Digital Video - September 2007 - (Page 21)

reviews Making the grade Working with Color is as much an art as a science. Most of your work is going to be done in either the Primary In room or in one of the eight available Secondaries. One trick I picked up from Bob Sliga (colorist and former FinalTouch demo artist, now on the Apple staff) is that you shouldn’t try to do all the correction in a single room. For example, use the color wheels and curves in the Primary In room to establish a pleasing overall look, and then go into the Secondaries to customize that image. Both areas offer the typical color wheels and curves, but the effect is cumulative. You might improve the basic shot through the Primary In, but leave it neutral. Then in Secondary 1 make it warmer (more yellow/red) and in Secondary 2 make it cooler (more blue). Since each Secondary can be enabled or disabled, this becomes a quick way to toggle through alternative “looks” for a director without having to start over each time. in Secondary 1 and Secondary 2 to brighten the two different people equally. Next is the Color FX room, a node-based compositor whose effects are added on top of the grading done in the Primary In and Secondaries rooms. Color employs the GPU and CPU differently than do Apple’s FxPlug filters, so a different set of plug-ins is required. A number come with the system, but a powerful supplementary package of effects is available from developer Graeme Nattress. For example, I used one of the Nattress S-Curve plug-ins to really dig out some definition in a nearly burned-out sky with excellent results. The Color FX room includes a bin loaded with process tree presets. These are ready-to-use effects than can be tweaked and will give you an idea of how to structure your own trees for custom looks. The last grading room is Primary Out. It’s the best place to go when the client says, “I love everything, but make it all darker.” Finally, there’s a Geometry room for pan-andscan work. These Geometry effects look far cleaner than similar effects from most DVEs I’ve used, but these moves are rendered only when you aren’t using the FCP roundtrip path. When FCP is used, the Geometry information is sent back to FCP as size and position parameters that have to be rendered in Final Cut. Color’s interface isn’t very FCP-like, but if you’ve ever worked with Shake or a color grading app like da Vinci, you’ll feel right at home. Round-tripping Clearly, the optimal use of Color is in conjunction with Final Cut Pro. Most editors will use Color only in that context, so I’ll skip the app’s DI-oriented features. Start by using the Final Cut Pro 6 “Send to Color” command. Color works with the raw media files, so FCP effects generally won’t show up in Color. Motion tab values and basic FCP three-way color correction (since the 1.0.1 patch) will be translated, but only individual shots and not composites will be displayed. You’ll need to “bake in” any effects that are to be graded in Color after the effect is applied. To do this, export a rendered, self-contained file of that composite and drop it back on the FCP timeline before sending it to Color. This workflow also applies to SmoothCam and slo-mo shots. Color will properly interpret the effect, but when it comes time to render, the entire media file will be rendered—not just the portion that appears in the edited sequence. When you’ve finished your grading, render the clips and send the sequence back to Final Cut Pro. There you’ll find a new sequence, labeled “From Color.” It will match the original, except that the shots are now linked to the ren- There are eight Secondaries. Grading in a Secondary room can be applied to the whole image, a keyed color, or a circular, rectangular or custom vignette. Vignettes permit grading both inside and outside of the vignette area within a room, so eight rooms could actually equate to 16 layers of color grading. You can also use trackers to lock vignettes to objects or people in the shot. You don’t have to always start with Secondary 1. For instance, if you use a vignette to highlight a person in Secondary 1 by darkening the area outside the vignette, and then you highlight another person in Secondary 2, the vignette in Secondary 2 is trying to counteract the darkened video created in Secondary 1, and the two highlights won’t match. Instead, darken the overall shot in Secondary 3 and then use a vignette WWW.DV.COM DV SEPTEMBER 2007 21 http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - September 2007

Contents News AG-HPX500 HD Camcorder First Look: Color V8000HD 8" LCD Monitor Shoulder Mount System Instant Expert Close-Ups Fest Cercuit Q&A Flight Plan Cutter's Way Imagination in Action Motion Graphics Production Diary

Digital Video - September 2007

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