Flight Division Presents
Make Film Work
I wasn’t super happy about how I color graded the Boat Festival video. So I thought I’d take another stab at it. Afterwards I was curious to see just how much I had deviated from the first grade — quite a bit it, it turned out. You can see a side-by-side comparison below. Some shots will jump out at you more than others.
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A video snapshot from an antique boat show here in Salem, MA. Shot with DVX100a at 24pa, with a 1/48 shutter, using polarizing and UV filters. Audio captured with a super cardioid shotgun microphone. Edited and graded in Final Cut Studio 2. See the rest of the series here.
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The Witches Cup is a yearly bicycle race around the Salem Common. It’s made up of several events that attract racers from around the globe, including current and former olympians. I thought it might be fun to film this year’s race.
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Hitchcock [iTunes, $19.99] is an iPhone app for creating storyboards.
What’s most interesting to me about Hitchcock is how it’s meant to be used. I can’t think of any other iPhone app whose purpose is to get serious work done. It’s not something you use to jot down a few notes or use to browse incoming information. It’s a workstation, and it requires thought, planning and — most importantly — time to use effectively. That’s not something you see too much of on the iPhone.
Cinemek have put together a fifteen minute demonstration of Hitchcock’s functions. It’s clear that this was designed as a software solution, not just part of one. I believe that’s a major shift in intent for iPhone application programming — especially for the currently anemic filmmaking market.
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Say you’ve spent all day editing a video and now you’re excited to show it off. You don’t know too much about color correction but maybe noticed that your video looks a little red. And the colors are a little flat. And there’s not a lot of definition in the shadows.
Content might be king, but the big guy doesn’t wear a crown because it’s comfortable.
Color correction is the process of removing color casts due to a white imbalance, adjusting for poorly exposed shots, and improving contrast. Color grading is the process of manipulating color in your footage to produce a desired look.
That should answer the why. But what are you correcting? Simply, you’re looking to normalize your footage. Or maybe it’s better to call it naturalizing. Your goal is to make your video look normal. Properly exposed. Not-tinted. Uniform.
For reference, I run everything I shoot through Color for adjustments. From iPhone videos to the big-time client projects, I don’t consider it finished until it’s gone through (at least) a contrast & white balance grade. In fact, I specifically shoot in a way that gives me the greatest flexibility for correcting and grading. It’s similar to shooting RAW on your DSLR. But that’s for another day.
So here we are. Basic color correction. You can do everything here with Final Cut’s “Color Corrector 3-way” filter (discussed below), but if you have Final Cut Studio, you might as well use Color — you’ll have far more control over your adjustments.
I always start by adjusting contrast.
Unless you’re shooting with your shadows absolutely black (which you shouldn’t — you want flexibility) you should start by pulling the darkest areas down toward the black. Not so much that you’re losing a ton of color information, but enough to create a distinction between dark and semi-dark.
On the other end, your highlights shouldn’t be blown out. By which I mean not peaking above 100%. Anything above 100% is considered super white and not broadcast safe. Here’s a quick before and after look at the RGB histogram for the clip above.
The most important thing to note here is how the highlights are squished along the top (the thick yellow line near the top separates white from super white). The shadows are spread along the lower half.
With the highlights reigned in, the graph isn’t top or bottom heavy. Most of the color is in the middle and we’ve got a few shadows near the bottom.
How you shoot has a lot to do with how much flexibility you’ll have while grading. For example, many cameras include a handy zebra striping feature (see below) to let you know when you’re approaching your white limit. No striping means you’re within the limit.
If you’re using Final Cut Express or if Color’s interface scares you, you might be familiar with this guy.
From left to right you see three color wheels and sliders to play with. The far left is for adjusting shadows. The center is for mid-tones. The far right is for highlights. Use the sliders below the color wheels to adjust contrast, and the wheels themselves for color adjustments. Take it slow — minor adjustments can produce dramatic results.
Your goal is to maintain consistency across your clips.
You’ll want to look at your clips for any red or blue casting. Casting comes from maladjusted white balance and can cause ugliness between shots. This is the red tinting I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Pretty much every camera you encounter these days has some kind of automatic white balance, so most of the time it’ll be spot-on. When it’s not you need to fix it by adding the opposite of whatever color you have too much of. Here’s a handy color wheel for reference.
If you’re using the Color Corrector 3-way filter in Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro you’ll want to use the center wheel to remove most of whatever color cast your clips might have.
Again, your goal is to be as consistent as possible. When you’re done making your adjustments every clip in your sequence should be consistent from shot to shot. If you notice one clip that looks a little blue, everybody else is going to notice it too. Same goes for shadows. If it’s too light or too dark, you’ll know, and so will we.
When you have your footage looking good (and unified) you can choose to add a little bit of style. Maybe your video is set in the summer so you want to give it a warm feel. You’ll tint it orange. Or say your characters are locked in a cold freezer, you add blue. Maybe you want to show off an afternoon by the waterfront so you punch up the colors a little bit.
This is the fun part of color grading. You’re free to create a look all your own at this point — adjusting saturation, vignetting, removing colors altogether, etc. And because you’ve already corrected your clips for color & contrast, any look you create will be applied uniformly. Experiment and take time to create a look that makes you happy.
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My name is Jason. I have 7 years of freelance experience editing and shooting videos. I've got equipment, talent, and style.
via Jason Hawkins' Twitter