Color grade the clip

Four Step Four of the editing process we’re going to colour grade the clips that we’d already preselected.

This is so that they look at their very best to help us in some of the final decisions will be making as we choose which ones make the actual production itself.

Previously we had final cut Pro-Tech set up to help us mark up the music clips here and therefore we’d extended the height of the clip significantly to help in that process.

Now we concentrate on the big screen here and we want that to be as big as possible.

We don’t really need to look at much in the details of the clips in the timeline in order to help us with that.

Were going to click on the clip appearance on the bottom right corner here.

And they’re going to select just showing the visuals.

We don’t need to see anything about the sound at this point.

We also don’t need these clips to be that high down here or shrink those down to about that kind of height.

With that done or shut down that little box there by clicking on the clip appearance icon and we’ll then expand the screen at the top.

By clicking in the middle and dragging all the way down.

Now that is actually done with make sure we got this dragged over as far as possible.

We can start to skim through these clips and start to do our colour grading process so we’ll start off on the first clip.

And notice I’ve still got snapping turned off that far right.

Icon is still set to grey.

And this is exactly as we want it at the moment because we want to get a skim over all of the clips nice and easily.

So what I do want is to move that play head off this clip and onto the clip that we’re working on.

So I click basically above the clip we’re working on and a click play head has moved in order to do colour grading.

We’re going to do it in Final Cut Pro X which can be very quick to do.

It’s not the most refined way of doing your colour grading.

I prefer to explore all of my footage into another application called DaVinci resolve and do the work in there and then reincorporate it back into Final Cut Pro X for the final editing techniques and steps that will be going through.

I only do that for my really big projects because it does take quite a lot of extra time.

Final Cut Pro X will cover about 85 percent of really what you need to do.

Once we selected our ship over here would then move up to this part of the final cut crokes interface and where it says colour it says correction.

And there’s a little rainbow like Arrow.

We click on that and this gives us our colour grading options.

Now there are three steps to colour grading and they work from right to left.

Really want to start off by adjusting your exposure.

So this is where we’re making the whole image brighter or darker and we can do that for the entire image.

Like so all we can do it for just the high parts of the image so where all the sun is in the sky the very low parts were all the shadow is down by the water there or the midsection.

We can make those adjustments and you can do it all by item you get the right picture but there are facilities within Final Cut Pro X to make this process much easier.

If you go to window view a display and then you can bring up what’s called the video scopes and then this will give us a graphical representation of where the high and the low spots are visually in the overall picture.

And it will show how much of the picture is in true darkness which is zero.

And how much is in true brightness complete white bright white which is at a hundred.

And what you want to try to do is to get as much dynamic range in your picture as possible so that would bring out the most details.

So you want some of your image sitting down there in the zero and some of it’s sitting up there in the hundred and to adjust that what you do is we’ll start off at the top so the highs the Brites these whites in the cloud which most of them are nearly at a hundred.

There’s a little bit of a gap there.

And so we know shoot up very carefully.

There we go just a little bit brighter.

Now we need to nudge these bits down to the bottom so we go to the bottom over here of our exposure panel and we drag the bottom bits down a little bit looking at the graph that has made it quite a bit darker but we’ve got more range from the true blacks down here to the bright whites up there.

What you can then do is bring the middle up very slightly.

She got a bit more detail and that’s looking like a much better image already just on that.

If some of your graph crosses over these lines you only need to worry about that if it if it’s looking bad from a visual point of view.

So that set sorted out our exposure.

Next thing to look at is your saturation.

So this is going to be where we play around with how much colour there is actually in the picture.

We can play around with it overall for the entire picture using this big slider on the left.

Here we can play around with it again with the highs the mid tones and the lows.

I tend to start with playing around with it with the highs.

First of all so this will bring out the colour typically in the skies.

So I already bumped this this up quite high like that.

Then on start play around a little bit with the Lowe’s to see what we can do there.

We’ve had pro tune turned on.

It gives a very flat sort of greyish looking image.

And so you always boost year saturation to get it back to what you probably thought you were seeing in the sky.

CNN boost the bottom bit little bit more.

Now am going to start take the mids up quite highs.

I got quite a lot of saturation here.

This is where your artistry comes into play.

Obviously is entirely up to you how you grade your flip and it’s what you think’s going to look good for the overall impression that you’re wanting to give in your production.

So I quite like that.

Once I’ve set those or then play a little bit with the overall slider see what I can do for my blues there.

So that’s the second bit of colour grading done for most people at this point.

You may well in fact be done for your colour grading and you can skim through and see how it works for that particular image.

So that’s looking okay they’re sticking okay not too rainbow like not too bad.

Looks a bit strange to begin with there.

So let’s leave it on that point there.

Now what would it go to the third step of colour grading.

This allows you to actually adjust the colours themselves within the image.

