Shot Matching – Basic Camera Matching

The Fundamentals of Camera Matching

Camera matching is a huge part of being a successful colorist that I’m very excited to dive into. In this Insight, we’ll be covering how I match cameras and I’ll show you an example of how I match a Red Scarlet, Blackmagic Cinema Camera, and a Blackmagic Pocket Camera.

These shots are taken from a multi-camera music video shoot for the band Minimus The Poet so, in theory, these shots should match exactly!

Matching cameras is tricky but if you’re lucky, once you match the cameras together you should be able to apply the base correction you’ve developed across a lot of shots on the timeline and then work quickly and efficiently from there.

Oh one more big thing to remember. Use C mode!

C mode sorts the shots on the timeline in Timecode / Reel order so you can group all similar shots and angles together. This sorting mode can speed up your workflow by a huge amount.

Pushing And Pulling

If you remember one piece of advice from this Insight, I would love it to be the idea of pushing and pulling shots around until magically they meet in the middle and match.

More often than not, new colorists will dive headfirst into making one shot look amazing without scouting the rest of the timeline to make sure that it’s possible to make the look work across the whole project.

A good colorist is always thinking ahead and putting on the right show for the clients. I always try a couple of shots from each scene when building looks and keep informing the client that I am experimenting.

We’re the experts, so this is our chance to tell the client what’s possible and what’s not possible. We’re the color experts and more often than not if you tell a client something is not possible they will accept your expert opinion.

– Dan