product has improved vastly. In the bitmap layer correcting faulty camera work is a deadly tedious task. Every eyebrow arch, eyelid shadow, and cheekbone skin tone takes work.
Learning to recognise when poor video quality is present makes time use decisions easier. Blurring out atmospheric neutral pixels into the main shade, eyedropper picking up neutral tones in the same color and hue range in the selected area, and spot mapping new features such as eyebrows and lip extensions and eyelid smoothing takes time. The cheekbones throw shadow at an angle onto the eye socket area, creating difficult blends of color to work with.
Assessing whether a shot is worth it can reduce getting stuck editing a lost cause image endlessly. Drifting shadows, facial complexity, variable skin tones, and too many light sources will render a person or object impossible to fix. The graining can’t occur because their is no place for light to settle.
The same BBC production today would open with screen defying shots of immense clarity and scope. But two decades ago even the most priceless art in a stately home might be reduced to a cinema arts prop house quality on screen. Usually reducing the attributes of size increase resolution. But with early video the VHS grabbed “fields” of color, not distinct pixels of color information.
Experience is the only way you can learn when a shot needs too much fixing to be worthwhile.
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