Where to put color correction into workflow

I am having fun going through some 1200 images from a 2 week trip in Montana, Wyoming... lots of blue and green and a few snow capped mountains. As I work through the several I would like to print big, where would you place color correction in the workflow.... I use levels (the sliders), highlights/shadows, and saturation mostly. And then color correction somewhere in here.
Thanks.

Peter,
I agree with Jim that the order may change but as a general practice if I need to adjust color I do it after any lighting (levels or shadows/highlight) changes since they usually change the color in my pictures. Most of the time I adjust saturation selectively particularly if sky and/or water are concerned. As a final step I apply various amounts of unsharp mask. From the 3 cameras I have owned (2 Olympus and the current Panasonic) I have never found a picture that couldn't be greatly improved either overall or selectively by LIGHT application of usm.
Being basically lazy I always give Auto Smart Fix a shot as a first try and either go from there or undo it. :)
Bob

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Thanks for thoughts.
Peter F.

Peter,
I agree with Jim that the order may change but as a general practice if I need to adjust color I do it after any lighting (levels or shadows/highlight) changes since they usually change the color in my pictures. Most of the time I adjust saturation selectively particularly if sky and/or water are concerned. As a final step I apply various amounts of unsharp mask. From the 3 cameras I have owned (2 Olympus and the current Panasonic) I have never found a picture that couldn't be greatly improved either overall or selectively by LIGHT application of usm.
Being basically lazy I always give Auto Smart Fix a shot as a first try and either go from there or undo it. :)
Bob

Where Would You Color-Correct in This Workflow?

I shot talent in front of a green screen. I am putting the pre-liminary edit together in FCP. From there, I'll use Automatic Duck to move the project to After Effects. There, I'll use Keylight to remove the greenscreen using Keylight. Then I want to insert a solid orange background and eventually return to FCP. Given gamma issues going back and forth with FCP/AE and the potential for an alpha channel I'm curious where one should color correct the talent.

why not shoot the talent against orange and save yourself a lot of work?
There's a lot to be said about practicals, but it takes a lot of lighting if you want an "electronically flat" background. Even the lens will be working against you. White is particularly difficult.
But if you still wanted to engineer the shot as a matte-screen, why not use the target bg colour as the matte colour? Because of how cameras and codecs work. Its a fundamental issue.
Usually there's a primary sensor which is producing a tristimulus representation of the scene. Then those values are perverted and compromised in ways that allow it to be stored in an economically feasible way. If only there was a way of recording the original sensor values that didn't require a skyscraper full of recording medium! I'm thinking specifically about the so-called "4K" RED and what you would actually need to store an RGB motion picture file of about 45.59 MegaBytes per frame. And even then there would be issues with the de-Bayering.
Until further notice, orange is a combination of all three values of red, blue and green. Mattes work better with a single primary like blue or green. Red is out for obvious reasons (flesh tone), and blue is usually regarded as too low-luminance and noisy to be useful. Green it is.
Green is also the major Luminance contribution (about 60%) to the Y signal in YCbCr, so its a better choice. Its a trade-off that will require de-coding and spill control, but this is our reality.
So, shooting it as intentioned -- maybe. You would still need a fair amount of time and effort to do it right -- spill, flare, evenness, footprints on the set, cyclorama blending... let me count the ways...
jPo
Message was edited by: JP Owens

How to put measures correctly into spreadsheet

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I loaded data into a planning model, and I can see data in BW and BEX, but when I put 'ACCOUNT' into row, and 'TIME' into column, I can't see 'measures' in spreadsheet, eventhough I drag 'measures' into spreadsheet from EPM pane, then update, getting blank for 'measures', it is gone. please tell me how to put measures correctly into spreadsheet.

P.S If you are creating report by drag n drop on EPM pan, then same way need to add measure dimension in desired axis.
Share the screen shot.
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Batch Exporting Color Corrected Clips, QT issues

Hello,
I work for a small ad company with a couple guys on the road shooting video, a video editor(me) and a few graphic designers. For company workflow reasons I take video footage from guys on the road and export to Quicktime movies(5-50 per client, 5-10 sec. apiece) and give to graphic designers, they then use After Effects and Motion to lay graphics on and lay out vid for ad.
1. I generally capture the whole tape.
2. I select Ins/Outs from that tape and make (lets say) 50 clips in timeline.
3. I make all clips independant and rename in order 1-50
4. (THIS IS WHERE PROBLEM STEMS) I color correct all clips using 3 wheel color corrector
5. I pull all 50 clips (numbered, color corrected) into a client bin
6. Right Clip bin, Batch export.
7. Check Use In/ Out , Make Self Contained, Prefix .Mov, Quicktime movie using MPEG 4compressor, best quality, and set destination.
8. Hit Export
The result is a Quicktime Movie that has sound but is frozen on first frame of video.
Normally this process works perfect and I have no issues with QT. Step 4 is something that I would like to incorporate but everytime I try I get the issues with Quicktime.
Thanks ahead of time for help, hope I gave someone enough to go off of.
I.V.

