Since we didn’t get a chance to Instagram during our shoot the other night, I came home, grabbed a frame from video, and put it up on Instagram! Once I posted it up on Instagram, Heather & I were lookin at it and I said “Hey…wouldn’t it be cool if we could color our footage that easy?” Then I started thinkin How hard would it be to grade some footage to look like one of the Instagram filters.

I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t always do things the proper technical way you should. With that said, here are a few shots of the progress we made on some footage we’re workin on.

Below is a quick vid showing the difference between the orignal and graded shots! BAM:)

Now like I said earlier, we don’t always do things the way the books say to do it. We just figure out the look we want, and then have at it until we get what we want. There are a trillion ways to get to the final graded footage that we got, but here are screen shots of the color grading progressions during our grading fun.

…Oh wait…ready for the kicker…We did this in FCPX…gasssp:) Each screen shot you see is a different color correction. There were 10 total, and then a nice signature Instagram vignette at the end:)

I think we got pretty close!! There’s still a lil difference between the two, but we wouldn’t want to make it look exactly like Instagram would we? (Okay, yeah we would, but I got tired and went to bed)

If you’re not using the C1-C3 settings, You’re craaaaaazy!!!

As Videographers, Eugene & I use these settings so we can save time, and not miss out on catching moments because we’re messing around with the settings on our cameras. I’m not going to go through and be your camera manual, instead I’m going to tell you how we use the C1, C2, and C3 settings.

A lot of times, you’re shooting in situations where lighting is different, which means your white balance will probably be different. Most of us are always shooting on manual, which can be crazy if you’re going back and forth between all the different types of lighting in a room

When we’re doing bridal prep, we pre-pick spots where we want to have the bride getting her makeup on and where she’s going to get into her dress. We start off in manual and get our camera set-up perfectly (white balance, iso, shutter…etc.) Eugene & I usually shoot with 3 cameras. Its not uncommon for us to start with one camera and end up with a completely different camera at the end of the day.

What I mean when I say that is this:

I Love getting detail shots, so I shoot with the 100mm macro pretty often. Obviously, I wont shoot the entire day with the 100mm lens, but Eugene and I use it quite a bit when we really want to make a moment super intimate. I also like shooting on the 50mm as does Eugene. We also have our hollywood camera with the 16-35mm on it. Gotta have the wide angle shots:) It could get real confusing and time consuming if we had to change settings all the time on the cameras everytime we switched with each other. Yeah we could just switch lenses, but thats just as annoying:)

When we first walk into the room, we set our cameras so C1 is set for where the bride gets her make up done. C2, is set for her dress, C3 is always set for outside. This helps us so much just knowing each Camera is already pretty close to being set.

Below you can see a few stills we pulled from video. I was catching a moment where the bride’s mom and the bridesmaids had an assembly line and were tying each other’s dresses. At the same time, Eugene grabbed the camera I had next to me with the 100mm to hurry over and catch the bride getting her makeup done. I had told Eugene I really wanted to get a shot of the bride’s eyes when she was getting her makeup done. (She had the prettiest eyes ever)

The photog had just walked out the door with the dress to get some shots, so we wanted to capture both moments at the same time so we could then go get some killer shots of the wedding dress. By already knowing that C1 was set for the bride getting her makeup done, Eugene was able to just turn the dial to C1 and catch the moment! We then headed outside and while the photog’s getting settings right on their cam, we were able to go ahead and grab our shots pretty quick because we already had our settings for outside.

Eugene stayed outside and got a few different shots while I went back inside to catch some great moments with the bride and her wedding party. We use radios, which also makes capturing the day even easier. I always radio Eugene when its time for the bride to get into her dress. When Eugene comes back, no matter what or where he was shooting before, he can turn the dial to C2 and be ready to go.

Its such a time saver & people are never waiting for us. We avoid being “that guy.”

Using the C1, C2, & C3 presets can be used for more than extremes like inside and outside. If you’re shooting a wedding where the bride comes down the aisle and it’s lit way different than how the grooms face is lit, why not have C1 set for the bride and C2 set for the groom?

We sometimes wish that instead of having all of the different settings like TV, P, or automatic, they just had the Manual setting and then had C1-C6.

