This is the most technical post in the handbook, and the most skippable if you just want to point a camera and shoot. But if you've ever wondered why your footage looks flat and gray straight out of the camera, why some files grade beautifully while others fall apart, or whether you should bother with HDR, this is where those answers live.
Think of it as the "why" behind Color Grading. You don't need to memorize it — you just need to know these dials exist so you can make smart choices before you shoot.
Bit Depth: How Many Shades You Capture#
Bit depth is how many distinct values your camera records for each color channel.
- 8-bit stores 256 shades per channel — about 16.7 million colors total. Fine for a finished, correctly-exposed image.
- 10-bit stores 1,024 shades per channel — over a billion colors.
Why does it matter? Headroom for grading. When you push and pull an 8-bit image in the color stage, you can run out of shades and get banding — those ugly stair-step gradients in skies and shadows. A 10-bit file has so much more data that it bends without breaking. If your camera offers 10-bit recording and you plan to grade, use it.
Drop the bit depth below and watch banding tear across a smooth gradient. Then check Push the grade: at 8-bit the ramp looks clean until you stretch it, at which point the hidden steps spread into visible bands — exactly the failure 10-bit is insurance against.
Chroma Subsampling: The Compression You Can't See (Usually)#
Human eyes are far more sensitive to brightness than to color, so cameras exploit this by throwing away some color information. You'll see this written as three numbers:
- 4:4:4 — full color, no subsampling (huge files, rare outside high-end cameras).
- 4:2:2 — half the color resolution. The sweet spot for serious work; holds up well to grading and green-screen keying.
- 4:2:0 — quarter color resolution. What most consumer cameras and streaming files use. Perfectly fine for a final delivery, but it can struggle with heavy grading or chroma keying.
Try it yourself. Switch between the modes below to watch what gets thrown away — notice that the Luma panel never changes (your brightness detail is always safe), while the Color panel gets blockier. Then flip the source between soft gradients and sharp color edges to see when subsampling is invisible versus when it visibly bleeds:
For most DIY films, 4:2:0 is what you've got, and that's okay. Just know that if you're planning a green-screen-heavy project, 4:2:2 will save you a lot of pain.
Log, Gamma, and Why Your Footage Looks "Flat"#
If you've ever shot in a Log profile (S-Log, C-Log, V-Log, and friends) and recoiled at the washed-out, low-contrast image on your screen, congratulations — that's working as intended.
A normal video profile bakes contrast and color into the image immediately, which looks great but throws away highlight and shadow detail in the process. A Log profile does the opposite: it records a flat, low-contrast image specifically to preserve the maximum possible range of brightness in the file. All that detail is still there — it just isn't being displayed nicely yet.
The trade-off: Log footage must be color-corrected before it looks right. You bring it into your editor and apply an input LUT (see Color Grading) built for your camera, which converts that flat Log image into a normal, contrasty Rec. 709 image. From there you grade.
Step through the three profiles below. Watch the tone curve and the image strip together: Rec.709 looks great but clips everything past the 100% line to white; Log (raw) looks flat and ugly but its curve never clips — the detail is all preserved; Log + LUT expands that flat signal back into contrast while rolling the highlights off gracefully.
So Log isn't "better" or "worse" — it's a deliberate trade of convenience for flexibility. If you're not going to color grade, don't shoot Log; you'll just have flat footage and no plan. Sequence can apply a camera conversion LUT to normalize Log footage as soon as it's in your project.
Color Spaces and Gamut#
A color space defines the range of colors ("gamut") a format can represent. The common ones:
- Rec. 709 / sRGB — the standard for HD video and the web. This is almost certainly your delivery target.
- DCI-P3 — a wider gamut used in digital cinema and modern phone/laptop displays.
- Rec. 2020 — an extremely wide gamut associated with UHD and HDR. Few displays can show all of it yet.
The diagram below is the CIE chromaticity chart — the full range of color human vision can perceive. Toggle each standard to see how much of it that space can actually reproduce. Everything outside a triangle is a real color that format simply can't show, which is why a wider gamut like Rec.2020 leaves so much more room:
For a DIY film headed to YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram, you'll correct into Rec. 709 and deliver there. Wider spaces matter mostly for theatrical or HDR delivery — which brings us to the last piece.
Dynamic Range#
Dynamic range is the distance between the darkest and brightest detail a camera can capture in a single frame, measured in stops. A wider dynamic range means you can hold detail in a bright window and a shadowed face at the same time, instead of blowing one out to protect the other. This is a big part of what separates a "cinematic" camera from a phone — and a big reason to expose carefully on set, because you can't recover detail that was never captured.
SDR vs. HDR#
- SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) is the traditional Rec. 709 image every screen can display. It's what you've been watching your whole life.
- HDR (High Dynamic Range) preserves a much wider range of brightness and color, so highlights genuinely glow and shadows keep their detail — on a display that supports it. You'll see standards like HDR10, Dolby Vision, and the broadcast-friendly HLG, built on brightness curves called PQ and HLG.
Here's the honest advice for a DIY filmmaker: you almost certainly do not need HDR. It requires an HDR-capable camera and a properly calibrated HDR monitor to grade on, most of your audience will watch on SDR screens, and a botched HDR grade looks far worse than a clean SDR one. Deliver a solid Rec. 709 SDR master and your film will look great everywhere. Revisit HDR when you have the gear, the display, and a reason.
Raw vs. Compressed#
You'll sometimes hear that shooting raw (unprocessed sensor data) gives you the ultimate color flexibility. It does — and it also gives you enormous files, sluggish playback, and a heavier post-production workflow. We break down that trade-off in Video Codecs. For most projects, a high-quality 10-bit compressed format gets you 95% of the flexibility with a fraction of the headache.
What This Actually Means For You#
You don't need to become a color scientist. Just make a few smart choices before you shoot:
- Record 10-bit if you can — it's your insurance against banding when you grade.
- Shoot Log only if you plan to color grade — otherwise stick to a standard profile.
- Expose carefully to make the most of your camera's dynamic range.
- Deliver Rec. 709 SDR unless you have a specific, well-equipped reason to go HDR.
Get those right and you've handled 99% of the color science that matters. The rest is craft, and that lives back in Color Grading.