From the course: Final Cut Pro X Guru: Color Correction

Working with HDR footage - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X Guru: Color Correction

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Working with HDR footage

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- To successfully color grade HDR footage in Final Cut Pro 10, you should have a dedicated HDR monitor, and make sure your projects are set to the appropriate HDR settings. In this movie, we're going to explore how we can set up our projects and preferences to work with HDR, and some effects available in the effects browser for HDR workflows. In the last movie, what we did was we went up to the library level, here, in Final Cut, and we went to our inspector, and we changed our type of library from a standard to a wide gamut HDR, and we're about the see the options that it gives us for projects, when we're working in HDR, in this movie. So here, under my Chapter 6 folder, I'm going to go to the file menu, go to new, project, and one thing that we want to see here is that it's currently set to automatic settings, and we're going to choose custom settings. While default color space is set to color space rec 709, because we chose the wide gamut library, we have access to three additional project color spaces. Rec 2020 was available before 10.4, which did the actual toning that was described in the previous movie. These other two allow for two different types of HDR workflows. One, the HLG, I believe, which will allow you to work with not only high dynamic range, but if you also have to deliver for standard dynamic range, this is the one that you'd probably want to choose. PQ, supporting certain type of camera workflows, as well as delivery for Dolby. So, you have these two choices for HDR workflow, and once we select either one of them, if we had the appropriate HDR footage, we could take advantage of this project. So, let me just press okay, and one thing I want to show under the footage, when we made our projects HDR, certain formats, or certain clips that are HDR, what's going to happen is that they're going to appear a lot brighter. Most notably, this field shot, and this other shot here, as well, are being affected, because we're pretending, in this case, that they are HDR clips, and on certain monitors, their colors might appear to be blown out, specifically your computer monitors if you don't have an appropriate HDR monitor. If I go to the Final Cut menu and choose preferences, I do want to draw your attention to one thing in terms of working with HDR, and that is, if you look under your playback menu, notice that you can show HDR as raw values, and this is now showing how the original clip looks, without the HDR settings, which are, basically allow you to show brighter pixels. Your computer screen is unable to see these. Your HDR monitors are. Another big difference, here, specifically depending on the type of footage that you bring in the timeline, has to do with the way your video scopes are displayed. If I bring up my video scopes, although this is not the appropriate type of HDR footage, some of the options that come available for units happen to be nits, which are a lot more longitude and latitude when dealing specifically with extending the bright and shadow details of your shot. So, you get a lot more range. That range is not going to translate onto your computer monitor, but on the external monitor, it will. Although, you're allowed to work with this incredibly large high dynamic range workflow, and your monitor doesn't go to that extreme amount, Final Cut has supplied you, under the effects browser, with a series of HDR effects. So, if I select my effects browser, and we go into the color area, specifically, you'll see that there are a series of HDR tools, and some of these HDR tools allow us to choose which mode of signal we're exporting out to, how those signals perform, as well as tone maps that we might want to apply for certain monitors. So, just keep that in mind that we have these HDR tools available for us, here, for working with our HDR workflow, and choosing this project, keep in mind that we can take this HDR workflow all the way to export, to deliver HDR content to the world.

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