howdy this is axe and I'm gonna show you a little bit about what I learned on basic color correction
colorization using Adobe Premiere Pro. I started my first project full length documentary feature
movie and I learned a lot just by trial and error and found the system that eventually worked well
for me so I wanted to share that so the rest of you can benefit from this in case it's helpful to
you as well. okay so as you can see down here I've already got my movie open. it's pretty extensive,
there's about 81 minutes of it and there's a lot of different clips and they range in
anything from photos there's things like old photos there's video riding the bike there's
video driving there's a lot going on in this movie so it's important to have some kind of
a reference to make sure that your scenes look consistent the movie looks planned out and not
just thrown together and that's what colorization comes in so the first thing to do is I would set
up your - something like this or this is what's worked for me up here. I've got lumetri scopes
and I've got these different tools that are of varying use I would say depending on you know
the scientific approach and there's things like making sure these bars are all overlapped making
sure that your color bars are lapped the white spaces in the middle for all those and there's
other videos showing how to use these technically that may or may not work but it's it's a very
good starting point so let's say that I start with this as my opening scene and it's pretty straight
forward because it's just a piece of metal that I had for my opening and if I want to make that
look correct one tool over here and again you go into lumetri color on this side you got basic
correction and here's the temperature and the tint and you can see this goes from blue to orange and
as a combination of red and yellow and here you got green to red and then you've got red and
green and yellows combined to make green and then you've got your tone below so the first thing to
do is a starting point is okay this is basically gray it's a shade of white so I'm going to click
on the clip and then I'm gonna click on this guy and if I click in there it's gonna make that some
variation of white correct and so I can do that and this is what it says my numbers should be
and let's say that I'm like okay that's pretty close but maybe I don't want it quite so blue
so I'm gonna make it only 215 and then I kind of like to enter numbers because I can repeat those
later easier wow that is a little bit too orange so maybe I'll leave it at 20 okay oops minus 15
that's what it okay so minus fifteen looks good I like that and then if you want you can go down
here we'll talk about this on the next clip but let's say for example I like this and I like the
way it looks then what I recommend doing is do a screenshot of just this portion showing what
that looks like and what your settings were and then bring over a word document or something put
it in there and so you have that for reference so now if you have another scene similar to this
you can go back and see what settings used and how it looks and this will make more sense in
a minute when we go to the next one so now let's go to the launch alright so on the launch here's
a dash scene right so let's select that and let's say that I want to make my background of
the tachometer white so I'm going to select this I'm gonna click in there and you can see it made
it a little bit more orange right well I don't really want it that one so I'm gonna click it
back double click to zero and actually I kind of like it right where it was. that's just a softer
or just barely a blue to it but it it's softer and it's not so harsh when compared to the rest of the
dark background so now that I have that now I'm gonna go down here and I'm gonna say okay I want
to click Auto settings and you can see that it it did a bunch of work here it changed all these
levers but I don't really like the way it looks. that's a little bit too grainy for me and this is
you know part of the film that I had it's just it wasn't as good for dark adjustment. it's a little
too bright so I'm gonna take the exposure and I'm gonna move that down to like a point to the
highlights. yeah maybe I'm gonna have that shadows way too much. let's put 20 in there and leave it
dark so it's more clear. White's is fine okay and if you want to you can reset that by just
hitting the reset button and then I'll go back down to zero but let's say I kind of like that
look then again I'm gonna take my screen shot of it and I copy this and then over here I'm gonna
drop that in again now like I said before once I get to the next - view in the dark I can go back
and I can set these numbers the same way one it's easier because it's already been done once - it's
going to be give you a consistent look throughout the movie and that's again what you're really
trying to do so now when you get into things like the garages was a tough one for me for example so
you've got all these garage scenes were building the bike in here right and so here's the scene
let's say we focus in on this one and actually I wonder if I've got one here let's do this one okay
so here there's a white mop board I know that so I'm gonna choose this and I'm going to pick that
white and click on it and you can see it's it's adjusted aright and it gave these numbers now you
may be perfectly content with that I'm think it's a little bit too much so I'm going to drop it down
to like minus 20 which I'm going to drop it more than one is 15 I'm gonna give it just a slight
warmth in from a basic gray on it and now you can kind of see down here in this corner this is gonna
be your reference with the mop or than the wall look like alright and then again you can move
these around you know I'll leave them on there for now because I just went through that but if I take
this and copy it and then bring my document over here now I have a reference for this wall color
and that's gonna be really important throughout the movie because I do a lot of scenes in here
indoor and outdoor and like there's one we're gonna find another one here or you've got stuff
going on but later on in it especially like even even if we take this one here and this can be a
little bit tougher because you can see you've got sunlight coming in right and shadows all around
us so let's take it back when it's dark and now if we take that clip we might be able to do a similar
thing so maybe we zoom in on it and we see that this is supposed to be white and we click on it
and it does that to us and then we grow back out and now the nice thing is we have a reference so
we can take this document we've been using and we can look at the wall colors here and here and we
might look at it and say you know what that's not bad but he's just a little bit more warmth
over here so I'm gonna drop it to minus 20 and let's see what that looks like and you know it's
not gonna be exact because it's a gradient across this wall but it kind of gets you in the ballpark
so let's say I like that and then I say that and once I have these references it just makes it more
helpful as you go through the movie because you can look at things like the color of the highway
as I'm driving that was one thing that you know becomes consistent there's things like the road
color you can do things like you know here's one in the dark here and if we blow it up maybe
we want to use that as the white right so that gives us one look but and but a little bit ago
we're looking at this and this also is going to have white lines you can see so now I can
go down here and you might find this white line but the difference between the two is this one's
in the day and that one's going to be at night so you can see that's a little bit greener you might
want to do some more like this kind of a thing an adjustment and maybe it needs to be a little bit
more bluer and then maybe that gets it to where it matches better or something like this so again
a lot of it is just it takes time playing with it but having those references is is huge and you can
see like when I actually finished this project I had a lot of references I ended up with you know
a whole multiple sheets of these things and so every time I came to a new scene to colorize I
would look back and I would look for colors of the road I'd look for colors of the whites the skies
you can see how the blue is a very distinct blue and when I would go ride in the daytime that same
blue would carry through same kind of blue even in the clouds solved the same blue color of the sky
you can see all that's consistent so anyway that's an introduction and just what I've learned in a
first stab at doing a movie with color correction colorization hopefully it's been helpful enjoy.