Color Correction, LUMA : Pro expertise ?

[fred]

i guess the most important thing is what´s going to be the final product? are you going to transfer it to film or are you going to do a downsize and output on video (ntsc or pal?)? and what equipment are you working on, do you have a proofed display and a waveform monitor?
i guess those two points are very essential if you want any sort of advice. please let us know!

[Gpin]

Yes we do have an editing suite with vectorscope and proper NTSC monitors.
And the finla output will be NTSC, though we have to deliver a MASTER HD (we will do that through another post facilty).


My question isn't too much about the technical apsect.
It's more to understand the approach (process) when doing color correction.

Look at commercial > some are blue tinted, some saturated, some very dark, some very "dreamy"......

So how to get those effects in an artistic way while keeping a balance between the look and the technical rules.

Thx in advance.

[fred]

well, i guess it´s a bit hard to give artistic advice as i don´t know the film you´re working one AND i´m not the one responsible for grading it.
but the process you normally do is to create a "look" using several exemplaric shots until you´re happy with it and then try to apply it to all other shots in the sequence. if you´re absolutely free in choice there are a thousand ways of doing this so i guess you just have to follow your eye.
on the technical side it would be helpful that you try to match the contrast and luminance values for each shot (use the waveform for this in the first pass, the results you get are pretty good most of the time and only need a little tweaking). With colors it´s a bit harder as you can´t really define them over the vectorscope. Just do what your eye tells you and try to match the overall tone of shadows, mids and highlights. Be aware of the surrounding where the film is going to be shown (is it a dark cinema or ist it tv? - the shadows will appear completely different). Be very careful with selective color correction, 8 bits will ruin everything very fast. The only tool i know that can do a proper selective color correction on video is flame´s/inferno´s color warper.
and - this may sound dumb but i´ve seen lots of people doing this - never ever color correct a clip twice (you lose lots of information, especially working in 8bit colorspace) and never ever throw away your source material (you will do about 5 passes until the grading is final).
i hope this was of a little help for you, if you´ve got more questions just ask!

[Gpin]

So, applying color correctin on an already color correction footage isn't a good idea. Good to know !
Didn't know than selective color correction only wokr properly on advanced compositing package. But I did realize than AE is doing a very bad job on selective color correction and I never was able to get the way I want. I usually end-up using mask and mattes to select the area I want to affect.

But what are usually the tools used for color correction.
I believe color balance on low-mid-high are usually a very common tools. I've see some people using using Pedestal, gamma and gain, is that an appropriate tools ?

Unfortunatly AE isn't a real-time playback when using HD footage (though I'm running 2ghz dual Xeon) ....and I don't have a HD editing card, so that's another reason too !!
So, when it comes to compare color corrected shots....it's very difficult to get a sense of the overall. It's very frustrating.

I tried running the same footage on Shake (just testing), and the results are much better regarding CC and playback. But I really have to stick with AE.

So, any other comments, would be appreciate.

[fred]

it´s still beta for shake, ae and combustion but you should definitely check out colorstar from colorfront (www.colorfront.com - the guys behing 5d´s colossus). i used it as as a smoke* spark and this plugin definitely satisfies all grading needs you could ever have (at least on a desktop system). hope it will be out soon.

for playback problems i think it´s no problem to stick to ntsc resolution, it will be good enough to judge the grading!
if it´s possible in any way you should really switch to combustion for color correction. ae´s tools are really very very weak whereas combustion has one simple & really good module (almost the same as in inferno). check out the CC tutorials thread in this forum for more info on its capabilities!

[Gpin]

Unfortunatly, I can't seems to find a AE of Combustion beta version on their site.
Do you know if there is available beta versions somewhere ?

Thanks again.

[fred]

i guess the only way to get one would be emailing them and telling them about your project, maybe they´ll send you a copy?

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