Need Color Correction advice

puredrifting

Major Contributor
Hi all:

Shot an interview at an ad agency a few days ago. Talent lit by daylight balanced LED panels, talent looks fine. BG looks nice compositionally but is way too orange as it was lit with a combo of 3200k tungsten track lights and about twenty pendant lamps with "warm" fluorescent bulbs (probably about 4k to 4,300k temp). The LEDs did not have enough output for me to gel them to 3,200k so I shot with what I had, made the talent look good but the BG is a mess as far as color. I should have brought my Arri tungsten kit and lit with tungsten but other visits to this ad agency have shown a lot of daylight from skylights that bleed in, hence my choice to bring daylight balanced lighting. A location scout would have saved me but scouts are rare just for an interview. It's just that the BG the client wanted to use was a room with no windows and really warm lighting. Talent is mostly stationary on a stool. I just know the basic three way color corrector in FCP studio so I am not of much help in advising the editor how to fix this. Editor is also editing is FCP 7.02 so no great, sophisticated color correction tools available. Editor's computer and OS is older (Mountain Lion?) and not fast enough to run newer software like Davinci Resolve. I believe she has Magic Bullet Suite and just the FCP three way CC.

Is there a non-high horsepower program (she also has After Effects and is decent at it) or plug-in that she either has or can purchase that would let her "Power Window" the talent and apply a heavy CC on the BG only? Preferably something that doesn't cost a fortune and have a steep learning curve? She is upgrading to a new iMac 5k soon but not in time for this project/edit/deadline. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
It might work to create a feathered oval mask/power-window around the interviewee, track the mask, and color correct everything outside the mask. If there's not a gradual falloff from one color temperature to the other, rotoscoping might be your only recourse.
 
You'd be SHOCKED at how much you can do with automatically tracking power windows in DaVinci Resolve 12 - which is FREE. Will FREE work?

I've used Premiere Pro for years, but After Effects has always been an enormous time-suck for me trying to learn it's controls and functions.
I figured out the Resolve power windows by watching one YouTube video for about a minute. I'm not kidding.

I've seen relative noobs relight just the face of a subject who had too bright a background - they did it with ONE window, and I've also seen a guy use about 15 tiny windows to completely control all the lighting contours of the subject's face.
I learned how to completely section out and relight an entire scene in about half an hour.

Resolve is insane.
 
If she's got AE, she should have access to SpeedGrade as well. It's not quite as powerful as Resolve, but it has pretty much all the same functionality with power windows & everything.
 
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