Session 6: Colour & Export

These two words are used interchangeably and they are not the same. Colour correction makes the picture look correct: the right exposure, white that is actually white, skin that looks like skin, and every shot matching the next. Colour grading applies a creative look on top of a corrected image — warmer, cooler, more contrast, a particular mood.

The order is not negotiable: correct first, then grade. Grading an uncorrected image means fixing a look on top of a wrong baseline, so the shots that were already off become off in a stylised way and nothing matches. Beginners grade first because grading is the visible, satisfying part, and then spend longer trying to make shots match than the correction would have taken.

On our footage the correction work is substantial. We have two cameras that were never matched — different sensors, different automatic white balance guesses — and two light sources in the room: cool daylight from the windows and warm ceiling LEDs. The result is a wide shot and a close shot of the same person looking like two different rooms, which is the single most common thing that makes multi-camera video look amateur.

Matching is a comparison task, so put the two shots side by side — in Premiere a reference monitor or a split frame, in CapCut by cutting between them repeatedly — and adjust one until it matches the other. Choose the better-exposed, better-lit shot as the reference and bring everything else to it, rather than trying to meet in the middle.

The order of adjustment matters: exposure first, then white balance, then saturation. Fixing brightness changes how colour reads, so setting white balance first means setting it twice. For white balance, find something neutral in the frame — a white shirt, a white wall, a sheet of paper — and adjust temperature until it is genuinely neutral. This is the same discipline as in still photography, and for the same reason: your eye adapts to a colour cast within about thirty seconds and will convince you an orange image is correct.

Then accept what cannot be fixed. Mixed light in one frame — daylight on one side of a face and tungsten on the other — cannot be balanced to a single colour, because the two sides genuinely are different colours. Choose which source the face will match and accept a cast on the other side, or plan to shoot the next one with the ceiling lights off. Knowing the limit is part of the skill; pretending otherwise produces hours of work for a result nobody will call correct.

Once the images match and look correct, a grade is a choice — and the useful discipline is that a grade should be a decision, not a habit. The question is what the video should feel like: a business talk wants clean and neutral, an event recap wants warmth and energy, a church clip often wants soft and warm. Then apply that consistently across every shot.

The commonest grading errors are crushed blacks and blown highlights — pushing contrast until dark areas become featureless black and bright areas become featureless white, losing detail at both ends. The related one is oversaturation, where skin goes orange and the image looks processed rather than photographed. Both are invisible while you are working, because your eye adapts, and both are obvious to anyone seeing the video for the first time.

So grade lightly, check skin tones against reality, and look away for a few minutes before judging the result. If your editor has a histogram or waveform, use it — it tells you objectively whether you have clipped, which your eye will not. And keep the grade subtle enough that a viewer never thinks about the colour, which is the mark of grading done well.

Four settings decide your export, and everything else is secondary. Resolution: 1080 by 1920 for the vertical piece, 1920 by 1080 for the horizontal — 4K is rarely needed for social and quadruples the file size. Frame rate: match what you shot, so 25 or 30 fps for most phone and event footage; changing frame rate on export causes judder or stutter and is a common self-inflicted problem.

Codec: H.264 is the safe universal choice, compatible everywhere; H.265 is smaller and better quality at the same size but is not supported on some older devices and platforms. Bitrate is the one people get wrong most: too low and the image breaks up in motion, too high and the file is enormous for no benefit. For 1080p, roughly 8 to 16 Mbps is a sensible range, and audio should be AAC at 320 kbps.

Then the habit that catches most errors: watch the exported file, not the timeline. The timeline shows your project; the export shows what the viewer gets. Compression artefacts, audio that is out of sync, captions in the wrong place and colours that shifted all appear only in the exported file, and checking it takes two minutes while discovering it after the client has posted costs you the job.

Each platform has requirements, and they change, so the professional habit is to check the current specifications before delivering rather than trusting memory. As a working baseline: Instagram Reels and TikTok want vertical 1080 by 1920, YouTube wants horizontal 1920 by 1080 and also accepts vertical for Shorts, and all of them re-compress whatever you upload. Keep your own master export at full quality and let the platform compress it, because uploading an already-compressed file means it is compressed twice and looks worse than either pass alone.

WhatsApp is the hard case, and it matters more here than anywhere else because so much video in Nigeria is delivered and shared through it. WhatsApp re-encodes aggressively to keep files small, and it visibly destroys fine detail, introduces blocky artefacts in motion, and can shift colour. There is no setting that prevents this, because the damage happens on their side after you send it.

So the practical responses are: avoid fine detail and thin text that compression will smear — which is one more reason captions should be large and bold; export at a reasonable rather than maximum bitrate, since WhatsApp will discard the excess anyway; send the file as a document rather than as a video where the recipient needs the original quality, which bypasses the video re-encode; and for anything a client will use commercially, deliver the master file by a cloud link and let WhatsApp be the preview. Telling a client this is part of the service, because they will otherwise judge your work by the compressed version their cousin forwarded.