IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 |
(music playing)
| | 00:04 |
Hey, my name is Chad Perkins.
I'm the author of the books The After
| | 00:07 |
Effects Illusionist and How To Cheat in
After Effects, as well as an
| | 00:10 |
award-winning filmmaker and producer.
I believe that color correction in video
| | 00:16 |
is of epic importance.
It's the fastest and least expensive way
| | 00:20 |
to add massive amounts of production
value.
| | 00:24 |
Coloring footage also helps make it look
more like a cinematic event and not just
| | 00:27 |
some home movie recording.
Adobe SpeedGrade is one of the best tools
| | 00:32 |
in the world for using color to tell a
story.
| | 00:35 |
In this training we'll dig into
SpeedGrade from the bottom up.
| | 00:39 |
We'll get familiar with the interface and
the workflow and then start making basic
| | 00:43 |
color corrections and fixing color
problems as well.
| | 00:47 |
But this course is not just a technical
review of what the buttons do, we're
| | 00:50 |
going to get into the artistic side of
color correction.
| | 00:55 |
Changing a shot from bright daylight to
darker sunset.
| | 00:59 |
We'll also look at how to change the mood
with color, taking a regular ole shot and
| | 01:02 |
making it look like it came straight out
of a Hollywood horror movie.
| | 01:07 |
This is going to be a blast.
So let's get started learning Adobe SpeedGrade.
| | 01:12 |
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1. Getting Started with SpeedGradeWhat is SpeedGrade?| 00:02 |
Hello, my name is Chad Perkins, and I'd
like to introduce you to Adobe SpeedGrade.
| | 00:06 |
SpeedGrade is a color-correction, or in
other words a color grading application.
| | 00:12 |
It's extremely professional and it has
tons of great benefits and features.
| | 00:17 |
And typically in a workflow we use
SpeedGrade at the beginning of the video
| | 00:21 |
editing workflow, or at the very end, and
we'll look at both of those.
| | 00:26 |
But let's just go ahead and jump right
in.
| | 00:28 |
I have this drive here called Scarlet.
It's where I store footage from my red
| | 00:32 |
scarlet camera.
It's an external USB 2.0 drive.
| | 00:37 |
So, this is not an internal drive.
And I want to use this intentionally to
| | 00:40 |
show you, that even in the worst of
circumstances, how great of a job
| | 00:43 |
SpeedGrade does.
So, I have this selected and I'm looking
| | 00:48 |
here at this browser, called the desktop
in SpeedGrade language.
| | 00:53 |
And this is showing me, basically again,
like a file browsing system.
| | 00:57 |
And I'm only seeing sequences from
selected folder cuz that is what I have
| | 01:00 |
selected here up at the top.
But if I drop this down, and choose
| | 01:04 |
sequences from folder and subtree, then
after giving it a second, it finds 130 files.
| | 01:11 |
See, It didn't have any footage in this
root drive but I had a bunch of
| | 01:15 |
subfolders that had files.
So just by changing this I can now see
| | 01:19 |
all those files at once, which is
ridiculously helpful.
| | 01:23 |
And I see little thumbnails of them here,
I get details.
| | 01:26 |
And I want to draw attention as well,
that this is not just your run of the
| | 01:30 |
mill SD footage nor is it HD, but some of
these files, such as this one 4,096 by
| | 01:34 |
2160 pixels.
This is a 4K footage clip.
| | 01:40 |
And so what I'm going to do is apply it
to my timeline, add it to my timeline.
| | 01:44 |
I could do that by double-clicking it or
by clicking the little plus icon here and
| | 01:48 |
that adds it to my timeline.
But I'm still looking at my browser,
| | 01:52 |
which is actually a pretty good thing,
typically because I want to add multiple
| | 01:56 |
footage files usually to my timeline.
But what I want to do here is get to
| | 02:00 |
grading this.
So, I'm going to go away from the desktop to
| | 02:03 |
my monitor.
I could do that in one of two ways.
| | 02:06 |
I can click this little Monitor tab here
in the upper left-hand corner of the
| | 02:09 |
interface or I could press the letter D
on the keyboard a couple times and there
| | 02:13 |
we go.
Now I'm not seeing anything because I
| | 02:17 |
don't have my current time indicator
here.
| | 02:20 |
So I just go ahead and click, and there
is my little time marker.
| | 02:26 |
So I have this clip here, and again this
is 4K raw, red footage.
| | 02:30 |
16-bit raw and if I press the Spacebar,
you'll see it plays back in real time at
| | 02:37 |
4K being played of an externalLAUGH USB
2.0 drive.
| | 02:44 |
This is incredible.
You'll also notice that before I do
| | 02:48 |
anything I have my little histogram here
and I can select my scopes from this area.
| | 02:53 |
I have a vector scope.
I have a wave 4 monitor and of course I
| | 02:57 |
have my histogram which I can toggle on
and off.
| | 03:00 |
I actually prefer my histogram to be on
my left side of my screen so I could come
| | 03:04 |
over here to this little arrow and click
that.
| | 03:08 |
And we'll jump to the left side and I can
even expand it if that is what I desire.
| | 03:14 |
So there that is, and now let's go ahead
and jump in and start grading here.
| | 03:19 |
I'm going to perform what's called a
first light grade.
| | 03:23 |
Often times when you first get footage
in, it's good to do just kind of a basic gray.
| | 03:27 |
And that way when you have clients or
producers standing over your shoulder you
| | 03:30 |
have something better for them to look
at.
| | 03:33 |
Often times they don't catch the vision
when they see a flat image like this and
| | 03:37 |
so a first light perhaps is going to help
them see that.
| | 03:40 |
So I go over to the Look tab here and you
see that I have, I'm just going to go ahead
| | 03:43 |
and extend this up just a little bit.
And we have a bunch of controls that look
| | 03:48 |
like they're grayed out.
But realistically, what SpeedGrade does
| | 03:52 |
is it kind of grays out most features
just so that it doesn't get in your way.
| | 03:56 |
But as soon as I put my cursor over one
of these, you see that it instantly
| | 03:59 |
lights up and let's me know that it's
ready for action.
| | 04:02 |
So I have off-set Gamma and Gain,
essentially I'm going to use these to adjust
| | 04:06 |
the shadows, mid-tones and highlights.
But for deeper control I can go, not just
| | 04:11 |
to the overall controls but I can adjust
the shadows independently, the mid-tones
| | 04:15 |
and the highlights independently as well.
We're not going to get the hardcore in just
| | 04:21 |
this one intro movie so I'm just going to
keep this on overall for right now.
| | 04:26 |
And this little widget is actually pretty
cool.
| | 04:28 |
I actually like this.
If you don't like it, you can use these
| | 04:31 |
color sliders by clicking this button
here.
| | 04:33 |
Or you can use numeric values, but again
I'm going to go back to the color wheels.
| | 04:38 |
Ideally this works best with a color
wheel controller, like a track ball.
| | 04:42 |
But I'm going to use just a regular old
mouse here.
| | 04:44 |
If I click and hold my mouse down, you
see I get a color wheel.
| | 04:48 |
And as I click and move this around, the
adjustments are very subtle.
| | 04:52 |
You probably can't see it on my screen,
but you can see it in the histogram that
| | 04:55 |
my colors are changing.
Now that's again if I'm clicking and
| | 04:58 |
holding the left Mouse button down.
But while I'm holding the left Mouse
| | 05:03 |
button down, I can adjust my scroll
wheel.
| | 05:07 |
And again, it's very subtle.
And you kind of have to look at the
| | 05:10 |
histogram to see what I'm doing here.
But I can adjust the offset or the
| | 05:14 |
luminance of the offset using the mouse
wheel while my left Mouse button is held down.
| | 05:22 |
So it's a little bit tricky with your
fingers trying to do all this stuff but
| | 05:25 |
it allows you a lot of control.
One thing that it's good to note is that
| | 05:29 |
the controls and speed grader's very
subtle.
| | 05:32 |
So you could be scrolling your mouse a
lot, or dragging your mouse a lot, and it
| | 05:36 |
will only make very subtle changes.
I'll go over to here to gain.
| | 05:41 |
I'm going to adjust that next, adjust my
highlights.
| | 05:43 |
I could again from the top of my
histogram see that I don't really have
| | 05:46 |
all my highlights adjusted where I want
them to be.
| | 05:49 |
I want them to be brighter.
So, I'm going to click once and with my
| | 05:52 |
Mouse button held down, I'm going to
scroll my wheel mouse down.
| | 05:56 |
Now if I go crazy with this, I can also
click and drag on this little icon as well.
| | 06:02 |
But let's say I go crazy with it.
I may go way over the top, but I I blow
| | 06:05 |
up the highlights a little too much.
I can click on this little tab here to
| | 06:09 |
reset those highlights.
And I inadvertently tweaked this a little
| | 06:13 |
bit, I really didn't play with the colors
of my highlights, but I did.
| | 06:17 |
And so I get this icon, I can click that
to reset the colors as well.
| | 06:20 |
So they go back and actually I'll just
click on this little arrow here, until my
| | 06:25 |
highlights are about where I want them to
be, which is good.
| | 06:29 |
And I'll click on Gamma and brighten that
up, just a little bit.
| | 06:37 |
And now we have a better looking image,
and it looks very subtle, but what I can
| | 06:41 |
do is preview the before and after by
pressing zero on the numeric keypad.
| | 06:47 |
So here is the before and here is the
after.
| | 06:51 |
So, there's still some stuff I might want
to do to this.
| | 06:53 |
I could go over to my temperature
controls and scrub this to the right to
| | 06:56 |
warm this up even more.
Kind of like the nice, warm look.
| | 07:01 |
And if it's moving too subtly for you,
you can hold the Shift key down and then
| | 07:05 |
it moves much faster.
So, be careful that you don't over do it
| | 07:08 |
if you have the Shift key held down.
You might also want to add little bit of
| | 07:12 |
contrast, very little contrast.
And then just like color correction
| | 07:16 |
works, it's a very push pull type thing,
you do one adjustment and then you go
| | 07:19 |
back and then do more.
And then you go back to the shadows, back
| | 07:23 |
to the highlights, back to the midtones.
And it's kind of this juggling act as you
| | 07:27 |
kind of go back and forth between these
different controls.
| | 07:30 |
And now as I press Zero on the numeric
keypad, we have a bigger difference.
| | 07:34 |
So, you might not be able to get a
producer to sign off on this while you're
| | 07:37 |
editing but this is a little more
palatable.
| | 07:41 |
Now I'm just going to go ahead and clear out
this timeline and start from scratch.
| | 07:44 |
And we can do that by clicking this
little X icon on the right-hand side of
| | 07:47 |
the screen.
Click that, confirm that, and I'm going to
| | 07:51 |
go back to my desktop and I'm going to open
up another clip here.
| | 07:55 |
Let's start with this one and then go
back to my monitor here.
| | 08:03 |
And then we have this clip.
And what I was doing before, if I click
| | 08:08 |
on the Look tab, is I was making changes.
And those changes applied to my Primary layer.
| | 08:16 |
But what I can do for even more
flexibility is apply a grading layer.
| | 08:21 |
This is akin to an Adjustment layer in
After Effects or Premiere.
| | 08:26 |
And I have a little bit more flexibility
there.
| | 08:27 |
So let me show you what I'm talking
about.
| | 08:29 |
I'm going to go over to my Timeline tab.
And in the setup tab, in the timeline
| | 08:32 |
elements area, in the grading section
here there's a little icon.
| | 08:37 |
I'm going to click and drag this over my
layer.
| | 08:40 |
And that creates a new grading layer.
So I'm going to click on the grading layer
| | 08:45 |
to select that.
And now I want to go back over to the look
| | 08:48 |
tab, I have the same controls but now
this is going to apply to the grading
| | 08:51 |
layer and not to the clip.
Now with my grading layer selected, I'm
| | 08:56 |
going to come down here to the bottom of the
Loop panel.
| | 09:00 |
And we have these little folders here
almost, of different loops that we can
| | 09:03 |
apply it's kind of a Quick loop.
So I'm going to apply Cinematic one I'm
| | 09:08 |
going to double-click and this applies it to
my grading layer because that was selected.
| | 09:15 |
And I might go into the Gamma for example
and brighten up the Gamma of the clip.
| | 09:20 |
I'm just going to click this little triangle
and move it to the right, brighten that
| | 09:24 |
up just a little bit and it gives it this
cool super contrasty cinematic look to
| | 09:27 |
this image.
And I'm going to go back to my desktop here.
| | 09:33 |
And I'm going to add another clip to my
timeline by clicking the little Plus icon here.
| | 09:39 |
And then I'm going to go back to my monitor.
We can see the clip here in our timeline.
| | 09:43 |
And as we move over to this clip, we can
see that this clip does not match this clip.
| | 09:50 |
And actually what I'm going to do is I'm
going to drag this back here.
| | 09:52 |
And I'm going to actually create a second
play head.
| | 09:55 |
And I'm going to do that by clicking on this
right icon on the right side of the play head.
| | 09:59 |
Holding the Cmd key on the Mac or the
Ctrl key on a PC and dragging, which
| | 10:03 |
creates a second view here.
So what I'm going to do is click on this
| | 10:09 |
grading layer.
And I'm going to, on the right hand side
| | 10:12 |
of these little arrows, I'm going to extend
the grading layer.
| | 10:18 |
Now once I let go you will see that now
all the stuff that we did to this grading
| | 10:21 |
layer has been applied to this clip as
well, everything below it.
| | 10:25 |
So this is great if you have multiple
clips in the same scene and they all need
| | 10:28 |
a basic coating of contrast or a basic
coating of highlight adjustment.
| | 10:34 |
Or whatever you're going to do creative
grade.
| | 10:36 |
You can apply this to a separate grading
layer.
| | 10:40 |
You can have multiple grading layers if
you want to as well.
| | 10:43 |
So, a great feature from SpeedGrade.
And again, the, the multiple play heads
| | 10:47 |
allows you to kind of make sure that your
footage works from clip to clip that your
| | 10:50 |
grades are consistent.
So I've talked about how you use color
| | 10:56 |
grading on a first light situation where
we would grade and then we would output
| | 11:01 |
for editing.
Which we haven't done yet but we'll talk
| | 11:05 |
about in just a moment.
But another thing we can do, we can
| | 11:08 |
import a timeline from another program.
I'm going to go ahead and delete this
| | 11:13 |
timeline by clicking this X icon again.
And clicking yes.
| | 11:16 |
From here we can click this Open button
here, open SpeedGrade project which we'll
| | 11:21 |
do in just a moment.
But this is how you'd open an EDL if you
| | 11:26 |
had an EDL from your NLE.
And we could also open up .rlcp files
| | 11:31 |
which are SpeedGrade project files and I
made this one with the help of Adobe Premier.
| | 11:38 |
So in Premiere I have my video here that
I'm working on, my edit.
| | 11:44 |
I can choose File > Send to Adobe
SpeedGrade, it takes a little bit to
| | 11:48 |
render, and then it creates this project
file.
| | 11:53 |
So then I can open this up, in SpeedGrade
and then all of my edits come in to the
| | 11:58 |
timeline just as they were in Premiere
for further grading.
| | 12:05 |
Even my audio clip, that's what this
green bar is and if I want to disable the
| | 12:09 |
audio I can just click the little speaker
icon.
| | 12:13 |
And I could click on one of these clips,
go down to the loop panel and make
| | 12:17 |
adjustments as before.
I'll drag the mid-tones down to blue just so.
| | 12:23 |
There is an obvious difference here maybe
take the highlights to yellow and give it
| | 12:28 |
creepy look for some reason a maximize
that.
| | 12:32 |
And there we have a little grade from the
clips that we had in Premiere which is
| | 12:36 |
great and again I can still use those.
Grading layers and apply a color grade to
| | 12:42 |
multiple clips at once, easily using that
grading layer.
| | 12:47 |
And when it's all done and time to output
our files.
| | 12:50 |
We go to the Output tab in the upper
right hand side of the screen.
| | 12:54 |
And outputting here is very simple, we
just click folder here, under the folder
| | 12:57 |
we click a destination, we click a file
name, which is important, we need to do that.
| | 13:03 |
I'm just going to say test but we need to
have a filename or else we cannot render
| | 13:06 |
it and we choose a format.
We have some really professional formats here.
| | 13:11 |
I'll just say DPX and we can choose
whether we want to do it offline, which
| | 13:14 |
if we've done a first light we might want
to do a lower quality offline render.
| | 13:21 |
Or we could do the final finishing after
we've done editing and we want to do the
| | 13:25 |
color grade, and this is like our last
hurrah, last edit.
| | 13:29 |
We would select Online Quality, and then
we're all done, click Render.
| | 13:33 |
And that's the intro to Adobe SpeedGrade,
this incredible application that is so
| | 13:38 |
full-featured and a really welcome
addition to the Adobe post-production family.
| | 13:44 |
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| The difference color correction makes| 00:02 |
Throughout the course of this training,
we're going to see the difference that
| | 00:05 |
Color Correction makes.
Color Correction has just become a
| | 00:09 |
standard part of the cinema workflow, of
the digital video workflow all across the
| | 00:14 |
board, it's just so important.
Take for example, this footage, I don't
| | 00:19 |
even know if you can tell on your screen
what this is, it's mostly just gray.
| | 00:24 |
But through a couple quick tweaks in
SpeedGrade, we can turn it into this.
| | 00:29 |
Something that's actually usable and
looks pretty cool.
| | 00:34 |
But more than just salvaging shots, Color
Correction, Color Grading can add style
| | 00:39 |
and personality.
This is the shot originally as shot, it's
| | 00:43 |
distracting, there was a bunch of junk
around.
| | 00:46 |
And also, it's supposed to be from a
horror movie, and it doesn't seem that
| | 00:49 |
dramatic if you're just to see a still
frame from it.
| | 00:52 |
But with SpeedGrade, we can darken the
right spots, change the color around, and
| | 00:57 |
now any still frame of this, you could
tell that this is from a scary movie.
| | 01:03 |
Another thing that color grading can do,
is do all kinds of stuff like change the
| | 01:07 |
time of day that something was shot.
So, this looks like it was shot at sunset
| | 01:14 |
for example, but it was not.
