Color Correction Novice rounding home stretch w/ a Q

Hi,
So far, I've received some valuable advice & tips for my 1st attempts at color correction, esp since my production falls outside the normal applications. The help has been great!
I went thru my production and did scene by scene corrections, which lost most of its intimidation with enough practice. I still havent tackled the Keyframe approach to having corrections shift during the course of a scene - I'm hoping to escape without having to do that.
Heres my question -
I did all the corrections, with a calibrated external monitor, and then had the program render all the video effects. Then I chose "print to video". When the program ran, the colors were a little different overall than what I had set in the program (less orange, more pink) and in a few scenes (orig underexposed, but corrected in the process), the color shifted more radically, esp in the shadow / black values which fell greenish.
I didnt see any of this as I was correcting, and the signal path was the same when I printed to dvd, same monitor w/ no calibration changes.
Is this normal? Maybe these shifts happen more discreetly in reg productions, mine is a live stage shoot with a lot of red light.
Thanks for all the help, & Happy New Year
Duane
G5 tower Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Hi,
Thanks for all the info, I'm starting to look at ways of sending what I have to people who need to see it. The project will likely still require some tweaking so this isnt a final mastering step by any means. Just looking for something that looks as good as what I see on the monitor after rendering.
Its looking like (from the lasts posts) that 'out thru firewire -> dvd recorder' isnt the best choice & if I can keep it in the computer & flow it directly to its burner, the opportunities for problems can be minimalized.
I tried exporting to quicktime, that resulted in an FCP Quicktime file that took 3 hrs to create & was almost 13 gig. (program is 50 min) so it looked great but was too huge to put onto a disk.
If anyone has guidance in this area, I'd appreciate it. I'm gonna poke around in those options & then likely post a further question seperately on this subject. I want to get it onto a dv disc via toast 6 (I see Quicktime w/ Compression is an option so I'm gonna explore that)
Thank you all again for the correction help, in that 13 gig version, it looked really great (no green in shadow artifacts ! )
Regards,
Duane
G5 tower Mac OS X (10.4.2)
G5 tower Mac OS X (10.4.2)
G5 tower Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Similar Messages

Color correction novice back with a problem/question.

Hi,
I have been working on color correction for an edit of a live 2 camera shoot concert. Edits are almost all final. I dug into correcting color between the 2 cameras & after some practice got good results.
Tho, I noticed that corrections looked slightly different after rendering them, and again slightly different after exporting to full uncompressed quicktime video.
Saturation levels shifted (less), & some shots showed slightly different color balance. This is a unique shoot because the stage was fully lit in red light & red can be one of the most difficult colors in video (in my experience).
So I eventually started that vicious cycle of correcting not by eye but by anticipating what was needed to get a desired result after rendering & exporting... each time it was lengthy renders & exports before seeing the results.
So I had several versions of the project saved w/ different renderings, etc. All of this is stored on a 250 gig 2nd internal drive which I bought & installed just for editing. All files & edit lists etc were kept there.
So I'm trying to look at different versions after having to put the project aside for a couple of weeks, and every version I open shows me a list of render files that it says it can't find. I've just been choosing to re-render.
(I'm wondering if a routine session of running disk warrior on my drives could have contributed to this?? Thats the only thing I can think of, other than the OSX upgrade to 10.4.4, which also included a quicktime upgrade.)
I'm new at this so I'm trying to figure out if this disappearance of render files is normal? In one version I chose 'search computer for render files' or something to that effect & I watched it go thru my drives one after another & when it got to the 2nd internal drive (where all the render files should be), it spent about 1/10th the time that it spent searching other drives. It really jumped in & out of that drive really quickly.
Its not all the render files that are missing, I looked in the render folder & some have older dates, while a section of them are from tonite when I re-rendered. Then more with the older date.
Anybody have any advice?
Thanks for your help
Duane
G5 tower Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hi,
I have been working on color correction for an edit of a live 2 camera shoot concert. Edits are almost all final. I dug into correcting color between the 2 cameras & after some practice got good results.
Tho, I noticed that corrections looked slightly different after rendering them, and again slightly different after exporting to full uncompressed quicktime video.
Saturation levels shifted (less), & some shots showed slightly different color balance. This is a unique shoot because the stage was fully lit in red light & red can be one of the most difficult colors in video (in my experience).
So I eventually started that vicious cycle of correcting not by eye but by anticipating what was needed to get a desired result after rendering & exporting... each time it was lengthy renders & exports before seeing the results.
So I had several versions of the project saved w/ different renderings, etc. All of this is stored on a 250 gig 2nd internal drive which I bought & installed just for editing. All files & edit lists etc were kept there.
So I'm trying to look at different versions after having to put the project aside for a couple of weeks, and every version I open shows me a list of render files that it says it can't find. I've just been choosing to re-render.
(I'm wondering if a routine session of running disk warrior on my drives could have contributed to this?? Thats the only thing I can think of, other than the OSX upgrade to 10.4.4, which also included a quicktime upgrade.)
I'm new at this so I'm trying to figure out if this disappearance of render files is normal? In one version I chose 'search computer for render files' or something to that effect & I watched it go thru my drives one after another & when it got to the 2nd internal drive (where all the render files should be), it spent about 1/10th the time that it spent searching other drives. It really jumped in & out of that drive really quickly.
Its not all the render files that are missing, I looked in the render folder & some have older dates, while a section of them are from tonite when I re-rendered. Then more with the older date.
Anybody have any advice?
Thanks for your help
Duane
G5 tower Mac OS X (10.4.4)

