Digital Video - March 2009 - (Page 16)

COLOR BY THE NUMBERS The filter I use not only lets you change the quality of the vignette, but also adjust its position. Sometimes a vignette effect looks best when it’s off-center. signal and bright colors like yellow get hotter. Extreme color grading may result in illegal video levels, so it’s necessary to reduce color saturation in the light and dark regions of the image. Be subtle! I’ll say the same for the Broadcast Safe filter — the second of these last two effects. I’ll create a custom setting that’s not too harsh. RGB Limiting in that filter is disabled because I’m mainly interested in clipping extreme luminance levels. I prefer to fix levels through my grading adjustments and by paying attention to the built-in waveform monitor and vectorscope, so my use of the Broadcast Safe filter is only to clip the last few percent. Here’s the trick to applying any filter across the board. Add the filter to one clip and set the values. Now copy-and-paste that filter to the browser. Remove it from the clip. Highlight all video clips in the timeline and drag-and-drop the filter from the browser to the highlighted timeline. If you have several filters to apply this way, make sure you maintain the proper order so that the correct filters end up on top. In the case of Desaturate Hi/Lo and Broadcast Safe, these should be the topmost filters on each clip. There’s nothing left to do but render. Adding this many plug-in filters to a 90-minute HD feature film takes hours to render — often overnight for half of the film, even on a fast machine. So plan on at least three days for your masterpiece — IF you’re fast. Or work in sections and render overnight. Make sure you budget additional time to evaluate the overnight render first thing in the morning. You may not like everything you did when you see it in the cold light of day, so make sure you have the time to tweak. Happy grading! DV SPECIAL EFFECTS/STYLIZED CONTROL OF THE IMAGE I grade with a combination of filters to achieve artistic goals but typically stay away from the many stylized filter packages when doing standard color grading. There are many that I do like, including those from Nattress, Pistolero, Magic Bullet, Noise Industries and DV Shade, but I reserve such image effects as Technicolor, bleach bypass and chromatic glows for special cases, like dramatic flashback scenes. The exception is Magic Bullet Looks (Red Giant Software). This is my goto for more advanced effects that mimic in-camera filtering, including graduated filters, selective focus and swing-and-tilt lens effects. The results appear very photographic and the feature set offers quite a few color-correction tools, like curves, which are missing from the regular Final Cut Pro toolset. STAYING LEGAL The last step is to apply two more filters across the entire timeline if your master is for broadcast television. The first is FCP’s Desaturate Highlights (or Lows) filter. This is really a single filter, but it exists twice in the folder with either highlights or lows enabled by default. As you lower blacks and raise whites to achieve more contrast, dark colors like reds and blues get shoved to the lower boundaries of the video NEW WITHOUT Litepanels Micro Litepanels Micro WITH Litepanels Micro The perfect camera light fully dimmable & powered by AA batteries Use with video & still cameras ADVANTAGES > Continuous light output > Heat free LED technology > Brings faces to life > Vastly improves skin tone > Dimmable 100% to 0 (min. color shift) > Produces bright, HD-friendly soft light > 1.5 hrs run time from 4 AA batteries* * 7+ hours runtime using Energizer®e2 Lithium AA batteries Ph: 818 752 7009 ® • Fax: 818 752 2437 • W W W. L I T E PA N E L S . C O M NAB #: C6817 http://WWW.LITEPANELS.COM http://WWW.LITEPANELS.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - March 2009

Digital Video - March 2009 Contents MX02 Instant Expert First Look: EOS 5D Mark II Powerlight 1735W Color by the Numbers A Versatile Disc Indeed Slice/Dice DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - March 2009

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