It was shot early afternoon and it was a
| | 01:20 |
super hazy day, but with some tweaks in
SpeedGrade, that clip becomes a sunset clip.
| | 01:29 |
So, you could see the power of color
adjustment, also called Color Grading.
| | 01:35 |
And we could really tell a different
story when we play with the colors of our
| | 01:40 |
image, and that is what SpeedGrade offers
to us.
| | 01:44 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The story of SpeedGrade| 00:02 |
If you are familiar with other Adobe
video applications, Encore, Premier,
| | 00:05 |
After Effects, so on so forth.
You'll notice that they really pride
| | 00:09 |
themselves on having a common interface.
And that way, when you go from
| | 00:13 |
application to application, say from
Premier to After Effects or vice versa,
| | 00:17 |
that you feel comfortable, that you know
how things work.
| | 00:21 |
Well, when jumping into SpeedGrade it
might be a little confusing because
| | 00:24 |
things don't typically work like an Adobe
program.
| | 00:27 |
The shortcuts are different and all that
kind of thing.
| | 00:30 |
Well, it's good to be aware that this is
not a native Adobe application.
| | 00:36 |
SpeedGrade was made by a company called
IRIDAS.
| | 00:38 |
And Adobe bought SpeedGrade from IRIDAS.
And so, this is a fairly new thing that
| | 00:45 |
has happened.
And so currently, SpeedGrade does not
| | 00:49 |
look like an Adobe app as of yet.
I'm sure it will down the road.
| | 00:55 |
But just be aware of that as you're going
forward, that this is an Adobe tool, but
| | 00:58 |
it is a new Adobe tool.
So it's not going to work and feel and
| | 01:01 |
look just like an Adobe tool at this
point.
| | 01:03 |
The upside of that is that SpeedGrade is
already a really great application.
| | 01:08 |
And once Adobe gets their hands in it a
little bit and starts melding it into the
| | 01:13 |
suite in future releases, it's going to be
an even better application.
| | 01:18 |
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|
|
2. Exploring the BasicsUnderstanding the interface| 00:02 |
In this tutorial, we're going to take a
look at the interface in SpeedGrade.
| | 00:06 |
If you're used to Adobe applications, you
know that the interface is pretty standard.
| | 00:10 |
Even from Photoshop to something like
Premiere, the interface is similar enough
| | 00:14 |
that you can kind of tell what's going
on.
| | 00:18 |
But SpeedGrade, being a newly acquired
app, is a little inconsistent with that,
| | 00:21 |
and maybe a little foreign to get used
to.
| | 00:25 |
So, we're just going to look at the
interface here.
| | 00:27 |
And when you first start out, you're
presented with a Browser View, and this
| | 00:31 |
is called the Desktop.
And everything above this line here,
| | 00:35 |
actually above this little navigation
timeline is that little Desktop View
| | 00:39 |
that's used for browsing for files.
Now, I have here this folder called
| | 00:45 |
Scarlet Test.
You won't have this cuz this is a huge
| | 00:48 |
folder, many, many gigabytes.
So, you won't have this, so feel free to
| | 00:53 |
use any footage you have on your computer
in lieu of this.
| | 00:57 |
But I want to show you what it looks
like on my computer, cuz basically this
| | 01:01 |
is footage from a red scarlet camera.
And in order to get the actual video
| | 01:06 |
files, we have to go inside this Scarlet
Test folder.
| | 01:09 |
And inside my Organizational folders that
I've created, and then there's this RDC folder.
| | 01:15 |
And then, here is this R3D video file.
So it's in a folder, that's in a folder,
| | 01:21 |
that's in this main folder.
And so, I'm not seeing anything in the
| | 01:25 |
root directory of Scarlet Test.
But what I can do is go over here to this
| | 01:29 |
drop down that says Sequences from
selected folder.
| | 01:33 |
And I can change this to sequences from
folder and subtree.
| | 01:37 |
And as you can see here, it's going to
scan, and it's found 249 files, and here
| | 01:42 |
are all of the video files that are
within the folders here in this main folder.
| | 01:50 |
So, it's kind of doing all the work to
dig through these folders for me, which
| | 01:53 |
is really cool.
And I can change the thumbnail size by
| | 01:56 |
Clicking and Dragging here.
I can also change my Navigation area from
| | 02:01 |
one of these buttons here.
So in other words, here's the Assets drive.
| | 02:06 |
And if I click this arrow, I'm seeing
everything in the Assets drive.
| | 02:09 |
Click this arrow, and I'm seeing
everything in the Scarlet Test folder.
| | 02:12 |
So, there's that.
It's a really convenient way to kind of
| | 02:16 |
browse files and look for stuff.
And this works for other files, images,
| | 02:20 |
and whatnot as well.
Now, I'm going to add one of these clips
| | 02:23 |
to the timeline.
We can do that by double-clicking it, or
| | 02:26 |
clicking the little Plus icon here.
As you can see, it adds in the timeline.
| | 02:29 |
But we're still looking in our Browser
View in our Desktop.
| | 02:32 |
And the reason why is so that we can keep
adding footage, and keep adding to the timeline.
| | 02:37 |
But I want to actually remove this
Desktop View and get to the Monitor View,
| | 02:40 |
which we can do by clicking on this tab
up here.
| | 02:43 |
The Monitor tab in the upper left-hand
corner of the screen.
| | 02:46 |
Or we could press the letter D on our
keyboard.
| | 02:48 |
At any point, we could go back to the
Desktop View and add more footage, and
| | 02:52 |
back to the Monitor View and so on.
So, that's basically what that view looks like.
| | 02:58 |
And now we're in the Monitor View, we
could actually get to work.
| | 03:02 |
So here in the middle section of the
interface, we have our navigation controls.
| | 03:06 |
So, we can play and pause.
Play here, and pause.
| | 03:11 |
And we could also scrub in time with the
little playhead here.
| | 03:17 |
And this little bar represents our
footage and it's length.
| | 03:21 |
And we also have some controls here for
changing the way we're seeing our footage.
| | 03:25 |
So I can click this button for example,
to make it fit and see the entire clip.
| | 03:29 |
And I also have some scopes, if I wanted
to use those.
| | 03:33 |
And I'm just going to go ahead and turns
those off.
| | 03:36 |
So, this area is basically for navigating
your timeline and your various video files.
| | 03:42 |
And then below that, we have the actual
work.
| | 03:45 |
And most of the stuff you're going to be
doing takes place here within these tabs.
| | 03:48 |
Specifically, the Look tab is where
you're going to get most of your Grading controls.
| | 03:53 |
There are of course, other tabs for other
functions such as Masking or whatever.
| | 03:57 |
But most of the time, you're in
SpeedGrade, you're here to do color
| | 03:59 |
correction and that takes place in the
Look tab here.
| | 04:02 |
So again, you'll probably spend most of
your time here.
| | 04:06 |
And also, it's good to point out at the
upper right-hand corner, we have the
| | 04:09 |
Output tab.
So, if you're going to output something
| | 04:12 |
from SpeedGrade to somewhere else, you
use the Output tab.
| | 04:15 |
And we also have the Settings tab for our
preferences.
| | 04:18 |
And then to get rid of this, I just go
back to the Monitor tab, and there's my footage.
| | 04:24 |
So, I hope this little tour of the
interface was helpful for you.
| | 04:26 |
I find that I'm always a lot more
comfortable working in an environment
| | 04:29 |
that I know a little something about.
So, I'm kind of oriented and know where things are.
| | 04:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the workflow| 00:02 |
We're now going to look a little bit at
the workflow with SpeedGrade.
| | 00:04 |
And by that, I mean two different things.
We're going to look a little bit at the
| | 00:08 |
workflow within SpeedGrade itself, and
we're also going to look at the workflow
| | 00:12 |
where SpeedGrade might fit in, in your
overall video workflow.
| | 00:18 |
So, we've talked about before, we can
import footage from the Desktop View.
| | 00:24 |
And then, we work on it and we grade it
and we work our magic on it.
| | 00:30 |
And then, we go to Output.
And then, we set up our output settings,
| | 00:36 |
and then we render the output from
SpeedGrade.
| | 00:40 |
So, that's as simple as it gets when it
comes to working within SpeedGrade as far
| | 00:44 |
as the workflow in the application goes.
Now, when you do color grading, there's
| | 00:49 |
pretty much two places in the pipeline
you do color grading.
| | 00:54 |
When you first bring in footage into
SpeedGrade, you can do a Basic Color Correction.
| | 01:00 |
This is called a First Light Color
Correction.
| | 01:02 |
And the reason why we do that is because
sometimes when we have producers working
| | 01:06 |
over our shoulders, they don't get that
it's good to shoot flat.
| | 01:11 |
It's good to have a lack of contrast when
you're shooting.
| | 01:15 |
And film is like this as well.
You don't want the highlights to be super
| | 01:17 |
bright and the shadows to be super dark.
Kind of like this image already is in
| | 01:21 |
this case.
But we perform a light color correction,
| | 01:24 |
maybe a little bit of contrast, just so
the footage looks kind of palatable.
| | 01:29 |
So that that way, as you're editing and
you have people again, producers probably
| | 01:33 |
looking over your shoulder.
That it's kind of already had a little
| | 01:38 |
bit of a color correction applied to it.
And then, when we're done editing, then
| | 01:43 |
we also do a final color grading.
And that's when we apply our specialized
| | 01:48 |
looks and add vibe and feeling through
the color changes here with SpeedGrade.
| | 01:53 |
So, we can do that by bringing in project
files like EDL's or SpeedGrade project
| | 01:58 |
files exported from Premiere, for
example.
| | 02:02 |
And then, we finish from SpeedGrade, so
this is a finishing application.
| | 02:07 |
This is the final step before sending it
to the client.
| | 02:12 |
So, we wouldn't want to edit and then
bring it back into SpeedGrade and then
| | 02:15 |
finish somewhere else.
We probably do all of our visual effects,
| | 02:19 |
and everything in After Effects and
Premiere, and then bring it here into
| | 02:23 |
SpeedGrade and finish the color grade and
finish everything else.
| | 02:27 |
Put the finishing touches on from
SpeedGrade.
| | 02:29 |
So, SpeedGrade is kind of like your last
line of defense before sending the
| | 02:33 |
project on and out for delivery.
And so, those are the best practices for
| | 02:38 |
the workflow both within the application,
and also where SpeedGrade might fit in to
| | 02:43 |
your pipeline as well.
| | 02:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing footage and opening files| 00:02 |
We're now going to look at importing
footage and opening projects up.
| | 00:06 |
So I'm going to navigate to the project
files on my desktop here on the left hand side.
| | 00:11 |
And I want to make sure that I change
this from sequences from selected folder,
| | 00:15 |
the default, to sequences from folder and
subtree, so I can see all of the footage
| | 00:19 |
In the project file.
Now I'm keeping these kind of clear right
| | 00:23 |
now just so we're seeing this one clip,
but you'll see many more images and
| | 00:25 |
thumbnails than this because all of the
project files will still be in there, but
| | 00:26 |
I'm going to go ahead and click on this.
You want to make sure that Show
| | 00:31 |
Thumbnails is highlighted.
If it's gray you won't be able to see it,
| | 00:39 |
click it.
It turns blue, you can see it.
| | 00:43 |
So going to go ahead and click this Plus
icon.
| | 00:45 |
Or I could double-click the clip and that
adds it to my timeline.
| | 00:49 |
And it's imported.
If we had multiple clips here we could
| | 00:52 |
add those as well.
And they would come in the timeline after
| | 00:55 |
this clip.
Directly after so no gaps.
| | 00:58 |
You don't have to worry about that.
Now, another thing that we can do in
| | 01:01 |
SpeedGrade, is open up project files.
So I can click this little icon here in
| | 01:06 |
the upper left hand corner, and this
allows me to open, or in other words
| | 01:10 |
load, a previous session or project file.
The native file format for SpeedGrade
| | 01:17 |
project, is ircp.ircp.
And that's where you save your work.
| | 01:21 |
And I can open up a previous project file
by clicking this button like I did.
| | 01:27 |
And SpeedGrade refers to this as a
composition file, but if I click this
| | 01:30 |
drop down, you'll see that I can also
choose to load an EDL Conform file.
| | 01:35 |
So if you have an EDL, you could also
bring that into SpeedGrade.
| | 01:39 |
So whatever NLE you're using, you can
export EDL, SpeedGrade can then open up,
| | 01:42 |
and all of your project files.
You can see down here we've got some
| | 01:46 |
dissolves and whatnot.
All that will be in tact.
| | 01:51 |
If we go over to the monitor tab, you
could see that my footage is not there.
| | 01:56 |
And the reason why it's not there is
because the play head, for some reason,
| | 01:59 |
is not there.
So we have to click somewhere, create our
| | 02:03 |
play head, and there is our beautiful
footage.
| | 02:07 |
So that is how to input footage and open
projects in SpeedGrade.
| | 02:12 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Playing back assets| 00:02 |
In this tutorial, we're going to look at
how to playback your footage.
| | 00:05 |
We're also, how to playback your footage
in the best possible way.
| | 00:09 |
Now, the first thing I want to do here is
re-size this.
| | 00:12 |
I'm not using most of my screen real
estate here, that's bad news.
| | 00:16 |
So, what I want to do is grab this little
bar here and shrink this down so I get
| | 00:20 |
more of my useable interface.
And then, I want to go ahead and click
| | 00:25 |
this button, which is going to maximize
the space.
| | 00:29 |
So, now that I'm looking more of my image
and less at this blank, gray space here.
| | 00:35 |
So we can drag our Playhead.
And we can also click to just have it
| | 00:39 |
snap in time, if we want to do that.
We could also use the Space Bar to play
| | 00:44 |
the footage and then stop it again.
We could also use the industry standard
| | 00:50 |
shortcuts J, K, L.
So, I use J to play backwards, and K to
| | 00:54 |
stop, L to play forwards and again K to
stop.
| | 00:58 |
And if I press L once, it goes one speed.
If I press L again, it goes a little bit faster.
| | 01:04 |
And then I can press K to stop it.
Same thing with backwards.
| | 01:07 |
If I press J twice, it's going to go
backwards faster than if I just pressed
| | 01:11 |
it once, and again K to stop it.
I could also use the Arrow keys.
| | 01:16 |
Up plays forward, and Down plays
backwards.
| | 01:19 |
And the Right Arrow key will advance one
frame at a time and the Left Arrow key
| | 01:22 |
will go backwards one frame at a time.
Now, this never stops amazing me,
| | 01:28 |
completely blowing my mind that this is
3K raw footage.
| | 01:33 |
16 bit raw footage, and it's playing back
at real time.
| | 01:36 |
It's a really short clip because it's
really big.
| | 01:39 |
But it's playing back in real time.
It blows my mind.
| | 01:44 |
And one of the reasons why it's doing
that is because I've reduced the quality
| | 01:47 |
in the settings.
Ad if you're working with really big
| | 01:51 |
files like this, I highly recommend doing
this.
| | 01:54 |
I go up to the Settings tab up here in
the upper right-hand corner.
| | 01:56 |
Then you go to Dynamic Quality in the
options on the left-hand side.
| | 02:01 |
And you can choose the quality at which
it will playback here, or you could
| | 02:05 |
change the Pause Resolution also.
So, I like to keep this set at one
| | 02:10 |
quarter resolution, and I could take this
down even farther if I'm having a bigger problem.
| | 02:17 |
If you're working with Epic footage
that's 5K or even bigger in the future
| | 02:20 |
you might want to take this all the way
down to 1 8th.
| | 02:25 |
But I find that if even just one quarter
resolution, this footage just plays back
| | 02:29 |
unbelievably well.
Even after grading, applying some color
| | 02:34 |
grading, it still plays back incredibly
fast and smooth.
| | 02:38 |
Again, Playback, one of the great
features of Adobe SpeedGrade.
| | 02:42 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Saving projects| 00:02 |
This way we are going to look at how to
save your work, save projects from SpeedGrade.
| | 00:07 |
Know that this is different then actually
rendering from SpeedGrade.
| | 00:11 |
When we render from SpeedGrade, we create
a movie file.
| | 00:15 |
But we lose all of our work.
That's not going to be in the movie files.
| | 00:19 |
So if you're adjusting all of the stuff
and you want to save your grade, your
| | 00:23 |
color grade that you want to save your
masking and other things that you do to
| | 00:26 |
your clips here in SpeedGrade, you just
save the project.
| | 00:31 |
You can do that by clicking this little
icon up here to save your .ircp file.
| | 00:35 |
That's the native SpeedGrade project
file.
| | 00:39 |
Or any Timeline tab at the bottom, you
come to the setup area and you could
| | 00:43 |
click the Save IRCP button and you could
also export an EDL from SpeedGrade.
| | 00:49 |
If you wanted to take your work in
SpeedGrade if you have an edit going on,
| | 00:53 |
you want to take this to another program
for some reason, you could also save an EDL.
| | 01:00 |
So again the IRCP, not necessarily the
EDL, but the IRCP is going to save all of
| | 01:03 |
your grading work, your masks and all the
work that you're doing here so it's
| | 01:07 |
intact, you can keep working on the
project.
| | 01:11 |
I should also point out that SpeedGrade
is unlike most other Adobe applications
| | 01:14 |
actually, where if you close the program
when you open it the next time all of
| | 01:18 |
your work is going to be intact, it's
going to be just the way that you left it.
| | 01:24 |
It's going to assume that you're working on
one big project and it will already be
| | 01:28 |
there for you.
But just to be safe you might still want
| | 01:32 |
to save that .IRCP file just to make sure
that your work isn't backed up.
| | 01:37 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering from SpeedGrade| 00:02 |
So, I've performed a basic color grade on
this footage, here's the before and
| | 00:06 |
there's the after.
Nothing too amazing, but just a little something.
| | 00:11 |
And now I'm ready to render this.
So to do that, I go up to the Output tab
| | 00:14 |
in the upper right-hand corner of the
screen.
| | 00:17 |
Go ahead and click on Output there.