My HD TV as NTSC Monitor for secondary color correction

Can I use my new Panasonic HD TV model TH-42PX80U as a NTSC monitor for secondary color correction using both Final Cut Pro out of a Macbook Pro intel? What cable I can use to conect via HDMI? Will the color acuracy will be similar to that of a NTSC color correction monitor? will my TV do a decent job for NTSC? THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!
I am not sure I have this HDMI cable to be use in my macbook pro does it comes with it?

Can I use my new Panasonic HD TV model TH-42PX80U as a NTSC monitor for secondary color correction using both Final Cut Pro out of a Macbook Pro intel?
Yes, but I would only trust it if you are going to be making DVDs, and ONLY if you properly set it up. I would not rely on it for broadcast color correction. The reason broadcast monitors exist is to have a standard...HDTVs don't have a standard. Go to best buy and look at all of them....none of them match. BUT, as a nice simple solution for DVD, I'd use it.
But the only way you are going to get a signal to it is with the Matrox MXO. It will do component to the monitor, or you can get a DVI to HDMI adapter...if you do that the MXO software will allow you to set the monitor up to color bars. That option is only available from of the DVI out of the box.
Will the color acuracy will be similar to that of a NTSC color correction monitor?
No...it would be similar to color correcting NTSC on your home television...because that it what it is.
will my TV do a decent job for NTSC?
I doubt it. Taking an SD image and blowing it up huge on this HD TV...scaled up. I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't use it for SD color correction.
I am not sure I have this HDMI cable to be use in my macbook pro does it comes with it?
You have a DVI port on your MacBook Pro. And they make DVI to HDMI cable adapters I'm sure.
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ross_shane/MXO.php
Shane

Color Correction changes when Canvas is re-sized?

I have an Apple Cinema Display 22 inch (pre-HD model) and am working with some DVCPRO-HD footage that has been turned black and white using the 3-way CC filter. We wanted to do a quick pass on it and get the contrast as consistent as possible before we spend the money going in somewhere with an HD CRT (hopefully) for the final 'contrast tweaks'. My question is this: When the project is arranged in a 'Color Correction' layout, the 'Excess Luma' range check gives us a green check mark on certian clips; however when the canvas is stretched and re-sized to give us a bigger viewing area, we get an 'exclamation point' on the same clips -- even though the dots still look the same (good) in our waveform monitor. Why does re-sizing the canvas -- making it bigger -- violate the range check? That shouldn't bel. Should we just ignore it, and pay attention to the waveform monitor?

My guess is that when you expand the window, you reveal ALL of the pixels or something, and if the image is at 100%, you should be able to rely on the range checking tool report.
Jerry

Color Correction for Web

This is sort of a generic post questions. I am working on a project for the web. My final output will be to Digibeta. How do others approached color correcting in this situation? Being the computer monitors generally have such different characteristics than a traditional TV. In the past I correct as if I was going to air but this sometimes makes the online videos over saturated and contrasty. I realize there is really no web standard yet but wonder if anyone out there does a lot of web stuff that has any tips.

