Colour Grading for Weddings

T

tipdrinker

Member
Hi All,

I've just started out as a budding videographer and I'm really loving it. I've just set up my new website today :) (critiques of content and work welcome)

http://provideoireland.com

One thing I don't enjoy however is the long rendering times in after effects and premiere when I am doing colour grading for weddings. This is just about bearable when I'm doing a 5 minute youtube clip but when it comes to a whole wedding it can be a nightmare. Sometimes it can take a couple of days to render out a wedding if there is a glitch or some setting is wrong and you have to render out the footage all over again. So I was wondering what sort of workflow people have for this sort of thing?

I'm tempted to just do a quick colour correction of the wedding and just colour grade the montage sequences what to you guys think?

I've been using magic bullet looks so far and I'm experimenting with colorghear and I know they can be resource intensive.
 
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Magic Bullet takes a long time to render, period. That's your problem.

If you want shorter render times, learn to do the same things Magic Bullet does, only using the built-in effects of Premiere or After Effects.
 
That's true. What I did for my last project was something like that. I just colour corrected it and added a yellow colour matte which uses up hardly any resources (the bar was still yellow)

 
Audio... that's my only critique. Your corporate videos could use better audio. Spend time learning/practicing good audio recording. And learn about various types of mics, pickup patterns, and when to use what. Spend as much time learning/working with audio as you do video.

Also, I don't know what it's like n Ireland, but in the US you need to license any music you use. I've read that the industry is starting to crack down on this. Not saying you haven't licensed the music, but looking at your price list I thought to myself, "Where's the cost of the music license?" Popular songs can't generally be licensed for anything your client will be willing to pay. Here's a good article to read: http://daredreamermag.com/2011/12/0...me-to-roost-in-wedding-and-event-videography/

Anyway, it's great that you're doing what you love. Keep it up!

Cheers,
Rob

Edit: And check out the video at the end of that article. Something to aspire to? The Vimeo page for the video has links to the music he licensed. Great quality and pretty inexpensive licensing fees.
 
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Yeah I definitely need to brush up on my audio ;-). Also As of my next video I have already decided to use royalty free/creative commons music now that I'm taking things more seriously. That article was very useful. I've bookmarked it for the sites mentioned thanks.
 
I do a lot of color-grading for event videos and have some suggestions:

1. At the risk of being obvious, a more powerful PC will help even Magic Bullet run faster. In a business where time-is-money, a high end hex-core or 8-core PC with LOTs of memory can be a good investment. Or, as has already been suggested, the use of built-in filters and effects to accomplish the same thing will often render faster.

2. I have found that using dynamic link with Premiere and After Effects can really slow things down. Most of the time, I will edit a project in Premiere and then import that project into AE for color-grading.

3. When faced with a lengthy render-intensive job, many pros will render an image sequence. That way you can re-start the rendering at the crash point if there is a glitch or power-failure.


Jim
Colorburst Video
 
arco1 said:
I do a lot of color-grading for event videos and have some suggestions:

1. At the risk of being obvious, a more powerful PC will help even Magic Bullet run faster. In a business where time-is-money, a high end hex-core or 8-core PC with LOTs of memory can be a good investment. Or, as has already been suggested, the use of built-in filters and effects to accomplish the same thing will often render faster.

2. I have found that using dynamic link with Premiere and After Effects can really slow things down. Most of the time, I will edit a project in Premiere and then import that project into AE for color-grading.

3. When faced with a lengthy render-intensive job, many pros will render an image sequence. That way you can re-start the rendering at the crash point if there is a glitch or power-failure.


Jim
Colorburst Video
Click to expand...

Has anyone ever tried using 'aerender' in a render farm setup? Or is aerender even available anymore... rendering on several 'lower performance' machines may result in better times... for less money...
 
"Has anyone ever tried using 'aerender' in a render farm setup?" Yes, I have.

One of the problems with any sort of render farm is licensing of plug-ins. Not sure about Magic Bullet, but many plug-ins require a separate license for each pc in the farm. Some plug-ins will only run on one cpu or even one core, so multiple instances of AE on the same machine, or even a single instance of AE on multi-core processors may be limited by a given plug-in process. My PC has an Intel i7 8-core and it sometimes loafs along at 15% utilization because some process will only run in one cpu instance.


Jim
 
arco1 said:
"Has anyone ever tried using 'aerender' in a render farm setup?" Yes, I have.

One of the problems with any sort of render farm is licensing of plug-ins. Not sure about Magic Bullet, but many plug-ins require a separate license for each pc in the farm. Some plug-ins will only run on one cpu or even one core, so multiple instances of AE on the same machine, or even a single instance of AE on multi-core processors may be limited by a given plug-in process. My PC has an Intel i7 8-core and it sometimes loafs along at 15% utilization because some process will only run in one cpu instance.


Jim
Click to expand...

I'll bet the joker who thought up that licensing is basking in the sun in Tahiti... (Yes, I'm well aware of this sort of crap... in a recent day job encounter with a global provider of 'intellectual property'... the same question came up... guess what... we didn't go with that global provider...).

It would be interesting to see the list of 'plugins' that are provided by the standard Adobe install, and what resources they utilize, or in my case, whether they are 'render farm' friendly...

As it is I pretty much only use the Adobe standard plugins...
 
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"standard Adobe install, ...whether they are 'render farm' friendly..."

I haven't found any Adobe-included plug-ins that are NOT render-farm friendly. I have found dynamic-link to be a bit user-hostile at times.

Jim
 
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