And here are our Output options.
| | 00:21 |
Now, as we looked at, we have two
different options here.
| | 00:25 |
We can grade in the beginning, and that's
called the First Light Color Correction.
| | 00:30 |
In which case, we might want to render
what's called an offline edit.
| | 00:35 |
So, a low quality, fast rendering, proxy
version of this file.
| | 00:40 |
And then later, we can reconnect after
we've edited with this really fast footage.
| | 00:45 |
We can reconnect to our really high
quality imagery and better quality
| | 00:49 |
footage, or if this is our final edit.
Then we might want to render the online
| | 00:54 |
quality, a much higher quality, slower to
render, bigger files, and all of that
| | 00:57 |
kind of stuff but in much higher quality.
Now, we choose at the top, where we see
| | 01:04 |
folder and desktop here, we choose where
we want to save our footage.
| | 01:09 |
So, we have basically our desktop here
which gives us access to all of our files
| | 01:13 |
and directories, and we can choose where
to save it there.
| | 01:17 |
We obviously have to name it, or we won't
be able to render it.
| | 01:20 |
But the real key here is that we want to
change the format in the options.
| | 01:25 |
We want to change a setting here.
We have some really high quality settings
| | 01:29 |
here but not too many options.
So, what we can do is click on the other
| | 01:34 |
button and we actually can go to
QuickTime.
| | 01:38 |
And it choose the different flavors or
Codecs of QuickTime we want to save to
| | 01:43 |
everything from photo JPEG.
Even H264 animation is a common one and
| | 01:48 |
other flavors of pro res as well.
Of course, we can set our audio settings,
| | 01:54 |
video settings, and other, more specific
settings here.
| | 01:58 |
And also, we can create a frame sequence
if that's how we're choosing to output,
| | 02:03 |
say for exporting a DPX sequence or a
target sequence.
| | 02:10 |
Then we can adjust those settings by
clicking that button there.
| | 02:14 |
If you needed to burn in time code, you
can choose that from this drop down here.
| | 02:18 |
And when you're finally ready to render
and you've set everything that you need
| | 02:22 |
to set, you go ahead and click the Render
button, and you're ready to go.
| | 02:26 |
And again, if you have no selected a
destination, and if you haven't chosen a
| | 02:30 |
file name, that button might be greyed
out.
| | 02:33 |
So, be aware of that.
But that is how you export or you render,
| | 02:38 |
from SpeedGrade, both as an offline edit
or as an offline file, or as a
| | 02:44 |
high-quality online file.
| | 02:49 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sending to SpeedGrade from Premiere Pro| 00:02 |
There's some great integration between
Adobe's Video Editor, Premiere Pro, and
| | 00:06 |
Adobe SpeedGrade.
I have here this very simple sequence,
| | 00:10 |
and there's a few clips here.
There's a cross resolve and there's a dip
| | 00:15 |
to white.
We're going to imagine this is a really
| | 00:18 |
huge sequence that's really complex.
The problem with grading this in another
| | 00:24 |
application is oftentimes we miss those
transitions and the cross dissolves.
| | 00:30 |
And it can be a mess.
When we're trying to color correct this
| | 00:34 |
in another application and we also want
to preserve all the different cuts that
| | 00:38 |
we have as well.
And sending to SpeedGrade from Premiere
| | 00:42 |
will do that.
So, the way we do that is go into the
| | 00:45 |
File menu and choosing Send to Adobe
SpeedGrade.
| | 00:49 |
This will create a DPX sequence.
Basically, DPX is an image format that's
| | 00:53 |
very high quality.
And because DPX files are so big, I
| | 00:56 |
didn't include this with the exercise
files.
| | 00:59 |
But you will have the center SpeedGrade
Premiere Project in the Chapter 2 folder
| | 01:03 |
of the Project files.
So, you can use this and create your own
| | 01:08 |
DPX sequence.
And once you do that, it will take a
| | 01:11 |
while, and then it will open up that
sequence in SpeedGrade.
| | 01:17 |
And so, here we have the same sequence
SpeedGrade from Premiere and there's an
| | 01:21 |
audio file.
There was actually no audio in the the
| | 01:25 |
last sequence, but if you do have audio
that will come in rendered in this green
| | 01:29 |
audio track here.
As you see, we have the same footage, we
| | 01:33 |
have our transitions as separate files,
here.
| | 01:37 |
And then, there's that clip and then
there's the transition where it dips to
| | 01:42 |
white and then the final clip.
And so now, we can grade this here in
| | 01:47 |
SpeedGrade, much easier because it was
sent to us from Premiere Pro.
| | 01:52 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Working with FootageAutomatically detecting scenes| 00:02 |
So I want to apply a color grade to this
footage.
| | 00:06 |
This clip here.
But this clip is actually made up of two
| | 00:09 |
different shots.
As you can see it's one clip, but there
| | 00:13 |
are two shots in that one clip.
And I actually want these to be two
| | 00:17 |
separate clips, so I can grade them
independently cuz I don't know if the
| | 00:21 |
same grade is going to look good on both
clips.
| | 00:24 |
So, there's a feature here in SpeedGrade
that's in the set up tab of the timeline
| | 00:29 |
tab here, and it's called Scene Change
Detect.
| | 00:34 |
Now, most video programs have a feature
like this, where they can go in and I
| | 00:37 |
shouldn't say most, but a lot of them
have this feature.
| | 00:40 |
Where you can go in and detect scenes
automatically.
| | 00:43 |
But SpeedGrade's version of this, is
actually much better than most that I've seen.
| | 00:50 |
It's really cool.
So I'm going to click Scene Change Detect,
| | 00:53 |
and it takes a few seconds.
And it scans the footage, and it comes
| | 00:57 |
with this little graph here.
And basically, this graph is the
| | 01:02 |
likelihood, its best guess of where it
thinks the new scene is going to be.
| | 01:10 |
And so, if you are on a frame when you
are selecting these, you're kind of click
| | 01:13 |
and drag though here.
And you can see that this corresponds to
| | 01:17 |
different time in the video.
As it gets to this blue line, this
| | 01:21 |
indicates where SpeedGrade thinks that a
cut is.
| | 01:26 |
And so there's a checkmark here that
says, this frame is a scene change.
| | 01:30 |
Well, if it guesses incorrectly, I could
uncheck this and force SpeedGrade to not
| | 01:35 |
have a scene change there.
I could also decrease the sensitivity or
| | 01:41 |
increase the sensitivity, if it's not
giving me what I want.
| | 01:46 |
I'm just going to go ahead and reset that by
clicking this little swatch here.
| | 01:49 |
But in actuality, SpeedGrade did an
amazing job of guessing where the next
| | 01:54 |
cut is.
So I'm going to go ahead and choose split in
| | 01:59 |
two clips.
And now, I have two clips, and I can
| | 02:05 |
grade them independently.
| | 02:10 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating multiple playheads| 00:02 |
So, I have this video clip here that I've
actually used Scene Change Detect to
| | 00:06 |
split into two separate clips.
I started doing some color correction on
| | 00:11 |
this one, and as I go to the next clip I
realize that these don't match up at all.
| | 00:17 |
And this is not a very efficient work
flow to just kind of grade one clip, and
| | 00:21 |
then move over and try to grade one clip
and keep going back and forth until they match.
| | 00:27 |
And not only that, but when you have a
more complex scene that you're working
| | 00:30 |
with or group of shots that you're
working with, they might be spread over a
| | 00:33 |
timeline and that can be really
inefficient to go back and forth.
| | 00:37 |
So SpeedGrade has a great feature that
allows you to create Multiple Playheads.
| | 00:44 |
Now if I click somewhere the Playhead
will just jump right there.
| | 00:49 |
I can also click and drag this little guy
on the right hand side, this little icon.
| | 00:55 |
And set this where I want in the
timeline.
| | 00:58 |
But if I hold my mouse over this little
icon on the right side of the Playhead,
| | 01:03 |
and hold the Cmd key on the Mac or the
Ctrl key on the PC, I can drag this and
| | 01:07 |
now that little check mark icon becomes a
green plus.
| | 01:14 |
This indicates that I'm creating a second
Playhead, and now I have a split screen
| | 01:18 |
where I can see both clips at the same
time.
| | 01:22 |
So, now I can select the clip on the
right.
| | 01:26 |
Go to Look and maybe make these, actually
the footage should go a little bit warmer
| | 01:32 |
I think.
Darken the shadows, brighten the gamma.
| | 01:37 |
And so on and so forth until we get these
clips matched up.
| | 01:42 |
Now, at any point I could, again create
another Playhead if I wanted to.
| | 01:47 |
I can hold Cmd or Ctrl on the PC and
create yet another one, if I wanted.
| | 01:52 |
It gets a little messy in this case.
So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to
| | 01:56 |
delete that by clicking and dragging this
little icon right here.
| | 01:59 |
And notice I accidentally clicked on this
one right here which is Play Stop icon
| | 02:03 |
and I don't want that.
I'm going to hold the Cmd key.
| | 02:07 |
And move this away.
And once I move this away you'll see that
| | 02:11 |
turns into a red X which actually throws
away that Playhead.
| | 02:15 |
And actually, you don't need to hold the
Cmd or Ctrl key when you're throwing it away.
| | 02:18 |
So, just grab that little icon and take
it away from the Playhead and delete it
| | 02:22 |
and you're back to square one.
By using Multiple Playheads, again, is a
| | 02:27 |
great way to check your work especially
when you are matching color between shots.
| | 02:32 |
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| Using multiple monitors| 00:00 |
You might have noticed, as I'm working
here in SpeedGrade, that this footage
| | 00:05 |
doesn't quite line up perfectly.
There's just not enough screen real
| | 00:10 |
estate here.
I can drag on this little divider here,
| | 00:13 |
but even then, it's just It's not
perfect.
| | 00:16 |
There's still a lot of this footage that
I'm not seeing on screen.
| | 00:20 |
And I'm not even using the sides of my
screen here.
| | 00:23 |
So I'm seeing 75% of the image.
I could take this down to maybe 50%.
| | 00:27 |
I could hit this button so that it fills
the space here, but again I'm only seeing
| | 00:30 |
half, and I've got a lot of wasted space
here.
| | 00:34 |
SpeedGrade really is designed to be used
with two separate monitors, two separate screens.
| | 00:41 |
So the way that we can change that if you
have two monitors set up is by going to
| | 00:44 |
the settings here.
And then in the categories of Preferences
| | 00:49 |
here we want to choose Display.
Then all you have to do is check Enable
| | 00:53 |
for Dual Display Output.
Now I could see in my right hand side
| | 00:58 |
here out of my corner of my eye that my
monitor just lit up.
| | 01:01 |
And now my image is over there.
So if I go over to monitor I'm not seeing
| | 01:04 |
anything but now my image is nice and
beautiful on this screen that you cannot
| | 01:08 |
see, because it's outside of this
training so that's why for this training,
| | 01:11 |
I'm not using that option.
But whenever I actually do work in
| | 01:17 |
SpeedGrade, it's not for training
purposes, then I'm absolutely using this option.
| | 01:23 |
So I'm going to deselect this, so that
you can actually see what I'm doing, but
| | 01:26 |
if you're doing your own work, and you're
fortunate to have two monitors I highly
| | 01:30 |
recommend working in this way.
Not only does it give you a much clearer
| | 01:36 |
image, as you can see everything full
size.
| | 01:39 |
But also allows you just kind of to
resize your interface and work with
| | 01:43 |
everything here on the left monitor and
then just see everything else on the
| | 01:47 |
right monitor.
Again, it's a clean way to work and it's
| | 01:52 |
kind of the way that SpeedGrade was
designed.
| | 01:54 |
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| Performing basic video edits| 00:00 |
SpeedGrade is definitely not built to be
a video editing application.
| | 00:03 |
You certainly wouldn't want to use it for
that, but sometimes you're in a pinch and
| | 00:07 |
sometimes you want to just make little
tweaks here and there and SpeedGrade has
| | 00:11 |
some tools to help you with that.
So I have two clips here, I have a scary
| | 00:16 |
self-rocking chair.
Pay no attention to the fishing line
| | 00:21 |
pulling it in the back there, and then we
also a little nightmare sequence where
| | 00:25 |
our heroine is running away and things
are scary.
| | 00:29 |
But this rocking chair thing goes on way
too long, so I want to trim it.
| | 00:33 |
So what I can do, is grab one of the
corners here, and you'll see this
| | 00:37 |
double-sided arrows like a Chevron, and I
can click and drag this.
| | 00:42 |
And that trims the clip.
Now this does create a gap, so we can
| | 00:47 |
just click and move our second clip over
and, it doesn't really snap or anything,
| | 00:53 |
but it kind of stops.
It won't let you overlay the clips.
| | 00:59 |
So, now our two clips are set.
Now we could also trim some off the
| | 01:03 |
beginning of the second clip.
As I click and drag that, you'll see that
| | 01:07 |
we have trimmed the clip.
And then we would click and drag and move
| | 01:12 |
the clip and put it back where it goes
there.
| | 01:15 |
Now, what we could also do, is we can
grab this icon here, similar to the icon
| | 01:20 |
in the play head.
We could click and drag this icon and
| | 01:25 |
move this up and simply get rid of clips
that way, as well.
| | 01:31 |
And if we click somewhere with our play
head, we could see there our footage is
| | 01:35 |
still here and again, we can trim this if
we want to.
| | 01:40 |
So basically, we can trim clips from the
beginning and end of clips, we can click
| | 01:43 |
and move them in the timeline, and we
could also remove them completely from
| | 01:47 |
the timeline, while still keeping the
rest of the timeline in tact.
| | 01:52 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Deleting timelines| 00:00 |
SpeedGrade has a really interesting and
kind of quirky feature, and some of you may
| | 00:04 |
love it, and some of you may hate it.
Basically, let me show you how that works here.
| | 00:11 |
I have two clips, I have a little project
I'm working on, and if I quit SpeedGrade
| | 00:16 |
and then I relaunch SpeedGrade.
That was fast.
| | 00:23 |
I'm here in the Desktop view, so it looks
like I'm just browsing files, but if I go
| | 00:26 |
back over to my monitor here, you could
see that we have that same exact project
| | 00:30 |
reloaded for us automatically.
So we didn't have to do it, we didn't
| | 00:35 |
have to save anything necessarily, we
didn't have to open anything when we got
| | 00:38 |
into SpeedGrade.
It just carries right on through, so it
| | 00:41 |
picks up right where you left off.
Now again, for some of you, that might be
| | 00:46 |
a great feature.
For some of you, that might be really
| | 00:48 |
annoying, but regardless, for everybody
at some point, you're going to want to stop
| | 00:51 |
working on this current project and get
rid of this stuff in this timeline and
| | 00:54 |
start from scratch.
So the way that you do that, is come all
| | 00:58 |
the way over here to the right-hand side
of the interface.
| | 01:01 |
There's a tiny little x here on the
right-hand side of the timeline.
| | 01:05 |
Click x, and it'll say, do you really
want to delete the timeline?
| | 01:09 |
And then we click Yes to confirm that,
that clears the timeline, we get the
| | 01:13 |
SpeedGrade icon here, we can go back to
our desktop and choose some more files to
| | 01:17 |
work with.
| | 01:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Managing large R3D and ARRI Alexa files| 00:02 |
Most video files these day are 2K, maybe
1080P, HD or smaller.
| | 00:08 |
But occasionally now, we're having more
and more formats become larger than that,
| | 00:13 |
such as the Arri Alexa or with RED
formats.
| | 00:17 |
So, I have here this clip, shot with a
RED Scarlet camera, and its 4k, so the
| | 00:22 |
pixel dimensions are 4096 pixels by 2160
pixels.
| | 00:28 |
So, I'm going to add this to my timeline,
you'll find this in the RED Footage
| | 00:31 |
Folder of the Media Folder of the Project
Files.
| | 00:34 |
And I want to show you some special
issues that you might encounter when
| | 00:37 |
you're dealing with Alexa files or Red
files.
| | 00:40 |
And actually some really great tools that
SpeedGrade has to work with those.
| | 00:44 |
I'm going to go back over to my monitor and
here we have this footage.
| | 00:49 |
Now occasionally, it will freak out, cuz
what it's doing is it's getting
| | 00:53 |
information from the RMD file.
Now in the RMD is kind of like a sidecar
| | 00:59 |
file that comes along with some RED
files.
| | 01:03 |
So, I did an initial grade of this
footage in RedCine X it's a free color
| | 01:08 |
grading program that you can get from the
red.com website.
| | 01:13 |
I prefer SpeedGrade, but It does good for
creating RedCine X, is good for creating
| | 01:18 |
kind of like a preliminary grade.
And using RedCine X, I created this RMD
| | 01:23 |
file, which is basically kind of like a
Metadata file that tells programs that
| | 01:27 |
read the R3D files how to read them.
And so it's created this kind of look.
| | 01:34 |
And so SpeedGrade has been able to
understand the RMD file.
| | 01:39 |
So, if I were to go back to the RedCine
X, and change the RMD, or if I were to
| | 01:42 |
delete this RMD then this file would look
much different than it looks now.
| | 01:48 |
This is a really flat, washed out file
originally, so SpeedGrade is able to read
| | 01:51 |
those RMD files which is pretty cool.
Now another thing that you'll notice is
| | 01:57 |
this file is just massive.
It's huge, and so we're only seeing 25%
| | 02:01 |
of it.
We could hit this Maximize button, or
| | 02:03 |
Zoom to Fit, excuse me, and see there's
even more that we're not seeing.
| | 02:08 |
I can also see this at 100%, and this is
the image at 100 %, it's massive.
| | 02:16 |
So, what I'm going to do is go over to my
settings, and in the left hand side here
| | 02:20 |
under Options, I'm going to click on
Dynamic Quality.
| | 02:25 |
And here we can adjust the playback
quality of our footage.
| | 02:29 |
And for really big files, like Arri Alexa
files or RED epic or Scarlet files, you
| | 02:34 |
might want take this down to a quarter of
the quality.
| | 02:39 |
I want to make it play back much faster,
or even 1 8th of the quality.
| | 02:43 |
On my system, I don't really need to go
down to 1 8th, one quarter does the trick.
| | 02:48 |
But be aware that this is there, because
that really does help playback.
| | 02:53 |
And once you break it down to a quarter
resolution, then things go remarkably fast.
| | 02:58 |
So, as you can see I play this back and
even though it's stuttering trying to
| | 03:02 |
read the RMD file, the playback is
incredible, very very smooth.
| | 03:07 |
So, I might take this down to 50%, so I
could see more of the footage and I'm
| | 03:11 |
actually holding down my Middle Mouse
button to move this footage.
| | 03:16 |
It's not actually moving the footage
technically, it's just changing my view
| | 03:20 |
of the footage.