sRGB is the recommended color space for internet application.< </div>
You'd need to provide some documentation to support that statement.
sRGB is not necessarily meaningful beyond photographic applications. sRGB was designed to roughly reproduce color regardless of local profiling. The sRGB standard was created in 1996 to, among other things, create a smaller number of colors to increase the likelihood of correct reproduction in printing photographs, The mere presence of Microsoft on the list of supporting companies is reason enough to be skeptical.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleI d=67719
When an RGB image from a high-end scanner or other device is imported into an SRGB environment, however, some color information is lost. What SRGB offers is a lowest-common-denominator view of images in business applications and on Web sites.< </div>
This from the wiki:
As the recommended color space for the Internet, sRGB should be used for editing and saving all images intended for publication to the WWW. Images intended for professional printing via a fully color-managed workflow, e.g., prepress output sometimes use another color space such as Adobe RGB (1998), which allows for a wider gamut.
Images intended for the Internet and created in one of the other color spaces may be converted to sRGB when editing, using a suitable editing program, e.g., Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop; ideally, the original non-sRGB file should be saved and the conversion to sRGB done on a copy, as some loss of image information occurs when converting to another color space.
Due to the standardization of sRGB on the Internet, on computers, and on printers, many low- to medium-end consumer digital cameras and scanners use sRGB as the default (or only available) working color space. Used in conjunction with an inkjet printer, an sRGB image produces what is often regarded as satisfactory for home use. However, consumer-level camera LCDs are typically uncalibrated, meaning that even though the image is being labelled as sRGB, one can't conclude that the image is color-accurate on the LCD.
The two dominant programming interfaces for 3D graphics, OpenGL and Direct3D, have both incorporated sRGB. OpenGL 2.1 incorporates sRGB textures first introduced by the EXTtexturesRGB extension. OpenGL's EXTframebuffersRGB extensionsupports rendering into framebuffers assuming either a linear or sRGB color space. DirectX 9 supports sRGB textures and rendering into sRGB surfaces using Direct3D.<
bogiesan

Secondary Color Correction End Softness

Here is a little something that has driven me insane across all versions (sans 8.1 which doesn't work on my machine)...
Lets say you are using secondary color correction to mask out the sky above a mountain range - you know, like every single video tutorial on the subject does - so you get it dialed in as much as you can until you are left with that nasty pixel fakey line along where the heavens meet the earth which screams "hey look everyone this guy is faking the sky color here". But you don't admit defeat yet and you of course go for that trusty almost magical "End Softness" slider. You drag it a bit and see that it indeed does blend/feather/fix your SCC mask up quite nicely except one glaring problem. The End Softness adjustment has also feathered in the very far left/right outside edges of your clip/frame as well - rendering the usefulness of the secondary color correction ... well... completely non-useful.
If it helps to clarify what I mean, the unwanted side effect I am describing also happens when you use Gaussian blur (premiere, photoshop, etc) but is remedied when you simply check the little "Repeat Edge Pixels" box.
Anyone else ever have their secondary color correction attempts utterly deflated by this occurrence?

I would imagine it is something to do with how softness or blurring samples surrounding pixels. When you reach the edge of the frame the edge pixels won't haven't neighbours all the way round for the effect to look at. As you said it is like the gaussian blur. Why there is no 'Repeat Edge Pixels' option, I don't know. I think you are possibly wasting your time asking the why on these forums. As long as you can get to the how, then be happy you achieve the desired outcome you are after

Best conditions for Color Correcting

Hi
If I'm color correcting at home, what are the best conditions to have in my room?
Probably not near a window, daylight, even without direct sunlight seems to change things. Maybe not even direct lighting from lights.
Any tips, suggestions?
best
elmer

Hello elmerlang,
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
To calibrate your display follow the steps in the article below:
OS X Mavericks: Calibrate your display
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13768
Take care,
Alex H.

I just LOVE Color Correcting in FCP X

Don't ask me about the technical stuff but for some reason, I can now get great color (colour really) from some clips I shot back in 2006. The stuff I shoot these days is usually very consistent but these old clips muddy and have severe colour casts.
The new Color Board in FCP X seems to cope really well.
Being able to drag either of the four buttons to the colour that needs adjustment, slide it up or down for a rough adjustment, and then a tiny bit to the left or right to perfect the job is so user-friendly.
I disliked the old color wheels on FCP Studio, where it all seemed much less precise unless you were able to move a mouse in a perfect circle.
Anyone else have any thoughts on it?

