How Do You Color Correct?

It's important to use a waveform monitor and a vectorscope, when doing any color correction, so that the colours are in legal range. Especially when doing stuff for TV broadcasts and video.
 
When I'm at home color correcting I use FCP and usually just fiddle with everything until it gets the look that I was looking for. Then I check to make sure everything is legal.

At work, I use Quantel, which has a good CC, I usually just try to make the colors pop and keep an eye on the WFM. I usually raise the contrast, lower the brightness slightly, lower the gamma slightly, add a little saturation, add some red in the mids and add some blue in the highs. It all depends on what the video looks like but that's usually what i do for football, baseball or basketball highlights.

What I do probably isnt the best way to cc but I like to do what I think looks good and am happy with it in the end.
 
Blaine said:
Your cinematographer is going to play big in how you color correct. If you've got a good DP that knows what he's doing, he's going to get pretty damn close to the look you're going for in-camera. It may only take a little tweaking to get your clips in line with one another. If you don't have a DP that really knows what he's doing, then you may need to do more work in post. In the second case I would set my black levels, adjust the whites and then attempt to match scene to scene. In some cases I may have to work even harder by giving the scene a "look."
Click to expand...

actually alot of really good dp's shoot flat so the editor has the most room to correct in post... like it should be done.
 
onmi said:
Hmm, what happens if colors are in "illegal range". How those shows up on TV?
Click to expand...

Illegal colors only have to do with ntsc standard broadcast and the tv station will take care of that when they recieve your commercial or show. An illegal color is only blacks below 7.5 IRE. Colors above and below 100 and 0 luma are colors that are getting clipped. If you have blue above 100 it has now been clipped and will look white. Adjust your colors to within 0 and 100.
 
I'm currently working in Vegas, so my cc stack looks like this:

1. B&W
2. Brightness & Contrast
3. HSL
4. Color Gradient
5. Broadcast Colors

Essentially, after reading here for a while, and talking to some other sources, I found it very helpful to make sure the exposure was correct before worrying about the colors. So I go to black and white, and use waveform monitor to see what things are looking like. I allow so stray information down to about 4 IRE and up to about 105.

Bringing the color back in I monitor the color parade and do some adjustments so that I avoid clipping any color channels.

With the color gradient, I try to either get a nice warming effect, or make things slightly cooler if I've had to shoot in tungsten lighting without being able to get a good white balance.

On occasion I've used the 3-color corrector, but with what I'm shooting, it's usually not necessary. I've adjusted my pedastal and my auto-iris to underexpose a bit. I've not lost any highlights since making that change and I find it gives me nice latitude in post to really bring some things out.

Since I've started using these tools, the look of what I've shot has been well recieved.
 
J5 squared said:
Illegal colors only have to do with ntsc standard broadcast and the tv station will take care of that when they recieve your commercial or show.
Click to expand...

I know this is an old, defunct thread, but I couldn't help but respond to this.

If you submit a commercial or show to a tv station or network and it has illegal colors and levels, you will end up looking like a mouth-breathing, unsophisticated amateur. They will return your tape to you and make you fix it at your own expense.

In the standard network delivery contracts I have seen, your master tapes must have passed a quality control inspection.

That said, I know there are settings within Avid, FCP, and Adobe Aftereffects that can make your material legal.
 
PaPa said:
how do you key out a sky? What do you replace it with?
Click to expand...

Key to the blue color (hopefully a clear day or clouds may force you may have to do some roto or color levels to pull a clean key from it.
lay your new sky underneath the keyed sky and motion track it if needed.

Usually you replace a plain clear blue sky with a more dramatic sky, be that moving footage or photo.
 
Well these all sound great - but one the works like a charm to me is: on the scence correction - using the DVX's white balance - i find that once i bring into FCP little correction is needed - then again that's just me....
 
kryptics said:
Well these all sound great - but one the works like a charm to me is: on the scence correction - using the DVX's white balance - i find that once i bring into FCP little correction is needed - then again that's just me....
Click to expand...
Good color correction is used on top of white balance to achieve the best image possible, to achieve continuity between all the shots in a scene, and to give the piece a look.

White balance and correcting the on-scene lights will only take you so far, and at this level, color correction in post should never be needed to "fix" ruined shots. It is in taking projects to that next level of finishing that color correction is useful.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top