I'm in a strange mood today so I'm letting loose my two ultimate Final Cut Pro color correction secrets! Sort of. It's all about layering footage.
1. Diffused highlights. This one is great; it emulates strong diffusion. Put a copy of your footage on layer two (on top of your footage in layer one). Then apply a color corrector 3 way, desaturate signiicantly, crush the blacks and mids to zero, and boost the highlights so that you have a near black and white image. Then apply a gaussian blur of about 6-12 pixels (depending on the shot scale). Put this on top of your footage and set the transfer mode to "screen."
Then play around with the two color corrector three ways (and other filters, if necessary) as well as the layer opacity.
2. Fix crushed blacks. One big problem with crushing the hell out of blacks is that once you hit 0 IRE (contrary to what people will say, this is sometimes desirable or necessary) your blacks look flat, whereas if something were shot at zero footcandles, you would still have grain! So....shoot a few seconds with the lens cap on, or create some fake grain (I like to use the render-->noise option, and layer color and black and white noise, blur it a bit, and do like 4% opacity). Take your footage post-color correction, and apply a luma key that keys out only 0 IRE. Then place your luma keyed footage (layer two) over your noise (layer one). If the noise is too much, decrease the opacity of that layer.
These may sound like confusing and weird tricks, but they are awesome.
1. Diffused highlights. This one is great; it emulates strong diffusion. Put a copy of your footage on layer two (on top of your footage in layer one). Then apply a color corrector 3 way, desaturate signiicantly, crush the blacks and mids to zero, and boost the highlights so that you have a near black and white image. Then apply a gaussian blur of about 6-12 pixels (depending on the shot scale). Put this on top of your footage and set the transfer mode to "screen."
Then play around with the two color corrector three ways (and other filters, if necessary) as well as the layer opacity.
2. Fix crushed blacks. One big problem with crushing the hell out of blacks is that once you hit 0 IRE (contrary to what people will say, this is sometimes desirable or necessary) your blacks look flat, whereas if something were shot at zero footcandles, you would still have grain! So....shoot a few seconds with the lens cap on, or create some fake grain (I like to use the render-->noise option, and layer color and black and white noise, blur it a bit, and do like 4% opacity). Take your footage post-color correction, and apply a luma key that keys out only 0 IRE. Then place your luma keyed footage (layer two) over your noise (layer one). If the noise is too much, decrease the opacity of that layer.
These may sound like confusing and weird tricks, but they are awesome.