My on-going off-and-on project has been editing and moving my old home movies to DVD so they can languish away digitally instead of as VHS tapes. (This includes quite a few Super-8mm films which were converted to VHS in the mid 80s, so its still all VHS.)
Sprinkled in with this are more current home movie projects such as "How we spent our year" Travelmentaries (commonly called vacation movies), and an annual DVD of our Boy Scout Troop outings for the year.
First I have to say, this has all been hobby and goes along in fits and starts. FCP 3 got old and clunky when it had to be pushed thru Rosetta like a meat grinder, and I messed with iMovie until FCE 4 came along. If I had dedicated myself, probably would have finished all the VHS stuff long ago, but mostly worked on stuff when it occurred to me that peeps in the Super-8 stuff, for instance, might actually enjoy seeing it all again 40 years later. And the color correction stuff was tedious and wearing, making anticipation of the next project less inviting.
In all this, doing a limited amount of color correction and sharpening worked pretty well. But I have to say that having all the parts (color, saturation, exposure) right there working the same with the same 4 "grab and drag" method has actually made the whole job far less imposing.
The one thing I miss about the color wheel, however, is that whatever color over-tinted the clip, dragging the "button" directly away from it pretty much settled the problem. For instance, if shot inside with the yellowish incandescent tinting, blue was the color needed, and it was opposite yellow.
It took a bit to get used to the color bar's method of removing yellow in maybe light tones area and adding a little blue, perhaps, in the mid-tones. But I also quickly found that by playing with the exposure in either area, I can sharpen those old fuzzy VHS tapes -- something I never noticed was happening until I tried it. The sharpen effect works pretty good as a start (used unsharp mask in FCE), but the color bar really sharpens things up, if not overdone.
Personally, I find I am anticipating spending lots of time on my "restoration" projects now, all because of the ease of use and power of FCPX. I finally finished one I started (converting the VHS tapes to DV) in 2009, although in all fairness, it was an extra four hours left over after having processed at least as much at the time. (To make things less intimidating, I have also moved the VHS player and now convert the tapes directly to disk using an otherwise now unused Canon DV camera as an AV to DV convertor.
But I am certainly one of those apparently targetted by Apple with the new FCPX at the expense of losing their loyal professional base. And the Color Bar's ease of use is a major part of that.

Color correction hardware advice

Hi all,
I've been a video editor by trade for the past 3 years or so, but have only finally gotten around to investing in my own personal studio. I recently purchased a MacPro and am looking into broadcast monitors for color correction.
The main question deals with Intel compatibility and the hardware out there.. I'm curious what other user's experience has been. I'm going back and fourth between a Blackmagic card and a deck like a DSR-11. Anyone have any advice? The big thing to keep in mind is that I've been editing in-house at the companies I've worked for and have little experience setting up hardware. Thanks in advance!
cheers,
Adam Weinberg

hi Adam
its not all happening in the box alone. if my understanding is correct, you also install drivers which hook into the system to manipulate the DVI output in order to provide the necessary signal to the device. similarly, the drivers, allow FCP to hand off some of the processing to the extermal device, hence the hardware acceleration.
not sure this is the option you want though. if you're trying to set up a home studio, you may be better off looking for a suitable Decklink or Kona card as they will offer you far greater options for both input and output .
cheers
Andy

Do all editing before any color correction?

I have just gotten final cut pro x.
I have some experience (very limited a couple of years back, with a Sony Home Movie Studio Platinum).
I am shooting my own music video.
Really enjoying using FCPX atm. Niggles aside (the lack of a manual save feature)
Just curious about workflow/resources.
Should I do all my editing, prior to color correction from a resources standpoint.
Does it make it slower, rendering say a zoom in the transform function with color correction applied, than without?
Eg, I have a clip, I put a keyframe and start and end of the clip. Then I scale the clip to 105% on the end of clip keyframe
to simulate a zoom in.
Should I be doing all that kind of editing, then applying any color correction or video type effects?
cheers
Wiz

Should I do all my editing, prior to color correction from a resources standpoint.
That's the SOP for working with professional video. You organize your media, you edit your media, you mix your audio, you add your transitions and titles, add effects and motion, color correct your video.

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.

Color Correction Quality Loss Computational Problem.

I have an entire film finished editing, all color graded etc...
And I recently decided I want to go more conservative with the color palet.
If I simply overlay a color correction over the entire film sequence. Would I lose more quality than I would lose by going back through and readjusting the color balance on every clip?
I guess this is basically a question of how Premier calculates it's color correction. Does it save it's numeric values in a largr than neccessary floating point number or does it have to do rounding at each step?

