using the Broadcast Safe Filter

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enrico

Well-known member
In colour correction when you see a range check exclamation mark, is it better to go straight to the Broadcast Safe filter, or turn down the whites/saturation in 3way Col Cor?

And does the exclamation warning always apply also to cinema resolutions as well as tv broadcast?

thanks
 
It refers more to broadcast IRE so in film it's not always necessary to correct for but it cannot hurt. Broadcast safe filter is the quickest way but not always the most aesthetically appealing.

Noah
 
thanks for the feedback!

I'm using FCP 5. Are there any recommended tutorials for colour correction that deal identifying and taking out colours that are out of balance (perhaps using the limit effect?)
 
Has anyone tried using the Grading Sweet colour corrector, or are there any really good white auto balance, or colour balance filiters I should look into?

thanks
 
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I have used the Grading sweet demos of their effects. Price wise, I think Magic Bullet Looks might be a better value and you get to adjust parameters better. Grading sweet color fx look nice, but I think they're nothing that special, that you can't come up with MB Looks or even FCP5.

FCP's own 3-way color corrector has good white, grey and black balance buttons. They're not necessarily one-click solutions all the time (if you click the wrong place or object that's not truly white), but with practice one can get fast results. 90% of time they work like a charm.

The best in-depth books about FCP 5 (and 6) color correction are Apple's own "Advanced color correction and effects in FCP5" and especially "Encyclopedia of Color correction", which specifically takes use of FCP's 3-way color correction. You'll learn limiting color correction (secondary) as well as primary correction and other special techniques. Great book!

Of the 2 forementioned books "Encyclopedia..." will give you all the necessary tools and knowledge to work with FCP 3-way corrector, but both books are good to own.
 
Thank you for your feedback!

So FCP 5's 3way Colour Correction is as good as Magic Bullet or Grading Sweet?

How do you know when your correction has crossed the line and diminished the quality oif the picture, eg. grainy (that's difficult to see on a small MTSC monitor)?
 
FCP's 3-way color correction + the FCP's own filters and blend mode options give you option to create similar and very identical looks that you see in MB Looks, BUT, it's much slower of course, when you have to create an effect "tree", or stack of few effects for clips or nests.
MB Looks and Grading sweet are "one click" solutions that are applied to clips, that give you instant looks that you can tweak for your taste. One applied effect is a lot faster than many effects from FCP so to speak.

If you do a lot of special looks to projects, then investing in MB Looks is worth it for the time alone. Plus, it's now an integrated unit that you can do other stuff as well as color grading, like post focus blurs on footage to create DOF effects, adjustable vignettes, film grain emulating noise etc.
Basically you can do almost everything (blurs, gradients, vignettes, color etc.) in FCP too, but then again, it takes time and some knowledge to apply all the effects.

In MB Looks it's just easier and a lot faster. MB Looks might be worth buying if you're still with FCP 5. Final Cut Studio 2 on the other hand has Color and other cool stuff. Color is more pro color grading piece than MB Looks. MB Looks doesn't support external monitoring for example (don't know if this is still the case?), so for critical and professional color correcting / grading needs it's not the best option.

MB Looks is easy and intuitive, fun and fast to use, but some users (like me on occasion with the demo version) have had problems of not getting the MB Looks UI to pop up when you want to adjust the effects parameters from FCP. This is of course critical, how can you use the software if it doesn't show up!
You should read Creative Cow and other forums to check this strange phenomenon. It could be Quicktime version, FCP version related problem or other bug, don't know.

I personally think that if you have a chance and the time, it's worth getting to know, learning how to make color grading / looks in FCP alone. That way you get in-depth knowledge about the nature of all those effects, color and how they relate to each other. Then you know how to make those looks in any FCP or basically any other NLE suite that doesn't have MB Looks for example.
 
Also, about broadcast safe: In my experience adjusting the whites and excessive color manually and then -last- putting the Broadcast safe gives the best results.

If you apply the Broadcast safe to a clip alone, it sometimes tends to clamp the excessive levels so that you can see some flat, ugly look on problematic areas. In many cases, almost all the time, if you adjust the white levels to legal range, you gain details in the bright areas that seemed hopeless (blown out whites), and also adjusting the chroma levels manually to legal range gives immediately detail and clears the problems areas. Especially with DV material you gain precious detail when adjusting manually first.

In some case on the other hand, Broadcast safe seems to take better immediate control of VERY out of range chroma (in my experience), than adjusting the saturation and adjusting the color with 3-way corrector alone. Especially when it's critical to keep the original color balance of the video that has huge color information, I find it very hard to adjust thing manually so that the video doesn't lose it's vibrant original colors. Broadcast safe seems to help that little.
 
Thank you for your detailed response!

Everything you're saying makes total sense. With foundations you can work further...gonna get the 2 books. Also gonna see about an MB Looks demo.

Right now I'm having difficulty getting an orangy/yellow t shirt to be white (with the rest of the image), like it's supposed to be. Is there a way to isolate that wrong colour with the limit effect, and then reduce/eliminate it, keeping the other colours intact?

thank you.
 
EDIT: Uh, sorry, in a hurry I read that you wanted to remove the color cast from the whole picture, but you talked about secondary...