So, it's not actually changing anything anyway.
| | 03:23 |
So, again that's holding down the Middle
Mouse button, as being able to get that
| | 03:26 |
functionality to kind of pan this around a
little bit.
| | 03:29 |
So, another thing I want to draw your
attention to, is if I go to the Timeline
| | 03:32 |
Tab down here at the bottom.
And then go over to Format Defaults, I
| | 03:36 |
can change the format from the default
Alexa, if I'm not using Alexa footage,
| | 03:40 |
which I'm not, but you could use Alexa
stuff here.
| | 03:44 |
Change this to R3D, and what I could do
is I could chose to use the settings
| | 03:48 |
stored in each clip.
There might be like an override timeline
| | 03:52 |
default here, which you might need to
check to get this drop down active.
| | 03:56 |
But then I could choose to use the
settings stored in this clip which
| | 03:58 |
basically means to use the RMD file.
Or I could use the settings below, and
| | 04:03 |
that will allow me to adjust all these
different settings.
| | 04:07 |
And I'm clicking, raise this up here so I
can see this.
| | 04:09 |
And you'll see that I have a lot of the
same options that I do in RedCine X.
| | 04:13 |
I have control over the white balance,
which is what you do with post, with this
| | 04:16 |
footage, it's part of the metadata, it's
not embedded into the footage like it is
| | 04:20 |
with most formats because it's shooting
raw.
| | 04:23 |
I adjust the brightness, the ISO, which
again is also metadata, not burned into
| | 04:28 |
the footage, and some basic curve
features.
| | 04:31 |
There's the gamma space and the color
space, as well, RED Gamma 3 and Red Color
| | 04:36 |
3 came out right before SpeedGrade
launch.
| | 04:40 |
So, I'm sure we'll see that in an update
sooner rather than later.
| | 04:45 |
But we do have a lot of options here when
playing with RED and Alexa footage.
| | 04:49 |
So, keep that in mind that these tools
are here for you to better fulfill your
| | 04:53 |
needs if you're working, with that type
of footage.
| | 04:56 |
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|
|
4. Grading BasicsPerforming a basic color grade| 00:02 |
All right in this tutorial we're just going
jump right in to SpeedGrade and perform a
| | 00:06 |
basic color grade.
Now here we have this footage shot with
| | 00:11 |
the Red Scarlet.
And one of the great things about this
| | 00:14 |
camera is its dynamic range.
And it shoots really flat, so that it
| | 00:18 |
washes out the shadows and washes out the
highlights.
| | 00:24 |
Which allows you to come back here and
post and makes these things pop.
| | 00:28 |
So, the first thing I want to do is
actually look at my scopes.
| | 00:31 |
And there are three scopes, and we can
access them here in SpeedGrade.
| | 00:35 |
We have a Vectorscope, and I can click
this to turn it off again.
| | 00:40 |
We have a wave four monitor, and actually
we might want to click and expand this here.
| | 00:45 |
We also have these little arrows that
make them jump to either side, again
| | 00:49 |
that's up here.
I could also click the little x to delete this.
| | 00:53 |
In this case, I'm going to use the
Histogram which is right here, the third
| | 00:57 |
over from the left.
And I'm going to expand that just a little
| | 01:01 |
bit, and now we can really see what's
going on with our image.
| | 01:05 |
And here we have a lot of gaps in our
highlights, and a lot of gaps in our
| | 01:08 |
shadows again, because this is a very
flat image.
| | 01:12 |
So we're going to do some great stuff here
as far as color correction goes.
| | 01:16 |
We're not going to make it perfect, but it's
just kind of to get started.
| | 01:19 |
Now I want to come down here to these
tabs, and I want to go over to the Look tab.
| | 01:23 |
This is where our Color Correction tools
are, I want to make sure I'm on the
| | 01:28 |
Overall tab right now.
I'm going to just expand this just a
| | 01:32 |
little bit, so I can see all of my color
wheels.
| | 01:34 |
And the first thing I want to do is set my
shadows, I'm going to do that with the
| | 01:39 |
Offset Parameter.
Now essentially with this little gizmo
| | 01:43 |
here, there are two controls.
We can Click in the center, and we can
| | 01:47 |
adjust, click and drag around to adjust
the color.
| | 01:51 |
It's very subtle, so you have to move it
quite a bit to make any difference.
| | 01:55 |
You can tell that you've made a
difference when you see this little tab here.
| | 01:58 |
I just want to reset that color change,
so I'm going to click that, and again
| | 02:02 |
that resets it.
If I click here, and then I use my middle
| | 02:06 |
mouse wheel, I can make this little icon,
right up here, go around, which actually
| | 02:12 |
darkens and brightens the offset.
In this case, what that's doing, it's
| | 02:18 |
offsetting the entire Histogram, and this
is what I'm going to use to control my shadows.
| | 02:23 |
So, if you're new to this offset gamma
gain, you can kind of think of it, for
| | 02:26 |
like of a better term, like shadows,
midtones and highlights.
| | 02:30 |
That's not exactly how it is, but that's
typically what we do adjust shadows,
| | 02:33 |
midtones and highlights.
So, that's what I can do, but I know that
| | 02:37 |
I'm not going to adjust the color right now.
And actually, I could click here to reset
| | 02:41 |
that, now click here to reset the
Luminance of the Offset.
| | 02:44 |
I'm just going to click this little triangle
directly, cause that'll get me lit, there
| | 02:48 |
a little bit faster.
And I'm going to drag this down until the
| | 02:52 |
bottom of this Histogram is at the second
to the last little line here.
| | 02:57 |
So, I'll keep going and going and going,
and it's right about there.
| | 03:02 |
If I get any negative values that means
I'm clipping the blacks which although
| | 03:05 |
okay, it's not something I'm going to do
just yet.
| | 03:09 |
And then we can go over next to our Gain,
and again this is the highlight.
| | 03:14 |
So, I'm going to expand the Gain until
the top of this Histogram comes the
| | 03:18 |
second to the top line here.
Here we don't want to blow anything out.
| | 03:23 |
If we do go to far, what's going to happen
see we went a little bit past the line
| | 03:27 |
there as far as brightening highlights
goes.
| | 03:31 |
Its very subtle we've actually posterized
some of these highlights up here becomes
| | 03:35 |
a hard edged ugly line as they blow out
to white, especially in this case that's
| | 03:39 |
not what I want.
I want to make sure that I don't go past,
| | 03:43 |
oops, let me click and drag that, come
on, come on.
| | 03:46 |
Here we go, and, there we have it.
So, now we have really nice several fall
| | 03:53 |
offs in the highlights.
Looking at the bright sky, everything
| | 03:57 |
looks great, so we have shadow detail,
and we also have highlight detail.
| | 04:01 |
But its still a little washed out, so now
I'm going to go to the midtones the gamma here.
| | 04:05 |
And click on this and drag to the left,
and that darkens the overall image.
| | 04:11 |
And now that we have a fairly good
average contrast setup here, we can go in
| | 04:16 |
and start applying some colors if we want
to.
| | 04:21 |
So say, let's say for example I want my
sky to be a little blue.
| | 04:24 |
So, I could click in this color wheel
here, and I'm going to drag the gain down,
| | 04:28 |
add a little bit of blue to the sky.
Again it's very subtle, and if you want
| | 04:34 |
to compare before and after, then you
could press 0 on the numeric keypad to
| | 04:39 |
show you before, and after.
So, that's how far we've come in just
| | 04:44 |
this little bit of work here.
As the original, and this is what it is now.
| | 04:48 |
I also want to add some maybe cyan to the
gamma, so there's a little bit more color
| | 04:53 |
overall, maybe some cyan or green to the
offset, we can keep playing with that.
| | 05:00 |
Now, you want to keep your eyes on the
Histogram, because in adding cyan and
| | 05:04 |
blue into the gain, we've actually blown
out some of those highlights again.
| | 05:09 |
So now we need to take down the Gain a
little bit and retrieve the detail in
| | 05:12 |
those highlights.
And that's kind of what's color correction
| | 05:16 |
is all about you kind of push pull back and
forth where you make one change and you
| | 05:19 |
have to go back and change other stuff
because of that change.
| | 05:23 |
And so you might want to back to more
shadows, and make sure those are, as dark
| | 05:27 |
as we need them to be and back and forth.
And if we want to go crazy actually you
| | 05:33 |
could take this little Gamma slider here
and drag this down.
| | 05:38 |
Actually to the left, darken that all the
way, so that you could really cool
| | 05:42 |
silhouette of the skyline there, all nice
and brooding and dark, looks fantastic.
| | 05:48 |
So, this is basically just a little intro
to what we can do in SpeedGrade.
| | 05:53 |
Again here's the before and there's the
after, again the power of Color Correction.
| | 05:59 |
This really doesn't tell any kind of a
story whatsoever, it's really washed out.
| | 06:03 |
And that tells a really foreboding
ominous story.
| | 06:08 |
And we could also again go to shadows,
midtones, and highlights them.
| | 06:12 |
We have these same controls, these same
parameters for each category of the
| | 06:15 |
shadows, midtones and highlights.
And we've just been working overall, just
| | 06:19 |
working with Offset Gamma and Gain.
And still we've been able to come up with
| | 06:23 |
this kind of cool Color Correction.
So, again, SpeedGrade incredibly powerful
| | 06:27 |
program, it's really easy to come here
and make a really big difference in your
| | 06:31 |
footage like this.
| | 06:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using a trackball| 00:02 |
Well you can use regular old mouse with
SpeedGrade.
| | 00:05 |
Most professional colorists choose to
grade using a control surface.
| | 00:10 |
Now these are really expensive.
They could be anywhere from $1500 to tens
| | 00:14 |
of thousands of dollars.
But a cheap little substitute is just a
| | 00:17 |
little trackball mouse.
And these can be $30.
| | 00:21 |
And what we could do with the trackball,
is come in here, let's go to the gamma,
| | 00:24 |
for example.
And I could click here, and with the
| | 00:27 |
trackball, I could just roll downwards
here.
| | 00:31 |
Or I could upwards, left, or right.
The benefit of this, is that if I know my
| | 00:38 |
color wheel, I could just look at the
screen and I don't have to necessarily
| | 00:42 |
keep my eye on the ball as I would with a
mouse.
| | 00:46 |
It's just a lot easier to get to the
colors that I need with a trackball, than
| | 00:50 |
it would be with a mouse.
And also the movements are a lot more subtle.
| | 00:56 |
There's it just feels like there's a lot
more control.
| | 00:57 |
And most of these little trackballs, even
this cheap $30 one that I'm using, has an
| | 01:01 |
outer ring.
And with this ring, I can control the contrast.
| | 01:06 |
So as you see here, I'm adjusting the
luminance, it's very subtle.
| | 01:11 |
You could see and my cursor right there.
Click here and again, I adjust that ring,
| | 01:16 |
that's very slowly but surely brightening
the gamma, and you can see the trees
| | 01:20 |
getting a little lighter, here.
Or again, I could go the opposite
| | 01:26 |
direction and darken those back down.
But again, very subtle, very controlled
| | 01:31 |
movements, and I don't have to look away
or look at these little knobs and
| | 01:35 |
controllers here, like I would with the
mouse, I just look at the screen and let
| | 01:39 |
my hands do the thinking for me.
So might be something that you're
| | 01:45 |
interested in getting, or of course, you
could level up to the super big
| | 01:48 |
guys,control surfaces for many thousands
of dollars if you want to go in that direction.
| | 01:53 |
But if you are used to using a mouse and
you're starting to get into color
| | 01:56 |
grading, you might want to check out just
one of those cheapy trackballs, just to
| | 01:59 |
get started.
| | 02:01 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting tones independently| 00:02 |
In addition to having separate and
independent brightness and color controls
| | 00:06 |
for each of the offset gamma and gain
parameters overall, we also have
| | 00:11 |
individual brightness and color controls
for offset Gamma and Gain for Shadows,
| | 00:16 |
and for Mid-tones and for Highlights.
These are all separate, so we basically
| | 00:24 |
have 12 different wheels of color, and 12
different brightness controls overall.
| | 00:30 |
So this can be a little overwhelming.
It's definitely a lot of power and
| | 00:33 |
control which is what you want.
But again, it can be intimidating initially.
| | 00:37 |
So what I might do is go over to shadows,
and by the way I should point out too,
| | 00:41 |
that you might be able to do everything
that you need in the overall area.
| | 00:45 |
So you don't get any bonus points for
going over as shadows, mid-tones and
| | 00:48 |
highlights, it does give you more control
but that's not necessarily something that
| | 00:51 |
you need to use all the time.
But I just wanted to show you how to do
| | 00:54 |
this so you're aware of it.
So offset basically shifts the entire
| | 01:00 |
shadows area here.
So I'm offsetting all of the shadows.
| | 01:06 |
And if you're wondering what constitutes
a shadow, I come over here to the grey
| | 01:10 |
out drop down and change this from None
to Color/Grey for example.
| | 01:15 |
And this shows me where on the Histogram
the Shadow controls are adjusting.
| | 01:21 |
Same thing with the Mid-tones and then
the Highlights.
| | 01:26 |
So we can see right there on the
Histogram, what we are doing in these
| | 01:30 |
different areas.
So if I know I want my shadows to be
| | 01:34 |
darker, I could take the Offset down.
And go all the way down to zero there,
| | 01:39 |
somewhere in that neck of the woods.
And then I could adjust the Gamma, but
| | 01:45 |
again, I'm only adjusting the Gamma of
the shadows, and also I could adjust the
| | 01:50 |
Gain, in other words, the brightest part
of the shadows, as well.
| | 01:58 |
So I'll take this back over to None.
And we're now a little bit too dark with
| | 02:03 |
our offset here.
So I might raise that back up just a tad.
| | 02:08 |
And we have some highlight problems.
Meaning that we have a big gap in the highlights.
| | 02:13 |
So I'm going to go over to highlights.
And I'll take the Gain of the highlights.
| | 02:18 |
Be a little bit brighter here, and that's
about where we want them.
| | 02:23 |
If we go too far, again, we're going to blow
out the highlights here and we don't
| | 02:26 |
want to do that, we want as much detail as
possible, so I'm going to reign that back in.
| | 02:32 |
But we might want the overall brightness
of the highlights to be a little
| | 02:35 |
brighter, so in that case I would
probably use Gamma to adjust those.
| | 02:40 |
And that's not adjusting the brightest
points of the highlights as much, but it
| | 02:45 |
is giving us a little more brightness in
those areas here.
| | 02:50 |
So sometimes what I'll do is come over
here and just click this triangle to
| | 02:55 |
reset that, then I could go back in and
play with the highlights.
| | 03:00 |
Mostly, this is really just affecting
this bouquet in the back.
| | 03:05 |
And that's all that's really being
affected by this.
| | 03:07 |
So I'm actually going to go over to my
Mid-tones and adjust the Gamma there,
| | 03:12 |
Brightness quite a bit.
And I could also adjust the Gain of the Mid-tones.
| | 03:21 |
Basically the highest point of the
Mid-tones.
| | 03:24 |
You see that's also pushing some of our
highlight detail over white, so we want
| | 03:27 |
to be careful with that.
And I might want to go back to Shadows
| | 03:32 |
and maybe darken those a little bit.
And again, it's a push pull, back and
| | 03:37 |
forth between all these different
parameters until we get the look we're
| | 03:40 |
looking for.
And actually might want to warm up the
| | 03:43 |
Mid-tones a little bit, so I'm going to go
to the Gamma color of the Mid-tones, and
| | 03:47 |
I'm going to drag this upwards just a
little bit.
| | 03:53 |
Warm this up too much, but it's already
kind of warm, but I like it super warm in
| | 03:56 |
this case, so take this up just a little
bit.
| | 04:00 |
And then we can press 0 in the numeric
keypad to preview this and there's the
| | 04:03 |
before and there's the after.
I think we can go a little bit further,
| | 04:08 |
but you see the point there that we can
adjust the offset Gamma and Gain.
| | 04:15 |
And again, the Color and the Brightness
for each of those, for each of the
| | 04:20 |
Shadows, Mid-tones and Highlights.
| | 04:24 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting other attributes| 00:00 |
In addition to adjusting offset gamma and
gain for all the properties together and
| | 00:05 |
also shadows, midtones, and highlights
independently, we also have several other
| | 00:11 |
sliders here to adjust.
For example, we could adjust just simple contrast.
| | 00:17 |
I'll just stay in the overall area for
now, but know that we could do that for
| | 00:20 |
shadows, mid-tones, and highlights
independently.
| | 00:24 |
But I could increase the contrast.
Just get a nice contrasty image here.
| | 00:29 |
I'm blowing out the shadows and the
highlights a little bit, but that looks
| | 00:32 |
kind of good.
And I could also adjust the temperature.
| | 00:36 |
So I could take this to the left to cool
down this image significantly.
| | 00:41 |
I could also take this to the right to
warm it up.
| | 00:46 |
So again, there's the before and the
after, after the contrast adjustment and
| | 00:49 |
the warming.
I'll show you the cooling, before and after.
| | 00:54 |
Again that's 0 on the numeric keypad that
allows you to preview the before, and the
| | 00:59 |
image in its original state and the
after.
| | 01:02 |
We could also, I'll take this temperature
actually.
| | 01:06 |
I want to zero this out, I'm just going to
click this little swatch to do that.
| | 01:09 |
Same thing with contrast.
I'm going to leave the contrasty for now,
| | 01:11 |
but just know that I can click that
little swatch to reset that.
| | 01:15 |
I can add some magenta tint.
I could also take this the other
| | 01:20 |
direction and add some green.
Really don't like the way that looks in
| | 01:23 |
this case, so I'm just going to go ahead and
put that little swatch to reset.
| | 01:27 |
And also there's input saturation, which
is a saturation coming into all of these
| | 01:31 |
color adjustments.
