How to Colour Match Footage From Different Cameras
Phone for the b-roll, drone for the establishing shot, mirrorless for interviews. Three cameras, three colour sciences, one timeline. Here’s how to make them agree.
Why eyeballing fails
The instinct is to grade each clip until they look similar. It works for two clips and falls apart at ten, because you’re solving the same problem repeatedly with slightly different answers — and the differences show the moment you cut between them.
The method that works
Convert each camera correctly. Apple Log conversion on the iPhone clips, D-Log on the drone, S-Log3 on the Sony. Nothing creative yet. After this step everything should already be close.
Match exposure. Use scopes, not your eyes. Put a waveform up and match mid grey between clips. Your eyes adapt within seconds and will lie to you.
Match white balance. Find something neutral in each shot — a white wall, grey concrete, a road. Get them reading neutral on a vectorscope.
Now grade the whole timeline. One creative grade on top of matched footage.
Shortcuts that help on set
Shoot a grey card at the start of each setup on each camera. Two seconds of footage that saves twenty minutes in post.
Lock your white balance. Auto white balance shifting mid-shot is a nightmare to fix.
Keep one camera as the reference — usually the best sensor — and match everything to it rather than to some abstract ideal.
The realistic limit
You will not make a phone sensor look identical to a full-frame cinema camera in low light. Noise, dynamic range and depth of field will differ. What you can do is make colour and exposure agree, which is what audiences actually notice on a cut.
LayrKit Motion covers 11 Log formats with the same 20 looks in each, so a Halcyon grade on your iPhone matches Halcyon on the ALEXA. See the packs at layrkit.com