I'll try to write some simple instructions, but here's my earlier post about the white balance corr. in general:


Yes, you can remove or eliminate the yellow/orange color cast by moving the whites (in 3-way CC) and mids "ball" towards the blue. The more you drag it towards blue, the more it neutralizes the yellow hue that's in the white / upper range of the picture. Eliminating a certain color cast works by adding more the complementary color, that is the opposite of color that you want to remove. If you had a magenta cast for example, then you'd drag it more toward green etc.

The automatic eye dropper tool does the exact same thing, limiting the effect only to which region (whites / mids / blacks) you apply it to.

There's basically 2 methods for white balance corrections: the most common one is to correct the whites, especially in video you see is clearly just wrong white balance settings, too blue or yellow. This usually does the trick. Adjust also the mids slightly if necessary.

The other school of thinking is that if there's neutral grey in the picture, adjusting it alone can correct the video AND whites and blacks are truly whites and blacks.
I've noticed that if you rely too much in the whites auto correction, sometimes the blacks / the dark areas might have a certain color cast in them. Especially if you try to balance shots from 2 different cameras that didn't have their white balances set, there can be situations where at first it seems both pictures are correct with true whites, accurate skin tones etc, but the other video has hue in the blacks. For example dark black jeans or clothes might look perfectly black in the other video and the other clips have a bluish / green / red / some hue in them.
 
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In 3-way corrector, or the simple corrector, you use the limit effect to isolate the yellow from a shirt:

Click the eyedropper in some mid tone yellow (or an average yellow pixel) in the shirt. You see in the Limit effect bar the color hue you've selected.

There's the KEY button on the right of the panel, when you click it, it first shows you the matte of your selection. In other words: the white selection against black is the selected area that the color limiting is going to apply. When you click the key button again, it turns to sampling more again (red key against blue), where you can add more information to the selection. Pressing the ALT so that the dropper has a +sign to it, you can ALT+mouse click to add more color variations to selection.
Red key against grey is the final composite, you can see the effect when you adjust the wheel and sliders.

Adjusting the Hue, Saturation and Luma value sliders, you can narrow and adjust you selection. Try clicking the different values on and off to see if it helps to isolate the color better. For example the luma value might sometimes be better off the get a better sample of some color etc.

At the bottom there's the Edge thin and Softness values. Adjust the edge thin that the selection comes totally white (if possible), with no grey or black spots in it. The softness helps you to smoothen the edges of the key, so that no artifacting shows. Don't use Softness too much, or a halo might apprear at the key edges, looks weird.

If you take the saturation away form the yellow, it's then white, there's no color in it. You can adjust the whites luma value to boost brightness in that area if it's grey.

Hope this helps.
 
Thank you. I appreciate your input very much. Once I've identified the colour cast with the Limit Effect, how do I reduce it, (if moving the slider away from the yellow/orange toward the blue, doesn't diminish the cast colour)?

I'm not sure what you mean by:

"When you click the key button again, it turns to sampling more again (red key against blue), where you can add more information to the selection. Pressing the ALT so that the dropper has a +sign to it, you can ALT+mouse click to add more color variations to selection.
Red key against grey is the final composite, you can see the effect when you adjust the wheel and sliders."

Still can't seem to make the whites, white, and colour balanced in this image.

And I picked up "Advanced Color Correction and Effects," today. It's a good intro...perhaps I should have got the "Encyclopedia..." to clear up this challenge.
 
Red key against blue, means that you can sample more color information to your previous selection. If you try to adjust anything in that mode, you will not see anything happen in the Canvas. For this you need to click once again to return to red against grey key, which is the final image. There you'll be able to see the effect in color you're doing.

I'm afraid I can't help you more... If I could see a sample image from the problem video, maybe I could see the problem.

Remember that if you try to adjust whites to be exact whites in primary correction (or greys to be neutral greys), you have to be sure that white objects really WERE white in the first place, during the shooting. If for example, you had a light beige object in the video, that you mistakenly think is actually white, clicking the auto white balance gives you the wrong overall color to you video.
Video calculates all the color spectrum it uses from the white (as set in white balance during shooting), so if there is no actual white in the picture, auto balance has no real white to work with and you end up with unnatural colors.

As you do more and more image color correcting, you'll train your eye to see color casts more easily in video or pictures. And in real life.

If your video has no white objects in it and you're wondering what the actual color might have been, another way to try to balance the color to more natural is to try correct it so that the human skin hue lines with the "skin tone" line in you vectorscope. This is of course for shoots in pretty normal environment, neutral color.
If you have a shot where there are strong red stage lights illuminating the actor, the face is of course red in real life too, that's what the eye sees. Then it's a question of artistic taste what you want to make it, take some of the excessive red out or not.

One last thing that comes to mind about white balance and yellow-ish whites: Remember that early morning and late evening sun light is actually light warm yellow in real life too. People see it as warm light, that's how they automatically know the time of the day. So trying to make evening sun glow to neutral white actually takes the illusion out of time, it turns the mid-day shot.

Same thing with lamps: the light they give varies in Kelvin degrees, so a moody restaurant scene with candle lights is actually pretty warm with yellow and some red color cast, in real life and especially thru camera. So the thing is not to take all the yellow out of it, but maybe make it more subtle, like it could be in real life.

I definitely recommend you to get "Encyclopedia of...", since it logically explains the color in video and how to easily manipulate it with easy tutorials. Both practical and some very useful theoretical aspects of light and colors.
 
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