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Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome Billy Causey to our roster of Contributors, here on MixingLight.com. You can find out more about Billy on his Author Page. He’s starting with a 3-Part series on color grading LOG footage of unknown origins. Please join us in welcoming him to Mixing Light, in the Comments below!
– Pat
Contrast, pivot, offset, and the ResolveFX Gamut Mapper
This Insight walks through the first of three workflows I use for grading ‘Mystery Log’ footage.
What is Mystery LOG? It’s log video that arrives without metadata, LUT, or a known source. The recording gamma and gamut settings are completely unknown to us.
Our end goal is to build a clean, stable grade using only our eyes (and scopes) to achieve a pleasing neutral starting point.
In Part 1 of this Survival Guide, we are focusing on using the following tools:
This workflow is fast, flexible, reliable, and built for speed under pressure.
About this ‘Mystery Log’ workflow
This workflow started during a documentary project that I graded a few years ago. The footage came from a mix of RED and Panasonic cameras, which is fine on paper. But everything had been transcoded to ProRes, and no one logged which clip came from which camera. There were no gamma or gamut tags, and no notes—just a pile of flat, gray images and a tight deadline.
There wasn’t time to chase down the cam ops, DIT, or DOP, or to guess which transform to use. I had to rely on what I could see and what the scopes were telling me. That experience led me to build this first workflow, which I now call the survivalist method. It uses simple tools to create a clean, stable image from mystery footage.
If you get handed random log footage and need to make it look right fast without color management or LUTs, then this visual-first approach is one you can trust when the technical info is missing.