I think that what Ann is asking is how did you do your color grading, i.e. 3-Way Color Corrector, etc.
Now, I am at a loss as to what you are now asking about. Which Effects are you now thinking about?
If it would be, say Fast Color Corrector, 3-Way, etc., then you might want to Nest your Sequence into another one, and apply that desired Color Correction Effect to the entire Nested Sequence.
Good luck,
Hunt

FCP export to Vegas for color correction

I work in FCP, I don't have the best eye for color, so I'm having a friend do the color correction with a PC, using Magic Bullet and some other software. Rather than exporting the entire film, or entire scenes, which he'd have to go back and cut into individual shots in order to edit them all individually with their own color treatment, he has me exporting every shot from the film and exporting them to his harddrive or DVDs for him to work on. I've been doing it a scene at a time. It's incredibly tedious, very easy to screw up (if a shot goes a few frames long and under another shot, for example, it's out of sync, and if I forget a shot, mislabel a shot, get out of order when labeling them, etc, it's out of sync, etc), and I'm sure, at some point, I'm going to screw it up and it's going to be very annoying. Is there any more practical way to do this so that he has the markers, the shots are cut already, etc, but he doesn't have to reconstruct it from a thousand shots I've exported one at a time? I don't want to make him go back and make all the cuts himself, either, though that actually seems slightly easier to me.

"I don't have the best eye for color" means I'm color blind. I don't appreciate the "learn the 3 way" comments. You can learn to drive a manual all you want, but if something in your brain tells you train tracks are highways, you're bound to run into trouble. And a train.
The other editor lives an hour away, and he hates working on a Mac. He came here once and tried to edit using my system, but he couldn't get the hang of it. Add to that he came an hour each way to do that, and I had to pay for his gas, that made it very expensive, timely venture. It also means he'd have to have, say, at least 4 hours set aside each time he wanted to edit, to travel here and make it worth his time to do so. At home, he can do it anytime.

Why is my rendered color corrected movie pixelated with jagged edges after rendering?

Hello All,
I am new short film movie producer and have just started using Adobe Premiere CS6 and Audition CS6. Comparing my flat footage before adding it to a sequence and color correcting it and rendering it, it looks fair. But after all these transitions it now looks pixelated along with very jagged edges. This is my first short film for my first client and I am at my witts ends! I have tried to copy the sequence and transfer it to a new sequence with differnt settings comparing the pixel aspect ration, fps, trying to match the clips specs and I am so stuck. Can anyone please offer any suggestions or let me know if there are procedures I have overlooked. Thanks Adobe Community.
Michael Diaz

Let's back up a step - what camera do you use? If it's an HDV model, then yes you have anamorphic footage. Simply choose an HDV sequence preset to match. If your camera shoots 720p or full 1920x1080, those are square pixel (1.0) formats and are not anamorphic (anamorphic does NOT mean widescreen, it means "stretched to widescreen" basically).
In any case, drag a clip to the New Item button for best results until you get more educated and confident about the different formats you may be working with.
If you copied and pasted the contents of the SD sequence into an HD sequence, all filters and effects you had applied before should remain intact and not need reworking, except possible for titles and things involving scaling (since the size has changed).
As for exporting, you typically will NOT want an anamorphic export, except for widescreen DVD. You will not see anamorphic mentioned though, just choose "MPEG-2 DVD" and an appropriate widescreen preset and Adobe knows what to do from there. For web/computer viewing, best to avoid anamorphic footage, since many players assume 1.0 PAR and do not adjust the image for non-square pixels. So if working with 1440x1080 footage, and exporting to web or YouTube for instance, export as 1920x1080 (1.0) or 1280x720 (720p) so the viewer sees the proper 16:9 output, or the image may be squished otherwise!
Thanks
Jeff

3 way Color correction FCPX - eye dropper - whites/mid/black color picker -

- In every shot with my AF100, after a WHITE BALANCE - I shoot a white/grey/black card http://tinyurl.com/greycards
- In FCP 7, in 3 way color correction, I use the eye dropper to pick each of these, this works very well,
as opposed to guessing at what is white, grey and black in any shot.
Question:
How do I do this in FCP X ?
What technique can I use for this trick which has worked well for my color grading.
Thanks,
Rob

I'd love learn specifically what makes the color bar "better".
Here is my comment which I recently left on a similar thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/19082591#19082591
The eye dropper in the 3 way CC was an amazingly efficient way of getting color balance.
Not only is it easy but also was a very intuitive way for less experienced users to grasp how color is distributed.
This new brain-dead approach of color matching in FCPX is inconsistent and doesn't help novice users really get a grasp on the fundamentals of color grading.
If Apple doesn't return the 3 way CC hopefully someone will write an affordable 3rd party plug that brings back this functionality.
Here's a short youtube tutorial illustrating how simple white balance is in FCP7.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d3rlRUXz4M
Here's a tutorial on how it's now done in FCPX. (The kid comments on the ridiculous absence of the eye dropper.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX3nsIm5oKg
Decide for yourself which is more intuitive and logical.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html

Color Correction Novice rounding home stretch w/ a Q

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