We’re not just adjusting the saturation or the exposure but it’s where you could be changing green to brown or red or something like that.

So we go in here and this requires a very delacour hand cause you can quickly make your image look completely strange.

So for instance you got your overall global slider and this allows you you can slide it anywhere along this line here to add in more colour so we can add in more red.

We could add in more blue more green or so or if you go down it takes away the yellow and so on it will take away the green but whenever it’s doing that some other colour is coming into place to replace it.

So that’s why you need to be very subtle in the way that you do this.

So I sat back there on its line.

Sometimes I’ll try to add in a little bit of extra blue up in the sky if I felt that that’s that it

warranted it.

Sometimes a turquoise looks quite nice.

I’ve taken my highlights over here and dragged it over towards the turquoise at the moment.

Nothing’s actually happened.

Now as soon as I leave it very slightly up into the sky you can see we’ve got a little bit more turquoise going on over there.

The rest the image isn’t looking too badly adjusted.

That was perhaps a tad too far.

I come back down a bit.

I don’t normally play around the too many of the others.

Sometimes you do it just to see what might actually happen.

But as with these ones there’s no quick way to set it back to where you were before.

You have to carefully drag it up to your zero position there as well.

With adjusted that slightly.

Let’s now go back and play this clip.

So come back over here.

I’m basically going to press space on and play it through and see if it’s looking good and that’s looking pretty good and you can see where it flicks they’re on to the next clip.

What it was like before we did any of the adjustment.

Quite a flat or in grey image compared to what we actually ended up with.

Okay.

We’re going to just review that one more time to make sure we’re happy with it.

This time we’re going get rid of these scopes here and you can do that by again selecting window view a display hide video scopes or command seven if you’re on a Mac.

Which of course you will be as is his final cut pro X. And they only work on IMAX.

There we go.

So I’ve got rid of that and now I can get a better look at that whole image.

That’s looking quite nice.

So therefore we’ve now colour graded our first clip.

Now what you need to do is colour grey every single other clip that you’re going to now in Final Cut Pro X. as a fairly quick way to do that.

And so what we do is OK click on this clip here and then I’ll copy it by command.

See.

So that’s now copied are then select all of these clips here.

So a press click the first one I’m pressing holding down shift and I’m clicking the last one.

Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to paste those colour changes onto all of these other clips.

So I go file.

Sorry.

Edit.

Heyst attributes and it will say well what do you want to actually paste from that first clip that you covered.

And it’s the colour changes I want to do so I’ll paste those on there and now all of these other clips had colours done to them.

This will not be your end result.

But it will be quite a good starting result for most of the clips but in some clips there was much more brightness or darkness in them.

And you need to go in and look at each individual one and then make the colour corrections.

So we’ll play through the first one you see.

Now here it doesn’t skip to Grey because the second clip has had exactly the same colour treatment done on it and that second clip is looking pretty much like the first so good.

We’re happy with that.

That’s playing through fine right now.

Again I can skim over the second one now for the second one.

Second once we’re getting the sun starting to come behind us we’re getting quite a lot of increased saturation.

Still just about okay.

That’s starting to look a little bit garish even for my tastes.

So.

I’ll click out of there a prayer space wants more to stop it.

I’ll go into the colour correction here for clip so I’ve made sure the clip is selected.

I’ve gone up to this part here of the details and have gone to correction and I’ll go to saturation where I think it’s been slightly overdone.

I’ll play around this a little bit to tone it down slightly perhaps a bit too much.

You take it out the mid tones which is there we get to can a bit better.

The exposure could perhaps be a bit better on this one too.

So I’m going to bring my video scopes up to check the graph to see if the exposures looking good.

So going to do that by doing command 7 quickly you can see here we’ve got too many dark’s going on so we could get more range by lifting up the bottom bit.

There we go.

And then bringing down.

Bringing up the top bits.

We’ve got some more exposure there.

Kind of overdone it.

So I’m going to bring those actually down there despite what the scope’s was saying and this is a good teaching point here.

You can you tend to use those you’re starting point but then ignore them if they’re not looking giving you the image that you want and just look at the image itself to make sure you’re happy with that.

That for me is looking better than where we were before.

So I can turn this on and off by moving back left out of your colour correction.

Here I was again I went to the top left little arrow that come out of it.

I can turn it off completely.

So there it was that grey rather almost stormy looking conditions that the pro tune has given us at Nice flat image.

I click it on and that’s what we’re going to work with.

Now I’m happy with that for that particular image.

But you can see it’s got a slightly different look to this one which hasn’t got so many dark’s in I’ve actually added the dark’s into that one.

But I prefer the contrast and the look of it.

So that’s the ways that you can do colour grading.

You start off doing your colour grade on a particular clip and then you copy that colour grade information into other similar clips.

So this particular example for a demo it’s quite easy because it’s all come from the same flight pack.