the one book 90% of us running FCS2 should own.

S

sigpikul

Member
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Technique...bs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222761540&sr=8-1

the best 30-40 dollars you will spend.


I'm sure most of you have come across some form of ranting and raving about how great Steve Hullfish's book The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction is, but if you haven't read it, don't hesitate and buy it now.

To keep this short, before I read it I had tinkered around with color correction in FCP and more recently in apple's color for the better part of 2 years or so. I'm usually very good at figuring programs out myself, I would call myself a very advanced FCP editor, as I have figured out the ins and outs of that program over the last 6 years, and I never read a piece of literature about FCP.

Color is an amazingly powerful tool if you know the theory behind it and how to use it, or any other advanced color correction tool. Before I read the book I thought I was a 2 out of 10 at using color, 0 being knowing nothing and 10 being the top colorists in the world. After a hundred pages, I realized that I was really a "negative 6," I read the whole book in a weekend folowing along with the lessons, and now at the end I can safely call myself a "3 out of 10." And I'm pretty happy with that.


Here is what I learned, below is before and after pictures of a project I'm working on, the before is the original image (shot from an ex1, which i loved using btw, but thats another topic all together) and after a weekend with this book

in short, buy it.

before:

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after:

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How heavily geared towards Color is this book? I'd be using Colorista in After Effects... Seems like the theory would be about the same right?
 
Steve Hullfish also has an earlier book on color correction Color Correction for Digital Video: Using Desktop Tools to Perfect Your Image as well as a blog over at ProVideo Coalition.

Jeff Anderson said:
How heavily geared towards Color is this book? I'd be using Colorista in After Effects... Seems like the theory would be about the same right?
Click to expand...
The book is platform agnostic. Steve uses examples from FCP to Avid Symphony to Color to Da Vinci. Occasionally he'll talk about certain modes or scopes that aren't available in some software packages, but if he does that he'll always offer up a way to basically do the same thing on software w/o those modes or scopes. It's actually pretty nice in a way because even though I mainly use Color or FCP's 3-way, I feel like if I had to use an Avid or Color Finesse I wouldn't be totally lost when I popped open the application.


-A
 
I'll second that - I got this book the day it came out, and it is well worth it.
Easily the best book on the art of color correction I've seen.
 
ya the book isn't specific to any color correction by any means. I feel (although unfounded this feeling is) that if i sat at a davinci that I wouldn't be totally lost. And I certainly feel like i can navigate avid symphony after reading it.

but in the book he does use apple's color (then called final touch HD) the most, and if the book carries any sort of message about the specifics of these programs, the message is that apple offering color for free with final cut has changed the world of post production. It is an incredible powerful tool, and with this book the learning curve isn't very steep atall.

If anything I feel like not only did I adopt a better understanding of color correction, but I'm also a better shooter now because I just understand the way that light is interpreted and can be played with digitally, and what can and can't be done.

you can turn terrible footage into okay footage.
good footage into great footage.
and great footage into phenomenal footage.
 
Good to see your cc turn out well. Also it sounds like a great book. And even with the old 3 way cc you can do wonders if you aren't just mindlessly fiddling around.
 
Alexg said:
Good to see your cc turn out well. Also it sounds like a great book. And even with the old 3 way cc you can do wonders if you aren't just mindlessly fiddling around.
Click to expand...

Ya everything turned out great, thank you for your initial help on that btw. The HDV footage was still a pain in the ass to work with, but I was able to get it to look pretty good in the end. The only problem is that I usually have to sit and tinker each individual shot for awhile to get it there, and to anyone with a trained eye the hdv camera will probably stick out like a sore thumb. But overall, I'm very happy.

If there is one thing that I've taken away from this whole last experience it was being majorly demoralized over my xha1, or any other hdv cam for that matter. For the last year or so I've been so empowered with the "I have a great camera and a great edit suite, I can do anything I want for zero cost and it will turn out great" and now that I have used the ex1s on a shoot in direct comparison to my xha1 in the same shoot, I've lost alot of canon-gumption over it.

One thing is apparently clear to me, I don't think I'm going to buy an ex1 just yet, but I'm definitely going to be using more rentals and I'm DEFINITELY going to make sure I have an extra 6-7 grand in the bank by next summer for whatever form of the scarlet RED releases, I can't muster the effort to work with tape based HD much longer.

Of course for some shooting environments solid state is just not practical to use, so I will always keep my trusty xha1 on the side. Its not that I don't think that you can make work that people will enjoy with HDV, it was just a world a difference when I started seeing not only how flexible the footage from the ex1s were CC but also just how stunning the final images looked. They looked like real-beautiful HD and it made HDV in comparison look like some sort of fuzzy half-assed format.
 
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adkimery said:
Steve Hullfish also has an earlier book on color correction Color Correction for Digital Video: Using Desktop Tools to Perfect Your Image as well as a blog over at ProVideo Coalition.


The book is platform agnostic. Steve uses examples from FCP to Avid Symphony to Color to Da Vinci. Occasionally he'll talk about certain modes or scopes that aren't available in some software packages, but if he does that he'll always offer up a way to basically do the same thing on software w/o those modes or scopes. It's actually pretty nice in a way because even though I mainly use Color or FCP's 3-way, I feel like if I had to use an Avid or Color Finesse I wouldn't be totally lost when I popped open the application.


-A
Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks - off to go order now!
 
sigpikul said:
Ya everything turned out great, thank you for your initial help on that btw. The HDV footage was still a pain in the ass to work with, but I was able to get it to look pretty good in the end. The only problem is that I usually have to sit and tinker each individual shot for awhile to get it there, and to anyone with a trained eye the hdv camera will probably stick out like a sore thumb. But overall, I'm very happy.

If there is one thing that I've taken away from this whole last experience it was being majorly demoralized over my xha1, or any other hdv cam for that matter. For the last year or so I've been so empowered with the "I have a great camera and a great edit suite, I can do anything I want for zero cost and it will turn out great" and now that I have used the ex1s on a shoot in direct comparison to my xha1 in the same shoot, I've lost alot of canon-gumption over it.

One thing is apparently clear to me, I don't think I'm going to buy an ex1 just yet, but I'm definitely going to be using more rentals and I'm DEFINITELY going to make sure I have an extra 6-7 grand in the bank by next summer for whatever form of the scarlet RED releases, I can't muster the effort to work with tape based HD much longer.

Of course for some shooting environments solid state is just not practical to use, so I will always keep my trusty xha1 on the side. Its not that I don't think that you can make work that people will enjoy with HDV, it was just a world a difference when I started seeing not only how flexible the footage from the ex1s were CC but also just how stunning the final images looked. They looked like real-beautiful HD and it made HDV in comparison look like some sort of fuzzy half-assed format.
Click to expand...

Workflow wise you can enjoy a file based workflow with your a1, I've been doing it for a while with cf cards. The ex1 is a great camera but having it versus dvcprohd format wise it isn't as flexible as you make it sound, it's very sharp and extremely nice but it's still called 4:2:0 for a reason.

The holy grail of formats to me is the newer xdcam hd422, if that filtered down that'd awesome, but I have a feeling they want xdcam ex on the low and and hd422 on the high end.

Thanks for the tip o that book though, I'm definetly gonna snag a copy.
 
Just started reading this book after seeing this thread last week. I have only read the 30 pages and I have learned A LOT. I wish I had read this before my first job in editing for broadcast (instead of the five minute tutorial given to me by another editor who had know no technical understanding of, well, anything).
 
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