If you drag the clips from the timeline to a bin and select them all and choose batch export and set the option to export in to out, it should work. Not sure about the naming option, but I suspect it'll work. Do a test first.

Color Correction Workflow Question

If I am color correcting on the "original clip" - and then pulling that color corrected "original clip" into its own "clip sequence" that I then pull into a "master sequence", along with all the other "clip sequences" that make up my edit, and I am trimming those "clip sequences" to get just the snippet I need...
Is that creating a longer rendering time than if I...
Do not color correct on the actual "original clip" - still put the "original clip" into its own "clip sequence" - trim and resize that "clip sequence" to just the snippet I need, and then do the color correcting on that "clip sequence" instead of the "original clip" itself?
I'm hoping there is no descernable difference in the approach, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Thanks.

Good enough for me.
BTW Jim the workflow set-up you held my hand through (http://forums.adobe.com/message/5522489#5522489) is what I'm utilizing here - so far it has truly changed the way I approach everything for the better.

Workflow KeyLight Before Color correction?

WHat is the best workflow when working in green screen.
Should the color removal (green screen). in Keylight come before any color correction?
In this specific case I am dealing with a medium shot of a person. Talking head, not much movement.
I assume getting rid of the green screen should come first since then I am only am dealing with the remaining image (specifically the medium shot of the person.) For example, I need to enhance the hue a bit on the person's face, and it seems to me that first getting rid of the green, making it alpha/transparent, first makes sense.
Or does it?
Thanks
Rowby

rowby wrote:
...seems to me that first getting rid of the green, making it alpha/transparent, first makes sense.
Or does it?
Generally - yes, but you may find situations, where pre-key adjustments are unavoidable. The real question is, whether the green is green enough, if you get my meaning. There may be situations, where you need to compensate for insufficient lighting or color shifts from non-ideal lighting conditions (sunlight shifting colors, for instance). In those cases, you would try to clean up the green as much as you can without regard to the rest of the footage - as long as they facilitate generating a clean matte, nobody will mind. Once you have gnerated a proper Alpha, it is easy to introduce it into an untreated footage via matte modes and channel operations. That's the one thing you should keep in mind. In most cases of course you will want to do a direct key and if there is enough contrast, there should be no problems. Indeed you would then do the color correction after the key. This also applies to compressed footage like HDV or AVCHD - any pre-key corrections may in fact have an adverse effect and make things harder, as they also increase the intensity of artifacts. Anyway, all theory aside, you only know when you try. The more you do this stuff, the better wil lyou be able to gauge what's required.
Mylenium

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.

AE CS6 - 3D Compositing and Color Correction workflow

AE CS6 - 3D Compositing and Color Correction workflow
Hello everybody,
I have some questions about work flow in AE concerning compositing and Color Correction. I saw many tuts about (f.e. Lynda.com Premiere Pro Color Correction and Enhancement... and tuts by Andrew Davis here in creative.cow).
Essentially, he have this CC work flow:
GRADING (primary and secondary)
Adjusting Tonality (Brightness and Contrast)
Adjusting Colors (White balance and fix color dominance)
MATCHING
Conforming colors of different clip shoted with different camera and lighting set up.
ENANCHING LOOK
Giving to all clips a unique "look"
But what does it happen if we have NOT just some clips but ALSO a 3D object (rendered in a 3d sw or, actually also a 3d object inserted by 3D Element by videocopilot)
or/and
a keyed clip from a green screen shot?
How does this footage (3d object and green screen keyed shot) transform
the aforementioned work flow?
We have to consider that this footage (3d object and green screen keyed shot) must to be pre-multiplied to make a right compositing but when you make CC it must be again "straight"... (NOT pre-multiplied)
Is really hard also understand how dale this work flow between AE and Pre Pro if you want to make CC in Pre Pro after compositing in AE.
I try to present a work flow for this (very common) situation:
I have a landscape clip as a background
a keyed clip (pre-multiplied) with a Character watching sky
and a 3d (pre-multiplied) object U.F.O. on sky.
When I have done compositing, how make I a right CC of all footage if I have two clip (3d object and green screen keyed shot) still pre-multiplied?
I think, but I'm not sure, that should be a good idea to send to Pre Pro a composited Comp with separate layers (by dynamic links) to have all single separate layers (Background, 3d object and green screen keyed shot.. but also the Color Warping...!). Than, in Pre Pro you should make a CC (Grading) just for a BG and than try to Match (Matching) this color corrected BG with 3d obj and keyed shoot. But we have a problem at this point cause our 3d object and green screen keyed shot are still pre-multiplied, and before make matching we have to re- multiplied theme, but how? And if we re pre-multiplied them, compositing will be also right?
Or maybe, before exporting comp from AE to Pre Pro, he have to create both layers for 3d object and green screen keyed shot, one pre-multiplied and one "Stright"? But, again, how to combine them to have a right compositing and a a right CC?
Anybody can help me to understand or maybe suggest any tuts to dale this common issue in AE- Pre Pro?
Many, many thanks!

