For a recent wedding shoot I had a freelancer use a Black Magic camera. I have heard very good things about that camera, how the footage looks just like 35mm motion picture film! I was very excited. And I was a bit nervous how that footage would mix in when edited in with footage with my other cameras.
It was so much smaller than I thought it would be.
What I saw in the viewfinder screen concerned me, everything was a dull desaturated greenish grey. The camera operator told me to relax, that all blackmagic footage looks like that until color graded in Davinci Resolve.
Well I don’t have Davinci Resolve. I ran the footage through Adobe After Effects and added an adjustment layer with AUTO COLOR and a lot of vibrancy came back into the image.
Then I added “Brightness and Contrast”. Lowering the Brightness and increasing the Contrast helped even more.
It still didn’t look right.
I added a third adjust layer and used HUE AND SATURATION and increased the saturation of the reds and blues and it started to look like the other cameras.
It says I should have used Effects>Synthetic Aperture.
Hmm I will have to try that on the next shots. So far I am not that impressed. It seems just like my video footage, not this marvelous film look I was expecting. Then again it is most likely the problem is my limited experience with color grading footage from the BlackMagic, and not the camera itself.
“There are four drummers on the Beatles records. Ringo’s not one of them.” So says Bernard Purdie
Taken at face value, this is a bold claim, if not a crazy one.
Purdie also stated: “I overdubbed the drumming on twenty-one tracks of the first three Beatle albums.”
Bernard Purdie is one of the must influential and famous drummers in recorded music history. This author details Purdie’s claims, explains why he said what he did, and separate fact from fiction.