Adventures In Post-Production: Discovering Dfx

Art of the Guillotine by Ross Hockrow

Ross is currently Owner/Filmmaker of CineStories, an innovative enterprise that brings together crews, cinematographers, and creative talent and works with a number of Fortune 500 companies, private vendors and high-end clientele on a wide variety of video productions. Here, in his own insightful words, are some of his adventures in the fascinating and challenging realm of post-production.

Around 2010, while preparing for a 31-city tour with Clay Blackmore and my business partner Jeff Medford, I discovered Tiffen Dfx post-production filters. To be honest, at first impression, I wasn't drawn to this system — I was pretty obsessed with Apple's Color, and doing color correction right inside Adobe Premiere. I'm not sure if I wasn't into the idea of changing my trusted workflow or was just too overwhelmed with the tour to really dig into the Dfx and learn it, but I downloaded it and didn't really use it all that much. However, I was intrigued with the ability to emulate a range of film stocks and there was one filter that I marked as a favorite — Faux Film. I was drawn to it because since the DSLR revolution we've gone so digital looking. As cinematic as the DSLRs are, they produce a very digital looking image. The Dfx “film look” filter added a little grain, made the whites whiter and the blacks blacker. It was the sort of contrast I was missing from a true video camera such as an HVX.

That kept Dfx in the back of my mind; however, I wasn't doing much production during the tour so there really weren't many situations coming up where I would need it.

Fast forward to 2011 for the Get In Motion tour. This is really when I started using Dfx. Final Cut X was eagerly anticipated at that time, and I was excited to see what it was even though I’m an Adobe user. I'm a huge fan of their color program as I mentioned above. read more...