Drone Film Grades Information

Drone Film Grades by Stewart & Alina Carroll is designed to enhance the visual quality of your footage by offering six cinematic LUTs.

We are so excited to share with you our Drone Film Grades! Building on our years of experience grading footage for our wedding and commercial film businesses, we have crafted 6 cinematic LUTs targeted at drone filmmakers but applicable to any footage from any camera.

Watch the accompanying FREE 50 minute video tuition to see how in a matter of moments you can enjoy beautiful colours for your footage in 3 easy steps:

• (1) Set your desired contrast and saturation levels,
• (2) Apply one of our 6 cinematic LUTs,
• (3) Select the desired intensity…DONE!

There’s a bit more to creating a high-quality LUT than might meet the eye. A good LUT needs to work not only on one specific shot but also be effective across a whole range of footage that makes up your project. Most importantly, we have carefully crafted these LUTs to ensure that skin tones are preserved.

Professionally designed LUTs are a fantastic addition to the post-production workflow:

• Saving you time in the editing suite,
• Giving your footage a cinematic or stylised ‘look’ at the click of a button,
• Unifying the feel of your project by pulling all your footage under the umbrella of your chosen grade, and
• Tapping into the colour-grading expertise of others.

HOWEVER, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to colour-grading. There are two distinct steps to colouring your footage in post:

• First, colour correction (contrast, saturation, white balance),
• Second, colour grading (your ‘look’).

The majority of LUTs on the market attempt to combine both the correction and the grading in the one package, dazzling you with spectacular transformations that you can expect at the click of a button. Over the years, we’ve been down this route many times as customers and the result is rarely satisfactory. WHY? Because these one-size-fits-all LUTs are created for use on clips with one level of contrast, saturation and white balance only. In reality however, the LUTs will be applied to clips with all manner of contrast and saturation, many of which simply won’t suit the LUT.

For example, let’s say you apply a LUT that in addition to giving you a teal and orange grade, ‘corrects’ your footage by brightening your highlights and darkening your shadows for a more contrasty, cinematic look. Sounds good? But what if the clip you apply it to is ALREADY nice and contrasty? Well then the LUT ruins the clip by blowing out the highlights and crushing the blacks. A LUT that combines both corrective and grading elements is useless unless the contrast and saturation of your clips is exactly what the creator had in mind when designing the LUT.

There are two solutions to this problem:

1. Specify exactly the settings you require for your LUT to be effective (e.g. Mavic Air with a perfect exposure in the centre of the histogram with contrast at -2 and saturation at -1), OR
2. Provide a FREE 50 minute video workshop showing customers how to set optimum contrast and saturation levels in their editing software to ensure perfect outcomes every time.

We have opted for solution 2 because we want YOU to be in control of your footage. The only way we can guarantee you will love our LUTs is if you get great results every time and here’s the honest truth – we need you to have a bare minimum understanding of colour correction to make this possible.

We can’t sell you one-size-fits-all LUTs in the hope they work 25% of the time. That’s not how we operate. So, invest a few minutes of your time with us in some colour correction basics and by watching our 50 minute video tuition, you will be able to, in a matter of seconds, colour correct any clip from any camera to ensure our Drone Film Grades work perfectly.

Oh yes, you heard us right, our Drone Film Grades are applicable not only to any drone, but any camera also! Whilst these grades have been optimised for the colours typically found in aerial cinematography, they have been rigorously tested to ensure that they work well with ANY footage from ANY camera. So for example, if your film contains ground camera work with people, our Drone Film Grades are carefully calibrated to ensure skin tones are not unduly impacted by our grade.

We don’t want any purple faces appearing in the shot! Again, by colour correcting your footage according to the basic principles in our FREE 50 minute video tuition, you will be able to prepare any clip from any camera to ensure perfect results with our Drone Film Grades.

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