Here's a fantastic showreel that shows how staggeringly important colour grading is to the modern video workflow
We can't bring you every showreel that we see here at RedShark. Many of them are amazing but, honestly, that's what YouTube is for. But what we do like to do is bring you clips that illustrate a point that we think is important, and this one does it nicely.
What it shows is how important grading is today to commercial video. Colour correction has claimed its place right in the centre of the post production workflow, and you can see why here: footage direct of the camera looks pasty and washed out. Extreme grading makes it look polished, glossy, and, compelling and irresistible. We haven't seen footage that illustrates this better. (Thanks to Numb Robot, Burbank, CA).
Of course, the "washed out" look from the camera is simply the "raw" appearance of material that has a wide dynamic range: all the detail is there throughout the scale from dark to light for the colourist to work his or her magic on.
We will be bringing you several detailed articles on colour grading during the year.