And in the final saturation, the
| | 01:34 |
saturation coming out of these
adjustments.
| | 01:37 |
In many cases, the final input saturation
will look similar, but in some cases it
| | 01:41 |
will look different.
So if you're not getting the saturation
| | 01:44 |
that you're looking for, you can try
adjusting these and see what you come up with.
| | 01:50 |
So, there's a lot more saturation and a
little bit of warmth, some more contrast.
| | 01:56 |
Again, there's the before and the after.
| | 02:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Going DeeperBlending grades| 00:02 |
In this movie we're going to look at
several really cool features in
| | 00:05 |
SpeedGrade including but not limited to
blending different grades together.
| | 00:11 |
So, I have this footage of my wife
actually, hello sweetheart, and she's
| | 00:15 |
actually shot (LAUGH) against a green
screen.
| | 00:19 |
We have a lot of problems here, if I were
to go into the overall area here and
| | 00:23 |
let's say lighten up the Gamma.
We can see that there's actually blue
| | 00:28 |
spots on the walls and there's a green
screen and it's just a mess.
| | 00:32 |
So, what I want to do is crush the whole
background to black.
| | 00:35 |
I want the pink in her hair to pop more.
And I just want this to be a much better
| | 00:41 |
looking image if that's at all possible.
So I could adjust things as per normal.
| | 00:47 |
I'm just actually going to Reset the
gamma for now.
| | 00:49 |
But instead, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to come over here to the Layers
| | 00:52 |
area, and by the way I'm in the Look tab
here down at the bottom.
| | 00:56 |
And I'm going to add a new primary
grading layer.
| | 01:00 |
I do that by coming down to the bottom
Layers area and clicking the Plus P.
| | 01:05 |
That gives me a second primary color
correction layer and I could keep adding
| | 01:09 |
as many layers as I want to.
Now let me show you the benefit of this here.
| | 01:14 |
I'm first going to make an assessment of
what I want and I kind of mentioned that already.
| | 01:20 |
I want to crush the blacks, I want her to
pop and I want there to be good contrast,
| | 01:23 |
I warm things up a little bit, I want to do
all that stuff.
| | 01:28 |
So on this extra layer here, I'm going to
do all of those things and I'm going to
| | 01:31 |
kind of go over the top about it a little
bit.
| | 01:35 |
So I'm going to take the offset down, crush
the blacks lets actually look at the gain
| | 01:39 |
first here.
Let's bring this up so we could see
| | 01:44 |
what's going on and then I'm going to
increase the mid-tones here.
| | 01:50 |
And what I want to do is again go over
the top, I want to increase the
| | 01:54 |
Saturation a lot maybe like 1.2, increase
the temperature, warm that up .2, yeah,
| | 02:00 |
there we go somewhere in that
neighborhood.
| | 02:06 |
And I'm going to go also to the shadows and
I'm going to darken that and then I'm
| | 02:11 |
going to midtones and I'm going to
brighten the gamma for that there.
| | 02:17 |
Also going to brighten the gain for the
midtones so that we get a little bit more
| | 02:22 |
of that brightness coming in there.
And again, I'm trying intentionally to be
| | 02:29 |
over the top here.
And you'll see why in just a moment.
| | 02:34 |
Maybe a little bit more, Gamma, have a
little more Gain.
| | 02:39 |
I want to go again, full throttle on all
these changes.
| | 02:43 |
So it's really obvious what I'm doing
there and actually lets maybe warm up the
| | 02:48 |
midtones a little bit to, take that a
little bit too far.
| | 02:54 |
Okay, so now I have everything in the
direction I want to go, I just went too
| | 02:57 |
far, and you can see our histogram was
all out of whack and more blown out
| | 02:59 |
highlights and shadows, and that's
totally fine for right now.
| | 03:04 |
But on this layer I have all the
corrections, so what I can do is, with
| | 03:08 |
this layer selected, go up here to the
Opacity of this layer and Click and Drag
| | 03:13 |
this down.
And again if I want to go faster I can
| | 03:18 |
just hold the Shift, it goes
significantly faster.
| | 03:21 |
And I could dial this back to where I
want it.
| | 03:24 |
Now the benefit of this, is that if I say
you know I want more of that correction.
| | 03:29 |
I want to darken the background more, and
make the highlights pop more.
| | 03:32 |
Then I could simply add more Opacity, or
increase the Opacity of that layer.
| | 03:38 |
Or if it's too much, I can again take it
down.
| | 03:42 |
So, I can take it to about this
neighborhood, and we have some peaking,
| | 03:46 |
we should get rid of here in the
highlights and a little bit and the shadows.
| | 03:51 |
But overall I am definitely liking where
this is going.
| | 03:55 |
Much better than I did when we set out to
improve this image.
| | 04:00 |
I think I might want to still go a little
crazy with the Gamma of the midtones.
| | 04:05 |
Maybe warm this up just a little bit
more.
| | 04:09 |
And we could add a little bit of pink,
making her hair pop a little bit more,
| | 04:11 |
but I don't want to mess with her skin
tones too much.
| | 04:15 |
And this is actually 5K footage, so if
we wanted to, we could really get in here
| | 04:19 |
in at 100% and (LAUGH) see how things are
doing.
| | 04:23 |
So obviously it needs to be denoised a
little bit, and it's a little bit lower
| | 04:26 |
quality, so it plays back a little
smoother.
| | 04:30 |
But the point is, is that we now have a
much better looking image.
| | 04:35 |
I'll go ahead and minimize that.
We now have a much better looking image,
| | 04:39 |
because we have this separate layer that
we can blend into our footage.
| | 04:42 |
And these skin tones are looking a little
bit off, so we might want to correct that.
| | 04:47 |
But again the point being is that we can
go crazy with this top layer, and then
| | 04:51 |
blend it in to the rest of our footage.
And again we can tone it down if we want
| | 04:56 |
to, or increase it because we have where
we want to go on this extra layer.
| | 05:01 |
And I'll press 0 on the numeric keypad,
you could see the before and the after.
| | 05:05 |
Significantly improved.
| | 05:07 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying grades to multiple clips| 00:02 |
One of the most common tasks for a
colorist is to match color corrections
| | 00:06 |
from shot to shot.
And that's what we're going to look at in
| | 00:09 |
this video.
A couple of techniques to do that,
| | 00:11 |
SpeedGrade has some great tools for that.
What I've done already is done some
| | 00:16 |
preliminary color matching just to get
these shots.
| | 00:20 |
So, that they kind of look like they
belong in the same shot, next to each other.
| | 00:27 |
And I want to now add a lot more Contrast
and some Color Grading, and I want that
| | 00:32 |
to be the same on both clips.
So, here's what I can do.
| | 00:36 |
Let's just start and I'm going to do
something just super crazy, just so you
| | 00:39 |
can see what I'm doing.
I'm going to go to the Gamma overall of the
| | 00:43 |
first clip, and I'm going to do something
crazy like add a lot of blue.
| | 00:47 |
Just so you can see what I'm doing, so
it's very clear and obvious here.
| | 00:53 |
Now, if I go to this next clip, let's
pretend that I wanted to have this bluish
| | 00:57 |
tint to it.
What I can do since it's one clip behind
| | 01:01 |
it, I can press 1 on the numeric keypad,
and that will take all of the color
| | 01:06 |
correction from the first clip and apply
it to the second clip.
| | 01:12 |
Now, I'll go back to my desktop here and
we'll just add some other clip, just to
| | 01:16 |
have something else in here, grab
something else from our library.
| | 01:22 |
This mocking clip will work here, I'm
just going to click the Plus icon here.
| | 01:27 |
And let's say I go back to my original
clip, go to the desktop here, and let's
| | 01:31 |
say I'm going to change this tint to really
red magenta here.
| | 01:37 |
So, now this clip is, two clips back.
So, let's see we want to apply that same
| | 01:41 |
tint from this clip two clips back, so we
don't want it to have this bluish tint,
| | 01:45 |
we want it to have this reddish tint from
two clips back.
| | 01:50 |
So, I can select this clip and then press
the 2 on the numeric keypad.
| | 01:56 |
And then all of the color correction from
that first clip, including that red tint,
| | 01:59 |
applied to this clip.
And you can go up to nine levels back.
| | 02:03 |
So, often times when you're matching
shots like this, or matching color
| | 02:06 |
between shots, you have maybe two or
three camera angles that you're working with.
| | 02:12 |
Probably a master and then a couple
reversals, and so that way you can match
| | 02:16 |
shots by calculating how many shots back
that particular reverse was or whatever,
| | 02:20 |
it's very quick and efficient way to
work.
| | 02:25 |
And I'm just going to grab this little icon
here, and say goodbye to this ridiculous,
| | 02:30 |
mocking clip and get that X there.
And I'm going to go back and undo a little
| | 02:36 |
bit, and see if we can't, actually I
want to do something, I'm just going to drag
| | 02:39 |
this way to delete it.
And I'm going to select this clip of bro
| | 02:43 |
relaxing, go to my look tab here down
towards the bottom, and click Reset on
| | 02:46 |
the primary grade, just to get it back to
the way it was.
| | 02:50 |
Do the same thing with this other clip,
Reset.
| | 02:53 |
You can tell that you've reset it because
this little color grey icon well it
| | 02:58 |
typically goes away, so there's a little
change there still.
| | 03:03 |
But instead of grading on the actual
layer, another thing we can do is go to
| | 03:06 |
the Timeline tab here.
And I can create whats called a Grading
| | 03:11 |
layer, and you can see in the setup area
we have Timeline Elements and it says
| | 03:14 |
Grading and there's a little icon.
I'm going to drag this and put this above
| | 03:20 |
the clip here.
And I can actually extend this to cover
| | 03:24 |
multiple clips.
This is kind of like an adjustment layer
| | 03:27 |
in After Effects, or now Premier CS6 2.
So, with this Grading layer selected, I
| | 03:33 |
can go and add a look.
Let's just go ahead and add a lot of
| | 03:37 |
Contrast here.
Hold the Shift key so we can bump that up
| | 03:41 |
quite a bit.
And maybe warm this with the Gamma, just
| | 03:46 |
a little bit, maybe cool the shadows,
just a little bit drag that towards blue.
| | 03:54 |
And now as I move this from shot to shot,
we can see that both of these clips now
| | 03:58 |
have this Grading layer applied to it.
So, if all things are equal, or if you've
| | 04:04 |
graded the clips so that they have the
same contrast and luminance and the same
| | 04:08 |
basic values.
Then you can use one of these grading
| | 04:12 |
layers to go in and apply a Creative
Grade to an entire scene.
| | 04:16 |
And again, just like with another Primary
Grade layer, for example, we can select
| | 04:21 |
this grading layer.
Actually, let me go a little bit crazier
| | 04:25 |
with it here.
More red in the highlights, more blue in
| | 04:29 |
the shadows, just so you can see what I'm
doing.
| | 04:34 |
And then we can have this layer selected
and then dial back the Opacity, so that
| | 04:39 |
we just have a little bit of this grade
applied.
| | 04:44 |
That's only half of that grading layer
applied.
| | 04:46 |
So, as you can see we have many ways to
adjust multiple clips together, either
| | 04:51 |
with Grading layers, or we could use the
keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste
| | 04:55 |
essentially the different looks.
| | 04:59 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Isolating colors| 00:02 |
In this tutorial, we're going to look at
how to isolate colors and work on just
| | 00:05 |
certain color families at a time.
This is more commonly known as secondary
| | 00:10 |
color correction.
So, I have here this clip, and we have
| | 00:13 |
our main character being chased by a
monster, and we're kind of looking at the
| | 00:18 |
monster's point of view above him.
The, the problem is, that color-wise,
| | 00:24 |
this looks like a very natural shot and
it takes away a lot out of the story
| | 00:28 |
because it just looks like a regular
everyday old forest.
| | 00:33 |
And there's a lot we could do here but
what I want to do, for example here, is
| | 00:37 |
just adjust the color of the greenery.
I kind of want to make that just really
| | 00:42 |
vibrant just to make this seem more out
of the ordinary.
| | 00:46 |
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come
over here to the Looks tab.
| | 00:49 |
And I'm going to create a new secondary
color corrections.
| | 00:53 |
So, we've worked a lot with primary color
correction, but I want to create a new
| | 00:56 |
secondary color correction layer.
And the way to do that is by clicking
| | 00:59 |
this plus S icon here, at the bottom of
the layers area.
| | 01:03 |
So, I click that, and then I get several
Color areas here, So, if we wanted to
| | 01:07 |
work on just the magentas, or the blues
or whatever, we can do that.
| | 01:13 |
Click this little checkbox with nothing
there.
| | 01:16 |
And basically, what that is, is that it
gives you access to some presets for cyans.
| | 01:20 |
And when it says wide, narrow and
saturated, it's basically describing the
| | 01:24 |
color range of what you're going to
choose.
| | 01:27 |
So, I'm just going to go ahead and click
outside of that.
| | 01:29 |
And instead, I'm going to click this
little eyedropper with the plus icon.
| | 01:32 |
And I'm going to click, let's say, over
here.
| | 01:35 |
And click it again and add some more
values to the range that we want here.
| | 01:42 |
And so, basically, we have the hue.
And so, it's choosing the hue and we
| | 01:46 |
could manually click this area in the
inside and change what hue is being selected.
| | 01:53 |
And then, we have, for each of these, we
have a top arrow and a bottom arrow.
| | 01:57 |
And the top arrow allows us to extend the
range and everything that's in this box,
| | 02:00 |
this little rectangle here, everything
that's in there is absolutely going to
| | 02:04 |
get affected.
As we take the bottom triangle and we
| | 02:07 |
spread it out, we are creating kind of
like a falloff.
| | 02:11 |
So, we're going to have a hard edge,
everything that's inside, it's going to be a
| | 02:14 |
gradually softer edge, everything that's
coming here.
| | 02:17 |
So, if we wanted all of the yellow greens
and maybe just a little bit of the greens
| | 02:21 |
kind of fade off into the greens, and we
would increase the falloff area.
| | 02:26 |
That's always a good idea as we'll see.
It's going to create a lot of hard edges.
| | 02:29 |
So, the more room we can give it by
feathering these edges, typically the
| | 02:32 |
better result you're going to get.
Now, this is all kind of weird and
| | 02:37 |
abstract because you can't really tell
what's going on.
| | 02:40 |
Basically, all we're doing is just
selecting a color range.
| | 02:43 |
So, what I'd like to do at this point is
go to the gray out area and change this
| | 02:46 |
from none to color gray.
And that gives us a better
| | 02:50 |
representation, actually let me resize
this just a little bit.
| | 02:53 |
Get a better representation of what we
are selecting.
| | 02:56 |
So, now when we make adjustments, we can
see what we're doing here.
| | 03:00 |
So, again the point of secondary color
correction is I want to adjust, in this
| | 03:03 |
case, just the greens.
And actually, some of the yellows as
| | 03:07 |
well because there, there's a lot of
yellow in the colors of the greenery.
| | 03:11 |
But I don't want to change the bark and I
don't want to change the character.
| | 03:14 |
So, I don't want to be just like a
general saturating.
| | 03:18 |
I want to work on again just the greens.
So, again, I could increase the range
| | 03:22 |
here, the fall off.
And I could do that for the lightness,
| | 03:25 |
that makes a big difference.
But again, if I get, if I increase this
| | 03:29 |
too much, then I select the whole image.
That's not what I want.
| | 03:33 |
So, I definitely want to isolate this.
Maybe I could increase the fall off here
| | 03:38 |
and again it's this kind of
like this push pull back and forth type
| | 03:42 |
thing until we get what we're looking
for.
| | 03:46 |
Increase the fall off.
And you might get some noise here.
| | 03:49 |
And that happens a lot with secondary
color corrections.
| | 03:52 |
So, what I can do is click this Denoise.
I'll just hold the Shift key.
| | 03:56 |
I could bump that up a lot.
I could do that with blur as well.
| | 04:00 |
And basically, what it's doing is it's
denoising and blurring the mask, not
| | 04:03 |
necessarily your image.
So, I'm going to kind of play around with
| | 04:08 |
this a little bit more.
As I increase this saturation amount,
| | 04:11 |
you'll notice that the character's leg
starts getting some junk on it as well.
| | 04:16 |
So I gotta scale that down a little bit.
Okay, that looks good for right now.
| | 04:22 |
What I'm going to do is take this back to
none.
| | 04:26 |
And I'm going to change the offset.
Let's just try taking that down a little bit.
| | 04:29 |
Now let's take it up a little bit.
You can see that that's changing just the
| | 04:34 |
greenery, but the character in the middle
there is not being changed at all, just
| | 04:38 |
the green stuff.
So, I might take this color in the middle
| | 04:43 |
and drag this over to a really vibrant
green.
| | 04:47 |
And so, as I press zero in the numeric
keypad to preview before and after, you
| | 04:51 |
see this scene kind of just comes alive
with the greenery.
| | 04:56 |
We didn't have to really make any
specific selections other than this.
| | 05:01 |
We didn't have to animate anything.
And now as I press play, we can see that
| | 05:05 |
the scene is super vibrant crazy green
because we isolated just the green values.
| | 05:12 |
There is some, a little bit of color
still going on in the tree barks.
| | 05:15 |
We could remove that.
And what I've done here is I made another
| | 05:18 |
layer that I took a little bit more time
with.
| | 05:20 |
And you could kind of look at that.
Still not exactly perfect, but you get
| | 05:24 |
the idea.
Again, before and after.
| | 05:27 |
So, using secondary color correction we
could really draw viewer's attention to
| | 05:31 |
certain items.
And we could also remove certain problems
| | 05:34 |
of things that are sticking out.
There's some red, and it's really vibrating.
| | 05:38 |
It's in the way or it's not in the way
enough.
| | 05:40 |
And that's what we can use, second color
correction to address.
| | 05:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying a look-up table| 00:02 |
A Colour look-up table often abbreviated
LUT and pronounced Lut, is used very
| | 00:07 |
often in color correction circles.
And typically this is used to bring
| | 00:13 |
colors in an image to a known standard.
It's not typically used for Color
| | 00:19 |
Correction per say.
But just kind of to balance things out,
| | 00:23 |
and also use to apply certain looks.
So, let's look at how to do that, so in
| | 00:28 |
the look area here, I have my Gradient.
