Understanding the Reference Guide For Videography With Examples
The Reference Guide For Videography With Examples is a document I started compiling around 2014 when I was shooting a lot of corporate interviews and run-and-gun documentaries. It basically collects the camera settings, lens choices, and lighting setups I kept returning to across dozens of projects. Most people don't bother writing one down. They just forget what worked and end up re-solving the same problems on every shoot. The core idea is simple: document what you actually used, including what went wrong, so future shoots move faster. A well-kept reference guide will tell you exactly which ND filter you layered on top of your polarizer for that backlit outdoor interview, or which camera profile preserved more shadow detail on a particular sensor. These are the kind of details that matter when you're on set and someone asks you for a second take in different lighting. I keep mine in a simple spreadsheet. Columns include project type, camera model, lens, codec, frame rate, resolution, ISO range, white balance, ND count, and a notes column for whatever went sideways. I also take a photo of my camera's menu screen at the end of every shoot and drop it into the relevant row. It takes about forty seconds and saves me from hunting through emails three months later.
Reference Guide For Videography With Examples
Here is a concrete section from my current reference guide. The entries are real, slightly cleaned up for clarity, and reflect what actually happened on these shoots. Camera: Sony FX3. Lens: 35mm T1.8. Codec: XAVC S-I 4K 60p at 340 Mbps. ISO: 800 base. White balance: 5600K with CTB gel on the practical lamp. Key light: 1x 1x1 Softbank with a grid, 45 degrees off axis. Fill: bounced white foam core. Background separation: subject two meters from the wall. Why this worked: The FX3 at ISO 800 gives clean shadows without lifting noise. The grid kept spill off the wall. The distance between subject and background created natural separation without a dedicated background light. What I changed from previous shoots: Earlier versions of this entry used ISO 1600 because I was worried about shutter drag, but the 340 Mbps intra-frame codec handles shadows much better at base ISO. I also stopped using a negative fill on the opposite side. The foam core bounce was enough. Removing it cut setup time by roughly eight minutes per location.
Entry 2: Product Shot for E-Commerce
Camera: Canon C70. Lens: 85mm macro. Codec: RF RAW to CFexpress at 4K 30p. Lighting: single large diffusion panel from camera left, light tent for interior shots. Color checker: X-Rite ColorChecker Mini placed in frame for every take. Post workflow: DaVinci Resolve, primary correction via ColorChecker LUT, then manual exposure adjustment. Pitfall: I once skipped the color checker on a rush job and tried to match looks in post by eye. It took me two hours to get consistent skin tones across five products. With the checker, the same pass takes about twelve minutes. The time difference is real. If you are delivering five or more product images per day, buy the checker and use it every time.
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Entry 3: Outdoor Documentary B-Roll, Golden Hour
Camera: Panasonic S5IIX. Lens: 24-70mm f/2.8. Codec: V-Log L 4K 25p at 200 Mbps. ND: 0.6 stacked with 0.3. Shutter: 1/50. Stabilization: IBIS on, gimbal for moving shots. Storage: dual CFexpress Type B slots, recording to both simultaneously. Specific problem I ran into: On a shoot in late summer, the sun dropped below the tree line and the V-Log footage came out flat and muddy in the final grade. I expected Log to give me latitude. It does, but only if your monitor calibration and scope readings are correct. My external monitor had drifted warm over the afternoon. The waveform looked fine on screen, but the actual histogram showed shadow crush in the 12-bit RAW outfeed. I spent thirty minutes on set recalibrating the monitor and regrading a test clip before continuing. The fix was swapping to a fresh calibration profile and trusting the scopes, not my eyes. Workaround: I now carry a calibrated gray card and run a quick black point check on arrival and again before wrap. It adds four minutes to setup and prevents an hour of confusion later.
There are parts of this approach that do not scale. If you shoot more than three projects a week, the spreadsheet becomes unwieldy. I switched to a tagging system in Notion for a while, then went back to the spreadsheet because search was faster and there was no login step at 6 AM before a shoot. The tradeoff is less visual organization, but the data is easier to pull apart when you need a quick setting lookup. Another limitation is that reference guides tend to become outdated quickly. A profile that worked on the FX3 will not necessarily translate to the FX30 because the dynamic range curve shifts. I mark each entry with a camera model tag so I can filter by gear instead of sifting through irrelevant rows. If you are building this for a team, assign a single owner to keep entries consistent. Two people entering data in different formats turns the document into noise within six months. The most useful thing in the reference guide is not the settings. It is the notes column. That is where you write the things that cost you time on the first shoot and saved you time on the second. You do not need fancy tools. You need a habit of recording one concrete lesson per project. A short sentence like "ND stack caused vignetting at 24mm on this lens" is worth more than a hundred words about ideal lighting theory.
