Advice for logical workflow for color correcting and color grading

I am an experienced user of PPRO CS5. I am a novice with color correcting and color grading. I am also just barely competant in AE CS5. It has been suggested that I use AE for color correcting my footage. Can you advise me as to the most logical workflow for doing this in coordination with PPRO CS5? Are there some tutorials that you recommend? I subscribe to Lynda.com and I think that they have some great tutorials, I am unsure as to where to begin looking and what to search for.
Thanks so much,
Lisa

lisaellensegal wrote:
I am an experienced user of PPRO CS5. I am a novice with color correcting and color grading. I am also just barely competant in AE CS5. It has been suggested that I use AE for color correcting my footage.
You can do it that way, sure. But you don't have to. You can accomplish quite a lot without leaving PPro. This has two major advantages. First, if you aren't using AE for anything else, it gets you out of using AE at all, so gets you out of climbing another set of learning curves.
Second, even if you are using AE for other things (I use AE to make motion lower thirds, for example), doing the work in PPro can improve exporting speeds. This is because AE gets restricted to a single processor core in some workflows as discussed in this thread and others (search around if you're interested). This can make exporting take 3x as long or longer, depending on how much footage has to be processed by AE.
So, how to do color correction without leaving PPro? Use either a luma corrector or luma curve effect to set black and white points, and contrast (use a waveform monitor to help). Then use a three way color corrector effect to get rid of any residual color casts (use the vectorscope to help, and the RGB parade, etc.).
If you find you have specific colors that need to be fixed, you can apply another three way color correction effect and use it to make that secondary color correction (for example I find the blue dyes used in many labels tend to fluoresce under fluorescent lighting, and has to be desaturated with a secondary color correction or it "blooms" on an HDTV -- IOW, it has to be made "broadcast safe").
If you want tutorials for using these tools, the ones on Creative Cow by Andrew Devis are quite good, and free. The ones on color correction with PPro cs6 start at tutorial number 47. There's a bunch of them. All good.
Finally, get a copy of Van Hurkman's Color Correction Handbook. May be the best technical book I've ever read, and it'll certainly point you in the right direction for doing color correction work regardless of which tools you use to do it.

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HT4589 Is there a recomended way to delete proxy and optimized clips once a project is completed and is ready for archive? also, can proxy and optimized clips be removed (to save space) once a project is ready for color correction and the original clips a

Is there a recomended way to delete proxy and optimized clips once a project is completed and is ready for archive? also, can proxy and optimized clips be removed (to save space) once a project is ready for color correction and the original clips are used

No, they are NOT the same as proxy or optimized.
When you add a clip to your timeline and, say, apply an effect to it, or superimpose a title on the clip, FCP X has to make many calculations to determine what color each pixel of each frame should be. If a section of your timeline is not rendered, it has to do all these calculations every time you play those frames. A render file has the frames already "calculated", so it plays fast and smoothly.
For simple compositions and a fast computer, you may avoid rendering completely - and you may also choose to only render the portions where playback stutters.
Render files can be safely deleted. FCP X can recreate them if needed (either automatically if you have "background render" on, or on demand, when you select the "render" or "render all" commands).

Advice for best workflow for catalogue production

We do several catalogues annually for some customers that are in the 80-120 page range. Each catalogue has between 1000 to 2000 products listed. The layout is based in sections and we use Indesign tables for the part number/description/key technical details/price/ The tables are not the same from product to product but vary depending on the type. So, for example, the number of columns and rows varies, the relative location of the price column changes (but is usually always the last right hand side one) and so on.
What we normally do is take an excel spreadsheet from the customer which is set up with multiple tables that follow the catalogue format, so we copy and paste the content from Excel to the appropriate Indesign table. The customer uses a LookUp function in Excel to maintain the price list monthly, and we do annual updates. The LookUp function searches another Excel file that has a data source from the accounts system, and so keeps the price and key data up to date (depending on the function).
What I would like to know, is there a better, more efficient way of doing this?
Is there a way for Indesign to lookup tabular data from Excel? In this way, what I am thinking, is that when the customer updates the price list spreadsheet from the accounts system (which is a 2 second task), we can then open the catalogue document (book actually) and automatically have Indesign update all the tables from the Excel document, then save the document to pdf.
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I've seen other people posting similar requests over the years so I know we are not alone in working this way.
Or are we actually better off sticking to the copy and paste table content replacement technique?
Any thoughts gratefully received. We're using Indesign CS4 on Mac.
Thanks,
Kevin

Thanks for the quick feedback.
I did try linking Excel to Indesign CS2 a couple of years ago on this job but found it a bit unreliable, maybe I'll try again in CS4.
I've not used table styles on this job - I'll need to take another look at that.
When we did the first iteration of this catalogue series using CS2 it was our first big job after switching from Quark Xpress so there were things I am sure we did wrong with regards to table set up. After completing that job I created a new Excel spreadsheet for the customer with all the tabular data from the catalogues in exactly the same format so we could copy and paste future corrections (at the time we used a table script that worked with CS2 for this). So in theory we may be able to link the two again (but I know the spreadsheet will need tweaking first!).
The problem I've had using table styles on this job was the number of variations in table layout in the documents. Having said that I need to look at the options on this again.
The whole catalogue is set up using a book with linked sections, unified styles and cascading master pages so making changes globally is relatively easy and consistent. Currently the tabular information is text styles (Character styles I think - need to check!).
I have no problem investing in a catalogue plug in provided it does help the workflow (as we do a few other similar jobs from time to time), but I'll need to take some time to try this out in detail. From the workflow I describe which product do you think would be more suitable?
Thanks again for the feedback. I'll take a look at what we can do and report back here as I'm sure others will be interested.
Thanks,
Kevin

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OK.
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on the cusp of being kick butt!
Comparing applications on a feature-by-feature basis is sort of a dangerous game of diminishing returns, especially when the ultimate consumer cares not a jot about how a service provider ultimately delivers the product.
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jPo

Adobe Premiere Pro Help | Color correction and adjustment

This question was posted in response to the following article: http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/color-correction-adjustment.html

Hi Ann,
I apologize for the incorrect screen shots. I will forward this thread to the new content and community lead, Mallika Yelandur.
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http://library.creativecow.net/devis_andrew/Color-Correction-2_Premiere-Pro/1
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Advice for logical workflow for color correcting and color grading

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