You notice I have this very washed out image.
| | 00:34 |
And what I can do is click this little
Plus icon at the bottom of the layers
| | 00:38 |
area again, in the Look tab, Plus here I
could apply LUT.
| | 00:42 |
And this will allow me to choose from one
of several LUTs that come with SpeedGrade.
| | 00:49 |
But if I need to, I can click this little
Ellipsis button, and this will allow me
| | 00:53 |
to browse on my system and navigate a
custom LUT, that I'll be using in my own workflow.
| | 00:59 |
Now a lot of these are very specific, so
here's like a Phantom Rec 709 LUT for example.
| | 01:06 |
But some of these can be kind of cool, if
you find a LUT that is a good base for
| | 01:10 |
our color grade then you can start there
and then improve upon it.
| | 01:16 |
In this case this Colour look-up table
adds kind of a filmic tint, a warm tint.
| | 01:22 |
And even though if I press 0 on the
numeric keypad, we could see that our
| | 01:25 |
footage was very cool, that's
temperature-wise.
| | 01:29 |
I could go back to the Primary Color
Correction layer, the original layer,
| | 01:34 |
take the gamma down a lot, drag this to
the left.
| | 01:40 |
And all of the sudden we have some hard
streets, Bellevue Washington.
| | 01:44 |
And so we have some shadows, and some
mountains kind of appearing through the
| | 01:48 |
haze a little bit, and everything is that
the mood is completely different with
| | 01:52 |
this shot.
It looks like it was shot at a completely
| | 01:56 |
different time of the day.
Again to preview that it's 0 on the
| | 01:59 |
numeric key pad, and then there's the
before and then the after there.
| | 02:05 |
And again, this all started because we
just applied a LUT.
| | 02:08 |
And again its typically not where you
want to start, you typically would want
| | 02:11 |
to use a LUT with a purpose, maybe to
apply a specific effect or as a starting
| | 02:15 |
point with footage.
Or again, to bring your footage, into
| | 02:20 |
conformity with a known standard.
| | 02:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Managing multiple playheads| 00:02 |
Comparing multiple clips is definitely
something that you'll be doing often in SpeedGrade.
| | 00:07 |
And there's a little bit of a trick to
it.
| | 00:08 |
Now, we've looked at how you can create
multiple playheads by Cmd or Ctrl
| | 00:12 |
dragging this little icon.
I actually have four play heads set up
| | 00:16 |
here, and you guys should create nine
play heads.
| | 00:20 |
But then that creates an issue of what
exactly are you looking at?
| | 00:25 |
So that's what we're going to look at in
this movie, is how to manage all of these
| | 00:28 |
extra play heads for comparing multiple
shots.
| | 00:31 |
So what we're going to do here is in the
Timeline area of the bottom of the screen here.
| | 00:36 |
I'm going to change this from setup then I'm
going to go over to the view area.
| | 00:41 |
And this is the gizmo, the little widget
we're going to use to control what we're
| | 00:44 |
looking at here.
Now, by default we're looking at one screen.
| | 00:49 |
So what this is doing on the left or on
the bottom, excuse me, is this is saying
| | 00:53 |
how many screens we're seeing
horizontally.
| | 00:58 |
So if I were to change this to two, then
we see two play heads, or two of these
| | 01:02 |
objects that these play heads are of.
This is shot one and shot two we are
| | 01:07 |
seeing right here.
And right now it's set to Split, and when
| | 01:12 |
it's set to Split we're basically getting
a splitscreen so we can click and drag
| | 01:16 |
this little Icon in the center.
And actually I'm just going to change this
| | 01:20 |
right here from saying first and second
play head.
| | 01:23 |
I'm going to change this clicking on the
number two I'm going to change this to the
| | 01:27 |
third shot which actually comes from the
same shoot.
| | 01:31 |
And so we might want to compare her skin
tones which are really off here.
| | 01:34 |
So I want to split the screen adjust that
this way.
| | 01:40 |
So I can see them kind of right new to
each other, or we might want to choose
| | 01:43 |
off so we're not displaying the screens.
We can see the entire frame of both images.
| | 01:51 |
We might want to see three screens side by
side, and we can also I'm going to adjust
| | 01:56 |
this here so that this middle one says
number two.
| | 02:01 |
So now we're seeing one,two, and three.
And the one on the left determines how
| | 02:06 |
many vertically we are seeing.
So if I change this back to two ,so we're
| | 02:11 |
seeing two clips horizontally.
And so this one I changed to two so we're
| | 02:15 |
seeing two vertically.
Now we're seeing all four.
| | 02:18 |
We're seeing playhead number one, two,
three and four according to this grid.
| | 02:24 |
So this is showing us where playhead one,
two three and four.
| | 02:29 |
Now I could change that if I wanted these
two nature shots to be side by side and
| | 02:32 |
these two shots of the girl to be side by
side.
| | 02:36 |
It changes to see they had three.
So I'm seeing one in three next to each other.
| | 02:40 |
And I could change this to be number two.
So I'm seeing two and four next to each other.
| | 02:46 |
Now what I like about this two is that
it's all ganged together by default.
| | 02:50 |
So if I press the player button you see
that all four of these play heads are
| | 02:54 |
playing back.
Just a little plug for speed grade here.
| | 02:58 |
I mean this is two 3k clips and two 4k
clips.
| | 03:02 |
And all four of them are playing back in
real time simultaneously.
| | 03:07 |
It's truly remarkable.
Now you might want to Adjust which of
| | 03:10 |
these is playing back at the same time.
So what I could do here if I wanted,
| | 03:15 |
let's say I wanted to move the third
playhead just by itself.
| | 03:19 |
There's a little Play icon on the right
side of the playhead, and that basically
| | 03:23 |
means that it's ganged to the others and
it's playing with them.
| | 03:27 |
If I click that, then it turns into a
Stop icon, and so it will not play when
| | 03:31 |
the others play, it will just remain
static.
| | 03:36 |
And you can see it here.
This is play head number three in the
| | 03:38 |
upper right hand corner.
And it is stationary and not playing
| | 03:41 |
while the others are playing.
And of course to get back that
| | 03:44 |
functionality so they're all getting
together.
| | 03:46 |
Just click it again and then again
they're all getting together here.
| | 03:50 |
Now, you'll notice that the shot sizes,
as I mentioned, there are two 3k shots
| | 03:55 |
here and two 4k shots, and so they don't
really match up.
| | 04:00 |
So if we come down here to the bottom we
can take auto zoom from Off to, say, Keep
| | 04:04 |
Width, and now they are all the same
width.
| | 04:09 |
And it kind of matches their sizes which
is really nice.
| | 04:13 |
You can also just check Match Channel
Sizes if you prefer to do that.
| | 04:17 |
Another cool feature of this is that I
can get multiple screen layouts.
| | 04:21 |
So I might want to set up one screen
layout which is one three two four like
| | 04:24 |
this, or I might want to set up another
screen layout.
| | 04:29 |
It's just, I'll just make this one so
it's just two shots next to each other.
| | 04:33 |
And I might want to get one right next to
each other as a splitscreen.
| | 04:38 |
So now, I can go back and forth between
screen layout one and screen layout two.
| | 04:43 |
Really helpful stuff.
And again if I want to delete any of
| | 04:46 |
these play heads I just grab this little
icon and drag it upwards and when I see
| | 04:51 |
that little x, I let go.
And it disappears.
| | 04:56 |
So as you can see, our ability to compare
multiple shots, even at nine.
| | 05:01 |
We could have three up and three wide
creating a nine piece grid here of nine
| | 05:06 |
different clips or nine different spots
in our timeline.
| | 05:11 |
Nine different play heads all at the same
time.
| | 05:13 |
So, so much power here in speed grade,
when you are comparing and contrasting
| | 05:19 |
multiple clips at the same time.
| | 05:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Using LooksApplying presets| 00:00 |
When you're first starting out with color
correction it could be really
| | 00:03 |
overwhelming there's so much, to be aware
of.
| | 00:07 |
And so what speaker has done is included
a huge host of presets for you.
| | 00:12 |
As maybe kind of like a launch pad for
you to get some new ideas or maybe some
| | 00:16 |
final looks if that's what you're happy
with.
| | 00:20 |
So, we're going to go down to the Look tab
here.
| | 00:24 |
And there's a few different ways to get
to stuff.
| | 00:26 |
So in the layers area I can go down to
the plus icon here.
| | 00:29 |
Click that, you see that we not only have
effects, such as bleach bypass.
| | 00:34 |
Which we'll look at in a moment.
But we also have De-grain, we have
| | 00:38 |
Sharpen, Soften, Gaussian blur.
And things like that.
| | 00:43 |
Sepia tone, for example.
There's a lot of stuff going on here.
| | 00:46 |
We have a night preset we click on night
and it makes everything kind of dark.
| | 00:50 |
And then we could you know style this
back as far as opacity goes.
| | 00:53 |
Or we could go back to our original
primary layer, let me boost the gamma a
| | 00:56 |
little bit.
So we can kind of see what's going on
| | 00:59 |
this looks a little better with
landscapes but you get the idea.
| | 01:03 |
I could just slick this layer that I've
added this Preset layer just hit the
| | 01:06 |
Trash Can button just delete that.
But there's also these categories of
| | 01:10 |
styles, and you can actually see previews
of them here as well.
| | 01:14 |
I really like this tri-toney one, for
example, so it warms the highlights.
| | 01:19 |
And then it gives the shadows back here
this kind of cool background, so really
| | 01:23 |
like that.
I'm going to press 0 on theUNKNOWN keypad,
| | 01:26 |
here's the before and the after.
Definitely looks a lot more cinematic
| | 01:30 |
with that adjustment.
Before and after.
| | 01:33 |
And I can just replace this preset by
clicking on another preset.
| | 01:40 |
Cool mid tones warm mid tones cold
overall and this is just the temperature category.
| | 01:45 |
I can go over here to Style.
I could click on 60's one or 70's one
| | 01:50 |
which actually does look very 70's.
Quite impressive I think.
| | 01:56 |
So getting it before and after.
There's a dream one.
| | 02:01 |
The dream one has this bloom here that's
really bright.
| | 02:05 |
So what I might want to do is click on the
Bloom here in the Layer stack.
| | 02:10 |
And I can just dial down the opacity of
just that layer until those blooms stop
| | 02:14 |
blowing out.
In my footage and I don't want to take it
| | 02:18 |
off all the way 'cuz that's before and
that's after, butINAUDIBLE with it.
| | 02:23 |
And it looks somewhat dreary but again we
could go through and make changes to
| | 02:27 |
these layers as desired.
There's another dream sequence, clip
| | 02:31 |
here, and before, and after.
So, some really cool stuff to work with,
| | 02:36 |
there's Desaturation, Presets.
And there's also Cinematic presets which
| | 02:40 |
are pretty cool, including bleach bypass
that I mentioned earlier.
| | 02:44 |
Can't really tell what it's doing in this
clip, but if I go to this other, clip here.
| | 02:49 |
Or minimize that so you can see it a
little bit better click on Bleach bypass.
| | 02:53 |
So we see it's Desaturated it to again we
might want to go to the overall Gamma settings.
| | 02:58 |
And kind of dry this up a little bit and
we'll be darken the shadows.
| | 03:02 |
We can still play with it even though
we've added presets which is pretty cool.
| | 03:07 |
Again day for night with this clip
compression two and this synomatic is
| | 03:10 |
like really strong contrast, this looks
pretty good.
| | 03:15 |
There's a lot to play with here.
I will issue a great word of warning.
| | 03:19 |
Is that these little categories of
presets, they're really hard to get back.
| | 03:25 |
So this little X.
If you were to click X and to get rid of
| | 03:28 |
this folder of presets, good luck getting
it back.
| | 03:31 |
Because you can click this button to
browse to another folder, which I also
| | 03:34 |
don't recommend doing, because that will
replace this folder.
| | 03:38 |
And this folder where the cinematic
examples are, or the desaturation, style,
| | 03:41 |
temperature or whatever.
Is really hard to find, especially on the
| | 03:45 |
Mac operating system.
So if you close this or if you reload
| | 03:48 |
another folder here.
Chances are that's going to be gone forever
| | 03:52 |
and these presets are going to be really
hard to get to.
| | 03:55 |
So just be aware of that.
But presets can be a good way to inspire you.
| | 04:00 |
It's a good place to kind of like start
from.
| | 04:03 |
And also, if you're new to color grading,
they can give you some great ideas of
| | 04:07 |
some techniques to use.
| | 04:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Saving custom looks| 00:02 |
In this tutorial we're going to look at
how to make your own Custom Look Presets
| | 00:06 |
that you can reuse for other clips.
So, I have here this footage of our
| | 00:11 |
subject running through the trees being
chased by a monster.
| | 00:15 |
We have some other footage we want to
apply this to later, so we're going to
| | 00:17 |
create a Custom Look now.
And what I want to do here is basically,
| | 00:21 |
just very quickly here, just kind of crunch
crunch the shadows a little bit.
| | 00:25 |
I want to increase the gain until we have
some good highlight information.
| | 00:31 |
And take down the gamma.
Let's go into the shadows maybe, take
| | 00:35 |
down the gamma of the shadows.
And go into the mid-tone gamma.
| | 00:40 |
Maybe brighten that a little bit.
Maybe also increase the gain of the mid-tones.
| | 00:47 |
And go over all and take this down just a
little bit in the gamma.
| | 00:53 |
And let's add some color here.
I'm going to take the offset down a little
| | 00:57 |
bit bluish.
A little cyan there.
| | 01:01 |
And then we could get some contrast by
taking the gain.
| | 01:05 |
The little orange is the gamma.
Warm that up a little bit.
| | 01:09 |
So we're getting some contrast here.
Again this push pull of color correction.
| | 01:14 |
You know you pull this one way and you
over correct with another value here.
| | 01:18 |
Kinda going back and forth.
Just go to the shadows and get a little
| | 01:24 |
bit more gamma.
Back to overall, increase contrast, a
| | 01:30 |
little more.
And it looks pretty good.
| | 01:33 |
So if I press 0 on the numeric keypad, I
can see the before and the after.
| | 01:37 |
It definitely looks more cinematic even
though we went pretty quickly here.
| | 01:42 |
So, let's go over to Look Examples /
Cinematic and I'll go ahead and save it there.
| | 01:48 |
And here is this Looks file that I just
created.
| | 01:51 |
I've created a couple others before this,
but this is the one I just created.
| | 01:55 |
Now what I can do is just go ahead and
delete this.
| | 01:59 |
I'll take this little icon right here and
grab it and then clear out my timeline.
| | 02:04 |
Go over to my desktop.
And I'll load another shot from the same day.
| | 02:09 |
This pursuitecu.mov, which you'll find in
the media folder.
| | 02:15 |
Put this here.
Press D to go back to my footage.
| | 02:20 |
And so, again, it's the same type thing,
same dude running through the trees.
| | 02:26 |
And so we want to apply the same Look.
So I can go over to the Look tab.
| | 02:31 |
And where I saved my Cinematic Example,
just click this here and boom, there we
| | 02:36 |
have it.
And so, even after I save this project,
| | 02:40 |
and I close it down, close SpeedGrade,
reopen it, these Presets will still be
| | 02:44 |
where we saved them.
So, that is how to create and apply
| | 02:52 |
Custom Presets.
| | 02:55 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Masking FootageCreating masks| 00:02 |
Oftentimes, when you're doing Color
Grades, you don't want to work on the
| | 00:05 |
entire image, just a portion of it.
And that's where masking can come in handy.
| | 00:09 |
So, down here at the bottom, there's
actually a Mask tab.
| | 00:12 |
So, when I click on that, and I want to
make sure to expand my interface by
| | 00:15 |
Clicking and Dragging this little grip
indicator here.
| | 00:19 |
And that way, I can see all of my <ask
controls.
| | 00:23 |
And we can just go ahead and quickly
create basic shapes using the presets
| | 00:26 |
here, just like a circle, square or
vignette.
| | 00:30 |
For right now, I'm just going to click on
the circular mask, click that, and it is
| | 00:34 |
created for you.
This is the mask, and then this little
| | 00:38 |
widget in the middle is kind of like the
controller.
| | 00:41 |
So, what I'm going to do is click on one
of these points and expand it.
| | 00:45 |
Cuz I actually want to just kind of call
out just her face, and correct just this
| | 00:48 |
area and make this kind of stand out a
little bit more.
| | 00:52 |
So I'm going to click, and I can
rearrange this however I want.
| | 00:55 |
And I can click and drag to increase the
tension on that side, just like you would
| | 00:59 |
in Adobe Illustrator, or any other Bezier
Curve Editing tool.
| | 01:04 |
Now, let me explain what this widget
does, this is kind of interesting.
| | 01:07 |
If I click right here on this bottom part
here, I will skew that particular point.
| | 01:12 |
Actually, you want to select everything
so I'm going to Click and Drag a marquee
| | 01:16 |
around all points, the entire mask is
selected.
| | 01:21 |
And now if I do this it horizontally,
skews the entire mask, I also vertically
| | 01:26 |
skew the entire mask.
Actually, I want to be just like her face
| | 01:31 |
so I'm going to leave that there.
I can also rotate it with this round part
| | 01:36 |
of the widget using the center point I
can move this into position.
| | 01:43 |
I could scale this horizontally using
this right facing arrow.
| | 01:47 |
I could scale it vertically using the
upwards facing arrow, and tweak this a
| | 01:53 |
little bit individual little points.
And you might need to deselect and then
| | 02:00 |
select again in order to get that access
to individual point there.
| | 02:05 |
And doesn't have to be perfect but that's
good for right now.
| | 02:11 |
Also with this, actually I'll click and
drag a marquee around these points just
| | 02:14 |
like the entire mask again.
But I can scale up everything uniformly
| | 02:19 |
using this square here.
And I could also feather the mask, which
| | 02:25 |
in this case is going to be really
important, by going to this outer corner here.
| | 02:29 |
So, I'm going to click and drag this out,
and you can see that we have a second mask.
| | 02:34 |
And basically, it's going to fall off
between these two masks.
| | 02:39 |
So, what we're going to do is we're going
to brighten the area inside of this inner
| | 02:42 |
mask, and then everything outside of this
outer mask will be unaffected.
| | 02:46 |
But between these two masks, there will
be a gradual fall off between the
| | 02:50 |
affected area and the unaffected area.