I guess that’s not really a big deal, but we just feel way better if we get to meet our couples first. Aight so when Ashley got out of her limo…Heather and I almost at the same time was like “Are you freakin kiddin me?” Ashley & Michael were the “no one will ever believe we actually shot this couple’s wedding, because they’ll think we hired em for a promo video from some modeling agency out of California” type of couple. Which was only 50% true. They were from California! Ashley is a huge country music fan and wanted to get married in Nashville! During the wedding, me, Heather, and the photogs from Divine Images kept pointing out that it was impossible to get a bad shot of the couple!! You don’t understand how sick it was.

Heather and I went through and found so many great freeze frames that it took a while to figure out which ones we wanted to post for today’s Freeze Frame post.

So…..

This first Freeze Frame is from Heather’s camera at Riverwood Mansion! I gotta say that Heather is the best wife ever, and she never ceases to amaze me with the shots she gets. She’s sooo…I dunno how to explain it, She’s just a genius when it comes to capturing little moments! This was during the get away (which explains the bubbles). Normally we both get some kind of shot from the front of the exit so we have at least two different shots we could go to; but this time, Heather stayed mixed in with the guests and got this shot from behind the couple. You can’t really tell in this still, but when we post Ashley and Michael’s teaser on our Facebook Fanpage, you’ll see why I’m lovin this shot so much!

Now this Freeze Frame came from Dakota at the War Memorial in downtown Nashville. We actually met Dakota when we went on our Christmas tree adventure and he noticed we had our 5D and started asking what we did. We all kept in touch and Dakota wanted to hang with us during a wedding to see how we shot our weddings.

Now honestly, (sorry Dakota) we really didn’t expect to be able to use much of what Dakota shot, but we know how having experience doing somethin is way better than having someone tell you or watching someone do it. So we gave one of our cameras to Dakota and let him have at it.

To say that Dakota blew our minds is an understatment. He would shoot and then show us some footage and Heather and I would be all…hmmm…wow…this kid is pretty sick!! It wasn’t until we got home that we realized…this kid shoots weddings a lot better than some of the videographers who’ve been doing this for years! (don’t tell him though…he’ll get a big head)

Man we can’t wait to post the video for this wedding! It was the perfect way to end our 2010 wedding season! Thanks Michael & Ashley for being one of the coolest couples we’ve been able to work with! (We really do have the best couples!)

Being in business for ourselves, we’ve learned that we’re not pros at everything -duh ProPhoto Blogs was one of the best tools we could’ve asked for. With ProPhoto Blogs we could actually make our blog look professional. However, even as simple as it was to use, we still were missing out on a few features we wanted.

We had been speaking with our freakin’ amazing friends Zach and Jody Gray about what we wanted to do with our blog, and how it seemed that everyone was starting to use the ProPhoto Blogs theme (which is great that people loved the theme but that just meant that a lot of our blogs started looking the same.)
Unless you’ve been hiding in a hole, you probably know that Zach and Jody Gray have one of the most awesome blogs around; so of course we asked them who did their blog. Without even thinking twice, they said that we had to call their good friend Allie! They even offered to shoot the photos for our blog (which turned out awesoooome!)

Well, the first time we spoke with Allie, we could tell she knew what she was talking about! After, she got a feel for our personality, she emailed us a few questions about what we wanted in our new blog. Well, poor Allie, because this is what we gave her: (don’t be jealous of the stick figures)

Allie turned this gorgeous drawing into the awesome blog you see now! We promise you she has magic powers Allie we cannot thank you enough for all of your hard work.

We also had a guy code our site, who…well thats a blog post for another time (not a good post either.) We should’ve just done a little more research on the guy before hand, but we’ll just say that we’ve been tweaking a lot of the code ourself along with having some guys code the blog so things function the way they’re supposed to. You’ll be seeing changes to the blog every now and then to make it actually do the things we want it to do. We just couldn’t wait any longer to give you the feel of our bloggidy blog.

Feel free to look around and check out our new features! (and let us know if there are any issues you come across) …. oh but wait….. we have another surprise for you! Along with our new blog look, we’ve also given our website an extreme makeover! So check it out too! You’ll love the new look (with the same ol’ Eugene and Heather, of course!) Be sure to leave a comment or send us a message to let us know what you think! Aaahhhhh! We love it!!