Dave is correct. (And so is Mylenium. No need to be rude, when he was jsut trying to explain that you were introducing unnecessary complexity.)
The color matting is removed to interpret the alpha channel when you import the footage. After that, any color correction that you do to a layer based ont hat footage item doesn't have anything to do with whether the channels were straight or premultiplied for the source item.
You color-correct your individual items to amke them match as part of the compositing process in After Effects. Then, if you want to do a color grade of the shot in Premiere Pro along with other shots, you'd be working on the single rendered/flattened composite, so the details of the original elements that went into the composite are irrelevant.

I exported my iBook and got the .ibooks file on my Desktop(iMac Retina 5K), I tried to put the file into the iBooks application but I get a message that says "The file "______.ibooks" couldn't opened because it isn't in the correct format.

I exported my iBook and got the .ibooks file on my Desktop(iMac Retina 5K), I tried to put the file into the iBooks application but I get a message that says "The file "______.ibooks" couldn't opened because it isn't in the correct format. I took the same file and transferred it in my MacBook Air and was able to put it in the iBooks application no problem, the MacBook Air runs OS X v 10.9.5
Please advise as to Why it would work on an older OS X version as oppose to the newer OS X Yosemite
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JP

Thanks Lyra,
I may be doing something wrong because looking at the "Purchased" in iBooks I only see all the books that I actually purchased, none of the iBooks that I created in iBooks Author shows up. I can re-download all the iBooks I've purchased and some in iCouds, but the ones I've created in iBooks Author are no where to be found.
Any help is much appreciated,
Best Regards,
JP

Workflow for Green Screen Multicam, Color Correction. (CC 2014)

Hi
What is the best workflow to do a music video shot with 7 cameras (each with 4 takes) on a green screen which would also include green screen stills.
All shot with Consumer Grade cameras at 1920/1080 at the highest resolution (I think 30 fps)
The way I am going about is not efficient.
My tasks are:
Key each 20 minute clip (to get about 2 usable minutes)
Rotate my DSLR video (shot in landscape so I could take stills as well)
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I was watching some movies about pasting attributes which look helpful and also about nesting sequences which looks like it could save time.
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HELP!

Temporary solution for this was "export xml" after all. I had to disable all graphics and textlayers and delete colorcorrections, and flatten multicam, so i had to redo all grading ja graphics stuff in older premiere after importin FCP xml. But got the work done in time. Won't use cc 2014 in near future unless someone figures out what is wrong with green frames. (well actually now im exporting from older AME, will she if the green frames pops out there too, wouldn't be too much surprised....)

Every time i put a clip into the timeline it crashes and just has the color wheel i have to force quit the program.

I just downloaded the trial to see if I wanted to buy instead of using Adobe Premiere. Every time i put a clip into the timeline it crashes and just has the color wheel i have to force quit the program. I tried deleting the program and reinstalling it. Please help. Here are my specs
2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
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Is this for FCP-X?
Wrong forum, you need to post here:
http://discussions.apple.com/community/professional_applications/final_cut_pro_x

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Color correction workflow

I like to color correct my clips before I start working on the timeline. Is there a way to color correct and save the color corrected clip so I don't have to redo color once I lay it on the timeline again? Or this is not the right way of doing things?

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