So with this basic mask setup, and
| | 02:56 |
actually I might click on this outer
point and just kind of give that a better
| | 03:01 |
fall-off a little bit here.
Now, what I'm going to do is go over to
| | 03:08 |
the Look area, and I'm going to make an
adjustment.
| | 03:12 |
Nothing's going to be different so far.
I'm just going to brighten this up a
| | 03:14 |
little bit.
A little bit in the gain, actually not so
| | 03:17 |
much in the gamma.
That looks okay.
| | 03:21 |
Now, what I want to do is only apply this
correction to her face and not to the
| | 03:25 |
entire image.
So, what I'm going to do is go over to
| | 03:28 |
the Mask and Alpha area, these three
buttons.
| | 03:30 |
And by defaults, Masks are turned off, so
we need to turn them on.
| | 03:34 |
And so, this first button will do what we
want it to do, will apply the grading
| | 03:38 |
adjustments we've made into that area.
And this other button will apply the
| | 03:43 |
grade to outside the mask that will
brighten everything outside of it.
| | 03:47 |
We actually want to do this, which will
apply the grading only inside of that
| | 03:53 |
shape there.
So, if I press 0 on the numeric keypad,
| | 03:57 |
we could see before and the after.
So that's the original, and that's with
| | 04:00 |
the adjustment that we've made.
We might want to make that stick out just
| | 04:03 |
a little bit more and maybe we can even
increase the temperature and just warm
| | 04:07 |
that up, just a little bit.
And now her face really pops, really
| | 04:11 |
comes alive.
Again, there's before and then after.
| | 04:15 |
Really makes it just kind of more three
dimensional.
| | 04:19 |
Another thing that we can do and actually
this seems a little bright right here on
| | 04:22 |
our knuckle.
So, I might go back to the Mask area and
| | 04:25 |
I might just click and drag this point,
so we just have a little bit more of a falloff.
| | 04:30 |
Let me click on that inner point a little
bit.
| | 04:33 |
And you might need to do this, as there
are areas where the mask is kind of
| | 04:36 |
obvious, and we don't want it to be
obvious at all.
| | 04:40 |
So, go back to the Look area, here's
another thing we can do.
| | 04:42 |
I'm going to select this layer, and I'm
going to click on this button right here.
| | 04:46 |
This will duplicate the current layer.
So, what we can do now is do the opposite.
| | 04:52 |
And we can change it so that the mask
applies only to everything else.
| | 04:57 |
So, what I'm going to do here is do the
opposite.
| | 05:00 |
This is kind of an extreme example here,
but I'll click the temperature swatch so
| | 05:03 |
that this isn't warm.
And we'll take the gamma and the gain,
| | 05:07 |
the opposite direction.
You'll see what it's doing is that it's
| | 05:11 |
darkening everything behind her.
So, that makes her head stick out even more.
| | 05:15 |
It's kind of a little ridiculous.
It looks like her head's like 20 feet in
| | 05:18 |
front of her body in this case, but I
just wanted to show you what's possible.
| | 05:22 |
Again, here's before darkening the
background and then after darkening the background.
| | 05:27 |
And here's the original, and then here is
the corrected version, with the
| | 05:31 |
brightened face and the darkened
background.
| | 05:34 |
Again, this is a little bit too much.
But we could always go back to our
| | 05:39 |
opacity adjustment for each layer, and
dial it back.
| | 05:45 |
So maybe, we'll do about 50%, somewhere
in that range, for each of these.
| | 05:51 |
Do, do, do, do.
And there we go.
| | 05:54 |
And now, we have a much more balanced
image.
| | 05:58 |
There's the before and after we darken
the background and brighten her face with masks.
| | 06:04 |
We have that.
So, Masks again are a great way to
| | 06:08 |
isolate parts of the image and just work
on those.
| | 06:12 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a quick vignette| 00:02 |
We're going to use masks to create a
quick vignette.
| | 00:06 |
And a vignette, basically, is a
darkening.
| | 00:09 |
Typically around the edges, of an image
and, you know, usually when you're
| | 00:13 |
shooting stuff there's a lot of just
extraneous data.
| | 00:18 |
Especially in this world where the
landscape orientation is so wide, you
| | 00:22 |
can't always get every single thing in
frame beautiful.
| | 00:27 |
For example, in this shot we have our
heroine here, the main character is a
| | 00:30 |
beautiful girl running away, running for
her life.
| | 00:34 |
It's a cool nightmare sequence, and
there's just garbage everywhere and
| | 00:37 |
there's, it's supposed to be garbage
everywhere.
| | 00:40 |
But it oftentimes takes the focus away
from her, from the girl.
| | 00:43 |
So, in this case, there's a, a bunch of
cardboard boxes, and these all, all these
| | 00:47 |
things are just fighting for our
attention.
| | 00:50 |
So, vignettes are a way to kind of quiet
that down.
| | 00:53 |
So, I'm going to go over to the mask area
here.
| | 00:56 |
And again, I need to raise up my
interface so I can see all my controls,
| | 00:58 |
and I'm just going click this button.
It's a button just made for creating
| | 01:03 |
vignette masks with one click.
Click that.
| | 01:06 |
There's our vignette.
Now if we were to darken this as is,
| | 01:10 |
everything outside of this area would be
dark, everything inside of this would be bright.
| | 01:14 |
And the falloff would only be this little
area right here.
| | 01:17 |
I find that to be much too small for a
vignette.
| | 01:20 |
So, I'm just going to click on this
little square here and click and just
| | 01:24 |
make that a little bigger.
And actually what I want to do too is
| | 01:28 |
click on this and scale this down
horizontally.
| | 01:31 |
I wouldn't do that with most vignettes.
But in this case, she's this one person,
| | 01:35 |
she's at the bottom of the screen.
And so, I don't feel too bad moving this
| | 01:39 |
vignette and having kind of like a
non-traditional vignette.
| | 01:43 |
Typically, we'd want it just kind of
going around the corners of the image
| | 01:46 |
like so.
But in, in our case, we want the
| | 01:49 |
attention to be on the girl down here at
the bottom of the screen.
| | 01:54 |
And so again, it's kind of a non-standard
vignette.
| | 01:57 |
Let me scale it down vertically just a
little bit and just kind of play with it
| | 02:01 |
until I get it.
I also might want to increase the
| | 02:05 |
distance between these two.
So, the fall off is greater, so it's not
| | 02:09 |
as obvious.
With a vignette, you really don't want to
| | 02:12 |
make it obvious that you're vignetting.
It calls attention to the shot and takes
| | 02:18 |
people out of it.
It's, it's going to be really subtly done.
| | 02:21 |
There's an art to this, so I'm going to
go now back to the look area.
| | 02:27 |
And I am going to choose this option,
where the grading layer applies to
| | 02:32 |
everything outside of the mask.
And I'm going to go to the gamma for
| | 02:37 |
example, let's just take this down a
little bit.
| | 02:42 |
And I'll go over to my offset and I will
take the shadows down there as well, just
| | 02:47 |
kind of crush that quite a bit.
And we can actually go overboard, and
| | 02:53 |
again the Opacity, dial this down a
little bit.
| | 02:57 |
And there you go, that's softened a
little bit.
| | 03:03 |
Next, I want to go back to my mask.
Again, just like everything in color
| | 03:06 |
correction, we just kind of go back and
forth, back and forth until we get what
| | 03:09 |
we're looking for here.
And like more falloff there.
| | 03:15 |
And let's go back to the look.
And maybe take the gamma of the shadows,
| | 03:21 |
this little middle wheel here.
Take this down a little bit more.
| | 03:27 |
And again, maybe crunch the blacks with
the offset here.
| | 03:31 |
Okay, so that's looking pretty good.
And we could press 0 on the numeric
| | 03:35 |
keypad, and there's the before, all that
stuff.
| | 03:38 |
Again, calling for our attention.
And then, there's after, with it quieted down.
| | 03:44 |
I will probably want to do some regular
color correction to the entire image so
| | 03:48 |
it's not so bright anyways.
But even this is a pretty obvious
| | 03:52 |
vignette, and we want to avoid that at
all costs.
| | 03:55 |
So if we play this back, it's definitely
a lot better cuz there's just a lot more
| | 03:59 |
focus right there where it should be.
And let's go back to the beginning here.
| | 04:06 |
And if she's against like, a white board,
so that's kind of distracting.
| | 04:10 |
B but if we go a little bit farther than
that, you can really see where the
| | 04:14 |
vignette comes in handy.
Here's the before and after.
| | 04:20 |
So, vignettes again, are a great way to
focus a viewer's attention, and it's very
| | 04:24 |
quickly done in SpeedGrade with that mask
preset.
| | 04:28 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. SpeedGrade in ActionFixing problem shots| 00:02 |
In this tutorial, we're going to get away
from the technical style and what all the
| | 00:05 |
buttons do and stuff.
And we're going to actually look at a
| | 00:09 |
real world example where we tackle a
really challenging piece of footage and
| | 00:12 |
see what we can't do with it.
Put all our skills to good use here.
| | 00:17 |
What we're going to do is go over to the
Desktop View, and we're going to add to
| | 00:20 |
our Timeline this clip.
It's a013_c003 blah, blah, blah, blah.
| | 00:25 |
So, that's the one we want to add not
RMD, we want to add the R3D file with the
| | 00:30 |
thumbnail here.
So, you can click that Plus icon to add
| | 00:35 |
that to the Timeline.
Press the letter D on your keyboard to
| | 00:38 |
get to the Desktop View.
And you see what our problem is.
| | 00:43 |
I was actually shooting this in the rain,
next to a waterfall, this Gargantua's Waterfall.
| | 00:50 |
The spray from the waterfall was hitting
the camera, the rain was hitting the
| | 00:54 |
camera, it was misty everywhere.
It was a totally overcast day, really
| | 00:59 |
cloudy, no sunlight getting through at
all.
| | 01:03 |
And so, this shot is just a mess.
I don't even know if, online, you'll be
| | 01:07 |
able to see how terrible the shot is, or
make out what's actually going on here.
| | 01:12 |
But it looks like it's just solid gray
even look at our poor little histogram.
| | 01:16 |
Look at our sad little fellow there,
(LAUGH) there's no highlights to speak of
| | 01:19 |
no shadows.
This is a tough challenge.
| | 01:22 |
And as we start grading this, you'll see
that there's even more challenges that we
| | 01:26 |
will uncover as we go.
So, let's jump in and get started.
| | 01:31 |
We're going to go to the Look tab here.
And the first thing we want to do is try
| | 01:36 |
to get some of this shadow and highlight
detail back.
| | 01:40 |
So, I'm going to go to offset and I'm
going to crush these blacks.
| | 01:45 |
I'm going to go over to gain and try to
add some highlights and like oh, look at that.
| | 01:50 |
It could just, it barely can do it there.
So, we're going to need to go into these
| | 01:55 |
individual sections here.
I'll go into Highlights.
| | 01:58 |
Add some more gain to the highlights.
And that's barely doing anything there either.
| | 02:03 |
Increase maybe the offset a little bit.
We could go back to the overall and again
| | 02:10 |
keep the shadows low there.
May be take the gamma down a little bit
| | 02:16 |
and we are starting to get something
that's fairly descent.
| | 02:21 |
We want to go in here and adjust the
contrast here a little bit to bring out
| | 02:25 |
some more of those shadows.
Maybe because of their tone gamma a
| | 02:30 |
little bit take that down that we have
more contrast going on.
| | 02:34 |
Shadow Gamma, take that down.
And it's not looking too shabby.
| | 02:42 |
However, as we go forward in time, we see
that that grade absolutely does not work.
| | 02:48 |
Because later in the clip, it pans up
right to the sky and it completely throws
| | 02:53 |
our histogram way off.
So, I'm going to back up towards the
| | 02:58 |
beginning here.
I'm going to hold down the Cmd key on the
| | 03:01 |
Mac, Ctrl key on the PC.
Grab this little icon, make a seperate
| | 03:06 |
play head and place it later in time
there.
| | 03:09 |
Okay, so now we can see what we're really
up against here so we could balance our
| | 03:15 |
grade between these two shots.
So, what I want to do here is first take
| | 03:21 |
down the highlights, I'm going to go over
all and I'll take the grain.
| | 03:25 |
If you can't grab the slider, you can
grab the top here and, and that kind of
| | 03:29 |
brings it back in, reigns it back in.
Now, what's challenging is that we're
| | 03:34 |
right now looking at a fairly decent
histogram.
| | 03:37 |
Because we're actually looking at a
histogram for this part of the clip on
| | 03:40 |
the left, from this first play head.
And we're not seeing this play head,
| | 03:44 |
which is what we're really concerned
about this part of the clip.
| | 03:48 |
Because this is really terrible it's
blown out really bad.
| | 03:51 |
So, what we can do is, and you'll notice
that this one is actually yellow or orange.
| | 03:57 |
And so what we want to do is, if we click
the number 2, that becomes the active
| | 04:00 |
clip, so to speak.
And then, we see the histogram for that
| | 04:04 |
particular clip.
So, now we're looking at the histogram
| | 04:07 |
for this part of the clip.
So, now we can take this down and again
| | 04:12 |
we lose a lot of the brightness here in
the waterfall by doing that.
| | 04:19 |
So, it's going to be a, a constant
juggling act as we go back and forth,
| | 04:23 |
trying to get these two parts of the clip
to both look good at the same time.
| | 04:28 |
So, you might want to go over to
highlights and we might to want to maybe
| | 04:32 |
take down offset a little bit.
Maybe increase the gamma, and that's okay.
| | 04:43 |
Let's go over to midtones, and increase
the offset a little bit of the midtones.
| | 04:50 |
And maybe increase the gamma and so we
have decision to make here.
| | 04:55 |
So, we can either blow out these
highlights so that the waterfall is
| | 05:00 |
properly exposed.
Or we can wash out, or make the waterfall
| | 05:04 |
a little bit too dark, but then have a
good solid dark trees here, which looks
| | 05:09 |
really cool.
And I found that because of all of this
| | 05:14 |
haze, I don't think we're going to get
really dark trees here.
| | 05:19 |
As much as I would love that to happen, I
don't think it's going to happen.
| | 05:23 |
So, I think that trying to find a balance
where they both look okay is going to be
| | 05:27 |
the best possible scenario, or at least
that's what I would choose to do.
| | 05:32 |
You may choose to do something different
than that and that's totally fine.
| | 05:36 |
And let's pump up the game here, see if
we can't get a good balance by increasing
| | 05:41 |
the gain, dropping the gamma.
So, we have like some good brights and
| | 05:47 |
some good shadows, as much as possible.
And there we have it.
| | 05:54 |
Now, another thing that might work for
you is that you don't just have to have
| | 05:57 |
one Primary Grading layer.
I could go to the +P here, create another
| | 06:02 |
primary grade, and then I could add more
gain there.
| | 06:06 |
And actually we've got to be careful,
we're blowing out these highlights.
| | 06:09 |
I could take the gamma down.
I could take the offset down and so we
| | 06:14 |
can keep stacking layers on top if that
is what is working.
| | 06:18 |
Another thing that I'd like to do is I
want to colorize this a little bit, this
| | 06:22 |
is really black and white.
And I think we can give it some character
| | 06:27 |
and life if we added some blue tones,
maybe some cyan, into the shadow areas especially.
| | 06:33 |
So, I'm going to go to the gamma and
bring this down or maybe not that much,
| | 06:37 |
just a little bit.
And then over right to offset, maybe very
| | 06:41 |
subtle, just a little bit here.
And also maybe in the, the highlights a
| | 06:47 |
little bit.
Actually not liking that in the
| | 06:50 |
highlights and maybe not even in gamma.
So, maybe we could just do this with offset.
| | 06:55 |
Okay, and maybe we could go over to
midtones and try that there, gamma for
| | 07:01 |
the midtones, a little bit of cyan tint.
Not liking what it's doing to the utmost
| | 07:08 |
highlights here, but we can go over to
the maybe the gamma of the highlights.
| | 07:13 |
And maybe warm that up to kind of
counteract that.
| | 07:18 |
Warm up those highlights just a little
bit there.
| | 07:21 |
Now, we have kind of grayer sky.
So again, it's a constant balance kind of
| | 07:25 |
going back and forth.
And what we can do now is press 0 on the
| | 07:29 |
numeric keypad and see the before and the
after.
| | 07:33 |
So, the after, honestly, is not super
impressive.
| | 07:37 |
There's some other problems that we need
to kind of fiddle with here and that
| | 07:39 |
might take a little bit longer.
And I think that there might be a better
| | 07:43 |
balance between these two shots if we
were to take longer.
| | 07:46 |
But that being said, what a difference as
we press again 0 on the numeric keypad to
| | 07:50 |
see the before.
What we started with and this clip on the
| | 07:54 |
right, you can't even tell what that is.
And then after a little bit of quick
| | 07:59 |
grading and SpeedGrade, we've made some
choices and now we have a much better
| | 08:03 |
looking shot.
And what I'm going to do is actually hold
| | 08:07 |
down the Cmd key on the second play head,
drag this away, actually I don't need to
| | 08:11 |
hold down the Cmd key.
Just drag it away oh, I need to make this
| | 08:16 |
one, the one on the left, the active
playhead, then I can drag this away.
| | 08:22 |
And now, we can play this back and now we
have this really cool, eerie clip with
| | 08:27 |
this haze, and I think that really works.
And again, I'm not happy with those
| | 08:34 |
highlight areas there.
I don't like the way that that came out.
| | 08:40 |
So, we need to go back and fix that so
that this looks all nice and great.
| | 08:48 |
But now, what a difference Color Grading
makes before and after.
| | 08:55 |
Very cool.
| | 08:56 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| What is a creative grade?| 00:02 |
All right, folks.
This is the fun stuff.
| | 00:03 |
We're going to talk about what a Creative
Grade is.
| | 00:08 |
And that's what we're going to look at in
this movie.
| | 00:09 |
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go
to the Media folder.
| | 00:12 |
I'm going to get this clip, this A014
blah, blah, blah, and add that to my timeline.
| | 00:19 |
Press D so that we can start working with
it.
| | 00:22 |
And I'm going to perform a very quick
basic grade.
| | 00:26 |
I'm going to go to the Look tab here, and
let's go ahead and raise this up and I'll
| | 00:30 |
take the offset down.
Keeping an eye on my histogram here, and
| | 00:34 |
we have some blues that we're going to
clip, but that's just what's going to happen.
| | 00:40 |
And I'm going to take the Gamma down so
I'm looking at the tree barks here.
| | 00:46 |
And I really want those to be dark.
There we go.
| | 00:51 |
And then, I'll go to the Gain and I'll
increase that, keeping an ever watchful
| | 00:56 |
eye on my histogram making sure I don't
break through those highlights right
| | 01:01 |
about there.
And then we can go back to Gamma, down a
| | 01:07 |
little bit, maybe go to the Gamma the mid
tones.
| | 01:11 |
Take that down 'til we have something
fairly nice here.
| | 01:16 |
And I might go back to the Gain and take
this down just a little bit.
| | 01:21 |
Okay, so there we have it, there's our
basic grade.
| | 01:26 |
I press zero on the numeric keypad, and
it was really washed out before and now
| | 01:29 |
it's this great, you know, beautiful shot
or whatever.
| | 01:33 |
So, it's just a basic color correction,
but this doesn't really tell a story.
| | 01:38 |
This is just a recording of what was
there.
| | 01:41 |
But I don't know if we're doing
something for documentary film making or,
| | 01:44 |
you know, some kind of a TV show or
whatever like a report in the news.
| | 01:49 |
And we don't really want to spin anything
or tell any kind of story or interpret
| | 01:53 |
anything, then I suppose this would work
just fine.
| | 01:57 |
But if we're film -making, if we're
making movies that we want to tell a
| | 02:00 |
story, we want this to be just a neutral
shot.
| | 02:04 |
And so, a Creative Grade is taking this
footage that's, for all intents and
| | 02:08 |
purposes, it looks fine.
You know, the contrast is good and all
| | 02:11 |
that kind of stuff, but a Creative Grade
takes the color and does something
| | 02:15 |
unusual to it.
An audience knows how to feel about this
| | 02:19 |
tree and this sun flare.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to
| | 02:23 |
create another Primary Grade layer.
And that way it's just totally separate
| | 02:28 |
from our initial balance of contrast
here.
| | 02:31 |
And let's play with the colors.
I'm going to go to the mid-tones here,
| | 02:36 |
and in the Gamma, I'm going to pull this
towards green a lot.
| | 02:42 |
Maybe not that much.
Dial that back just a little bit.
| | 02:45 |
Maybe go to the highlights.
I'll go to Gamma the highlights, and warm
| | 02:50 |
these up a little bit.
Maybe even go to the gain of the
| | 02:54 |
highlights and warm that up a little bit.
And then, we might need to go to our
| | 03:00 |
overall here and dial back the gain so
we're not blowing out anything.
| | 03:05 |
But now as we play this back, it has a
very distinctive retro feel to it.
| | 03:12 |
And this might not be your cup of tea,
this might not be your ideal creative
| | 03:16 |
grade, but we're going for something,
we're trying to express a message.
| | 03:22 |
With just a simple clip, just through
colors, and that is powerful.
| | 03:27 |
And as a colorist, we have the ability to
make people more intimidated, or make
| | 03:31 |
people feel more comforted by the color
choices that we use.
| | 03:36 |
And those color choices as we are making
interpretations like that, that is what's
| | 03:40 |
called a Creative Grade.
| | 03:42 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sample project: Hollywood blockbuster| 00:02 |
This drill we're going to take a look at
a common Hollywood blockbuster color
| | 00:06 |
grade, and see if we can't recreate it on
our own, from scratch here.
| | 00:12 |
Now the first thing we want to do with
this clip, is we want to make sure all
| | 00:15 |
the highlights and shadows are were they
need to be.
| | 00:19 |
Now, if we look at our Histogram, you
pretty much have some shadows, we could
| | 00:23 |
push this a little bit further in the
shadow department and our highlights are
| | 00:26 |
going right to the edge of our Histogram.
However if we look at the image itself,
| | 00:32 |
we know that we probably need a lot more
contrast here so I'm going to go to my
| | 00:35 |
overall setting and I'm going to take down
the offset to deepen our shadows.
| | 00:41 |
Often times when we tell stories, we want
to feel like we're seeing the most
| | 00:45 |
intense thing that's ever happened.
We don't want to see just a regular old day
| | 00:50 |
at the park or somebody's slowly waking
up and just eating cereal for a long
| | 00:54 |
periods of time like it would happen in
real life.
| | 00:58 |
We want to see drama and intensity and so
the colors often reflect that.
| | 01:03 |
So, I've done a good job, I think, in
darkening these shadows.
| | 01:06 |
These shadows are really rich.
You might need to come back to that as we
| | 01:08 |
start playing with the color.
But for now it's pretty good.
| | 01:10 |
And I'm going to increase the Gain and
normally I would keep it eagle eye on
| | 01:14 |
this Histogram to make sure I'm not
blowing up my highlights.
| | 01:18 |
But this spike of highlights is coming
from these highlights in the back from
| | 01:22 |
the window.
And they're already blown out.
| | 01:26 |
There's nothing we can do about it.
So what we really should be doing is not
| | 01:29 |
worrying about blowing that out because
that's already a lost cause.
| | 01:33 |
We should be looking at the robe because
the character really is the one that's
| | 01:36 |
important here.
So I want to make sure that we're not
| | 01:39 |
posterizing any of the highlights In this
row, but we can push this a little bit
| | 01:43 |
beyond what it was.
And again that's what we want to do here.
| | 01:47 |
We want to push the highlights as far as
they'll go without damaging them and same
| | 01:51 |
thing with the shadows.
We keep this really strong contrast.
| | 01:56 |
Now I suppose we could take it a little
bit further, but for right now I think
| | 01:59 |
that's pretty good.
What we want to do now is apply a
| | 02:03 |
Creative Grade.
Now here's how this works, the most
| | 02:07 |
important color in a film is going to be
skin tones, it's kind of this orangeish,
| | 02:12 |
reddish, pinkish blend.
No matter the race or how bright or dark
| | 02:18 |
the skin tone is, the hue, is about in
the same range.
| | 02:24 |
And you want to make sure and keep an eye
on that, because if that starts going
| | 02:27 |
sour, then your audience is going to
react negatively.
| | 02:31 |
For some reason, just because we spend
our whole life looking at skin tones I
| | 02:35 |
suppose, we know what looks healthy, we
know what looks right or wrong instinctively.
| | 02:40 |
So, you don't want to mess with those
skin tones too much.
| | 02:44 |
But what I want to do is I want to
basically exaggerate these skin tones by
| | 02:48 |
making everything either the color of the
skin tone or something that's very
| | 02:52 |
different like green in this case.
So I'm going to make the mid tones and
| | 02:59 |
highlights all kind of orangeish.
And I want to make the shadows all kind
| | 03:05 |
of greenish.
And we'll see what that looks like.
| | 03:09 |
This is very common in a lot of, you
know, again, big Hollywood blockbuster
| | 03:12 |
summer movies.
Transformers and stuff like that.
| | 03:16 |
What I'm going to do actually is I'm
going to go over to this area.
| | 03:20 |
And instead of using the Color Wheels, I
find this a lot easier to do if I go over
| | 03:24 |
to the sliders mode and I play with the
colors here.
| | 03:30 |
By default, these colors are all locked
and actually I find, if I'm going to be
| | 03:32 |
doing creative grades, I get better
results by going to the Shadows,
| | 03:35 |
Mid-tones and Highlights separately
rather than trying to make.
| | 03:40 |
Overall adjustments.
That typically doesn't work for me.
| | 03:42 |
So I'm going to go to Shadows.
And by default, these are all ganged together.
| | 03:47 |
So if I were to take, say for example,
the red channel down, this lock might be
| | 03:51 |
on, as it is here, and all these move
together.
| | 03:55 |
I've already unlocked these here and so
that's not blue and so we could move
| | 03:59 |
these separately which is what I want to
do.
| | 04:03 |
So what I want to do is in the Shadow
areas, both the Gamma and maybe the
| | 04:07 |
offset a little bit we want to increase
the green.
| | 04:11 |
So we are increasing the green and we're
going to go a little bit overboard here
| | 04:15 |
intentionally and we'll come back and fix
that in just a moment.
| | 04:20 |
Again, Color correction is this constant
back and forth, push pull.
| | 04:24 |
As you go back and forth between shadows
and highlights, and shadows and mid
| | 04:27 |
tones, and mid tones and highlights.
And also between different colors.
| | 04:31 |
So, some of this green is going to get
lost as we go over to the mid tones.
| | 04:36 |
And in making sure that Gamma is
unlocked, we want to take out some of the
| | 04:40 |
green from those midtones.
And also, some of the blue from those
| | 04:46 |
midtones as well.
And we might also want to go to the
| | 04:50 |
Highlights, this doesn't make as big of a
difference in this case.
| | 04:54 |
But we get a nice golden orange color
here, by taking out some of the green and
| | 04:58 |
some of the blue.
And that's looking pretty good.
| | 05:03 |
It's a little bit overdone, obviously.
But it's looking like we're in the ballpark.
| | 05:11 |
So we basically want the same orange hue
on the walls, on his hands, on the wood,
| | 05:15 |
and in his robe, and in the shadows we
all want to see.
| | 05:21 |
We would just want to see this green
there.
| | 05:23 |
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go
back to the color wheels and I'm going to
| | 05:27 |
now make some more adjustments.
So I'm going to go to overall and maybe
| | 05:32 |
crush the blacks a little bit more in the
offset.
| | 05:37 |
And maybe raise the gamma a little bit
for the midtones.
| | 05:42 |
And we also might want to just bump up the
Contrast even more there.
| | 05:47 |
And I also want to adjust the Saturation.
Now again we have two saturations.
| | 05:52 |
We have input saturation and we also have
final saturation.
| | 05:54 |
Now if we adjust the final saturation we
can take it all the way down.
| | 05:58 |
Let me hold Shift so it goes a little
faster, there.
| | 06:00 |
And we can get it all the way to gray.
Final Saturation again is the last
| | 06:05 |
saturation adjustment.
But Input Saturation is a saturation of
| | 06:09 |
the image before it goes through all of
our color grading.
| | 06:14 |
So this is almost like the beginning of
the image.
| | 06:17 |
So in other words all of the orange and
green that we've added to this image will
| | 06:20 |
be unaffected by Input Saturation, but
that same orange and green that we've
| | 06:24 |
added, would be effected by final
saturation.
| | 06:29 |
So as I take down Input saturation, we're
getting rid of the original color, and
| | 06:33 |
still keeping the orange and the green.
So you see I take this down really far,
| | 06:39 |
and we still have all that same beautiful
green, all that same beautiful orange.
| | 06:44 |
And now everything just seems to be a
more unified color pallet, even though he
| | 06:47 |
has a bright, beautiful lemonade here
with some red strawberries in it, it
| | 06:51 |
doesn't pop out as much.
It blends into the background.
| | 06:55 |
So now I can go back here and increase
the contrast even more after we've toned
| | 06:59 |
that down.
I might want to play with the gamma here.
| | 07:07 |
Just a little bit.
So now we can see the before.
| | 07:09 |
Which looks like just like a regular old
in house.
| | 07:13 |
And now this looks much more cinematic as
if there is going to be an explosion
| | 07:16 |
through the window at any second.
So again, the power here is being able to
| | 07:22 |
play with, in this case, these sliders to
adjust the color channels and play with
| | 07:27 |
that balance a little bit.
Another good rule of thumb is to come to
| | 07:32 |
your image after you've made color
corrections, and I'm going to click one
| | 07:35 |
of these like, midtones in his skull.
Maybe not like a super bright White
| | 07:39 |
highlight, and maybe not a dark shadow
area.
| | 07:41 |
But right there in midtones, and I guess
it will pop up if I click and hold my
| | 07:44 |
mouse down.
And it shows me what the original color is.
| | 07:48 |
Right there I can't drag my mouse to it,
but oh here we go.
| | 07:50 |
So this is the original color where my
mouse was and this is what the color is changing.
| | 07:55 |
See it's downward arrows so this is what
it was originally, this is what it is now.
| | 07:59 |
Here we get the original RGB values and
here we get the new RGB values.
| | 08:03 |
So I can put my mouse here and make sure
that my eyes are not deceiving me that
| | 08:07 |
this hasn't turned to some crazy green
color or something really off.
| | 08:12 |
So I want to make sure that skin tones
stay skin tones.
| | 08:16 |
So that being said, here we have a pretty
cool, Hollywood, blockbuster-ish color grade.
| | 08:27 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sample project: Horror movie| 00:00 |
In this tutorial, we're going to create a
pretty standard horror creative grade,
| | 00:06 |
and this really does wonders to footage.
Throughout the course of this training,
| | 00:14 |
we've been looking at this footage from a
movie I made.
| | 00:18 |
It's a horror movie, and this is actually
a nightmare sequence, and this women
| | 00:22 |
thinks that somebody is chasing her.
Like to catch up for some bad deeds that
| | 00:27 |
she committed.
But the problem is that these colors are
| | 00:31 |
all really warm, and there's a lot of
card board, It's just kind of boring and
| | 00:35 |
drab more than scary.
So, what we want to do is try to use
| | 00:39 |
color to make this seem like it's a very
scary place, and there's scary stuff
| | 00:44 |
going on.
So, what I've already done for you is I
| | 00:49 |
created a layer with a Vignette, there's
before, and after.
| | 00:54 |
And then I'm going to select this other
primary grade.
| | 00:57 |
I'll put that on top there, so the
Vignette's on the bottom.
| | 01:01 |
And then this primary layer's on top,
we'll have that selected.
| | 01:05 |
And now you just want to go through and
make sure that overall everything looks
| | 01:08 |
the way it should.
So, I'm going to go to the overall area and
| | 01:12 |
maybe crush some of the black just a
little bit.
| | 01:17 |
And maybe darken the Gamma for overall,
and then bump up the Gain, so everything
| | 01:22 |
is kind of bright.
So, again we're going for really high
| | 01:27 |
contrast here.
Now that's pretty much it for the regular
| | 01:31 |
old contrast grade.
But for the creative grade what we're
| | 01:35 |
going to do, we're going to take out the
red.
| | 01:38 |
Again as we look at the color wheel, the
opposite of orange and red on this color
| | 01:42 |
wheel is like cyan and blue.
So, what we're going to do to make the
| | 01:47 |
skin tones really pop, is we're going to
suck red out of the shadows and the
| | 01:51 |
midtones, and we'll watch what happens.
Again, for this I'm going to go over to the
| | 01:57 |
sliders by clicking this button here.
And I'm going to go to shadows, and I'm
| | 02:02 |
going to make sure that the gamma is
unlocked, so I can adjust them independently.
| | 02:08 |
I'm going to take red completely out of the
picture.
| | 02:11 |
Ooh, look at that, big difference.
And maybe a little bit from the offset as well.
| | 02:17 |
Doesn't make too big of a difference.
But lets go over to the midtones, and
| | 02:21 |
again make sure that gamma is unlocked
here.
| | 02:24 |
Then I'm essentially going to do the same
thing.
| | 02:27 |
I'm going to go to the red channel
essentially, and I'm going to remove red
| | 02:30 |
by dragging this to the left.
And now we're seeing a really big
| | 02:35 |
difference what's going on here.
So, we're still keeping a lot of the skin
| | 02:39 |
tones the same.
I can click and hold my mouse down again,
| | 02:43 |
and her skin tone really isn't too
affected.
| | 02:45 |
You can see that there are some
differences between the original and what
| | 02:48 |
it is now, but it's not radically
different.
| | 02:52 |
There's still a bunch of red and other
skin tones, and the different channels
| | 02:55 |
and the highlights and things like that
that are here in our skin tone.
| | 02:59 |
But everything else is all dark and
creepy.
| | 03:02 |
So, if I press 0 on the numeric keypad,
see a big difference between the before
| | 03:06 |
and the after after the color grade.
So, you play that back and now it
| | 03:11 |
definitely seems like there are things
wrong.
| | 03:15 |
And it's a combination of all those
things of all the components the vignette
| | 03:19 |
the high contrast and the lack of warming
red in the shadows and midtones.
| | 03:25 |
It creates a lot of tension and it also
creates a much more beautiful image
| | 03:30 |
because everything is mostly pulled to
cyan and red.
| | 03:36 |
And that just creates, again just, a more
pleasing and artistic image.
| | 03:40 |
We could, if we wanted to, tweak this is
a little bit more, too.
| | 03:43 |
We got to overall, I'll go back to the
color sliders or the color wheels.
| | 03:47 |
And we can adjust contrast, actually we
didn't need to do that.
| | 03:50 |
You needed to go back to the wheels for
the contrast but, and I could take down
| | 03:53 |
on the input saturation again.
So, that there's a little bit less but,
| | 03:57 |
in other words it's going to take some of
the red out of her face by doing that also.
| | 04:01 |
But typically horror movies are really
desaturated.
| | 04:05 |
And we might want to even keep up the
input saturation and then maybe take down
| | 04:10 |
the final saturation.
So, there's just not as much cyan or red
| | 04:14 |
in the final image and then here's what
we have.
| | 04:18 |
Again, more contrast, I always want more
contrast.
| | 04:24 |
And there we go, creepy.
So, just another quick little tip about
| | 04:28 |
how to create another creative grade in
SpeedGrade.
| | 04:34 |
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|
|
ConclusionGoodbye| 00:02 |
Well ladies and gentlemen, that is the
end of this training course.
| | 00:05 |
I want to thank you so much for watching
this, and I, I think you'll agree that
| | 00:09 |
SpeedGrade is just a, a wonderful
addition to Adobe's Production Premium
| | 00:13 |
Suite, it's really an incredible tool.
And its ability to grade so fast really
| | 00:21 |
is deserving of the title, SpeedGrade.
So I've had a wonderful time.
| | 00:26 |
Thank you again so much.
And on behalf of video to brain, I am
| | 00:29 |
Chad Perkins.
Thank you so much for watching.
| | 00:32 |
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