David A. Cox: Hello everyone.
And welcome to chapter 10 in my 12 part course on video production for small
business owners and nonprofits today, I'm going to teach you how to color, correct.
In final cut pro you are watching the free version of this course
that I've made available on YouTube.
But if you would like to take the full course, be sure to head over to
the website you see on your screen, or you can find the link in the video
description without any further ado.
Let's begin the class.
Hello everyone today, I'm going to teach you how to perform a basic
color correction in final cut pro of all of the different chapters
that I've created for this course.
This is by far been one of the most difficult topics to cover.
What you have to understand about color correction is it truly is a science.
That's why there are people who are full time colorists.
So what I'm going to do is teach you how to use the most important
tools that will help you achieve a more professional and polished.
Lesson one, no matter what you do, your video is going to look
slightly different on every screen.
It's a little bit like when you walk into a big box store and they have that
giant wall of TV's when they're next to each other, of course you can see
the difference between the different brands, but when you're at home,
you only have one screen in front.
I'd also like to remind you that the Mac, iPhone and iPad now have
features like true tone and night shift, which will automatically shift
the white balance on your screen, depending on the time of the day.
So what I'm basically saying here is no matter what you
do, your video is not gonna.
Perfect on every single device.
The main goals of color correction are, we want to make sure that
your skin tones are accurate.
We want to make sure that the colors appear as they are meant to be meaning.
We want red to appear as red blue to appear as blue and
green to appear as green.
And finally, we want to make sure that everything is properly exposed
so that there's nothing that's either blown out or underexposed.
There are a few settings that I recommend you change.
Anytime you're color correcting, let's go to the apple icon at
the top left and let's go into system preferences from here.
I want you to click on displays and make sure that night shift.
And true tone are both turned off.
Then let's go into the color tab and uncheck the option where it
says show profiles for this display.
Only if you use your iPhone to shoot your video that most likely
uses a profile called rec 7 0 9.
As you can see it's here in this menu, the name is a little bit longer, but
what I would recommend that you do is set it to that when you're color
correcting again, this is provided that you shot your video with your.
There is one more setting that I recommend that you change, but
that is back in final cut pro.
So let's go back into that app and click on where it says final cut pro here at
the top left and go into preferences from here, click on the general
tab where it says color correction, and I recommend that you change it
from color board to color wheel.
For those of you who are taking my course on Thinkific, you should
see a video associated with this chapter that you can download.
I would like you to do that at this time and please bring it into a new project.
Let's now rearrange our windows a bit.
I would like you to close the browser window by clicking here at the top.
Then in the preview window, I would like you to click on where it
says view and select video scopes.
Or if you want to use the shortcut it's command seven to
the left of our preview window.
I would like you to click on where it says view.
And I'd like you to drag this slider where you see this sun icon all the way to the.
Above.
I'd like you to select the box that only has one square.
That just means that we're only going to work with one tool at a time.
You can always change this later on, but for this point in time, I would like
you to just use one below the view menu.
I'd like you to click on this icon.
And in this list, I'd like you to set this first option to wave form
then click back into this menu and let's view the Luma Channel
great.
We've got our windows set up.
So let's begin the process.
The thing I always like to start with is setting the white balance.
Ideally, when you shoot a video, you want to start by having someone on
camera, hold up a white piece of paper.
You can also use a gray card.
It doesn't really matter.
This is used partially to set the white balance, but it's also really handy
when it comes to setting the levels for the shadows mid-tones and highlights.
That being said, if you are working with footage that you already
shot and you didn't think to do that ahead of time, don't worry.
You can make adjustments after the fact.
And I'm going to show you how to do it in just a moment.
I'm going to start by showing you how to wipe balance using
the white piece of paper.
Thinkific students.
What I would like you to do is click on this clip so that it's
highlighted, then click on this magic wand, icon and select balance color.
Now let's go into the inspector and here in the video inspector,
I am going to change this from automaic to white balance.
If I move my cursor over the preview window, it has now
turned into a droplet icon.
So now I'm going to place my cursor on that white piece of paper.
And I'm going to click down and drag out just a little bit so that it can sample as
much of that piece of paper as possible.
And as you can see here, our colors have shifted and my skin tones look a
lot better than they did a second ago.
If you want to see the before and after you can just uncheck this box.
If you are working with footage that you already shot, here's another method.
Click over to this triangle icon in the inspector, and here below the color
wheels, you will find a slider where you can manually adjust the white balance.
And just to be clear when you change the temperature in doing so, you
were also changing the white balance.
They are the same thing.
You're either warming things up or you're cooling them down until
theoretically they are balanced.
Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that you might not always want that.
Look, you might sometimes want your shot to look warmer or cooler.
So just please know, there is no wrong way to do it.
Ultimately it is your product.
Thank you so much for watching everyone.
We will be.
It is a little known fact that the human eye can much more easily correct
for exposure when you remove all color.
So when I'm color correcting a shot, the first thing that I like to do is
make it look perfect in black and white.
The easiest way that you can do that is to go here into the global color wheel.
And then you can drag this left arrow.
That will remove the global saturation levels.
And when you take it away, all you're left with is a black and white image.
So now that our shot is de-saturated, I would like to bring your attention
to the Luma channel when it comes to the highlights, 100% is
considered to be a light source.
And because my piece of paper isn't producing light, it's just reflecting.
We probably want that to read right around 90% to adjust the levels.
We can use the highlights slider here on the right hand side, when
it comes to the shadows, you want to make sure that those levels never
drop down below zero that slider
you'll find right here.
So for example, I'm going to adjust the slider so that my levels get really
close to zero without actually hitting.
When it comes to setting your mid-tone levels.
My advice is that you just simply play with it.
You know, sometimes you just have to export a copy and then see how it
looks on a bunch of different devices.
Before you find that happy level, you should also know that the iPad
pro is actually one of the best calibrated monitors out there.
So if you're trying to get an accurate feel for how the colors look, you can
always hook up your iPad to your Mac.
Thanks to the sidecar feature, which by the way, you can
find in system preferences.
And that way you can get a much more accurate.
Of how everything looks.
In earlier chapters, I recommended that you consider not shooting
an HDR only because it does add an extra step in editing.
If you did shoot any of your shots in HDR, please note, all you need to do is go here
into the effects panel, go into color, and you will find the HDR tool right here.
So all you have to do is drag and drop that onto your.
And finally, the last thing you'll need to change is here in the inspector.
We're going to need to change it from HD R to H L G.
And when I make that switch, our shot now looks correct.
I would now like to show you a few different ways that you can
enhance the colors in your video.
There are several techniques that you can utilize to tackle this.
But what I want to do is show you how to use the most
important tools for this example.
I'm going to use the quick clip of the sign that says entering Truro.
If I play this clip full screen, you can see, it looks totally washed out the sky.
Doesn't look that blue, the greens don't look that green.
Hmm.
Perfect for color correcting one of the techniques that I
encourage you to use when you're color correcting is to initially
over-correct and then dial it back.
I'm going to start by adjusting the exposure.
And what I forgot to say a moment ago is you actually probably want to start with
the shadows first, then do the highlights and finally deal with the mid-tones.
The shot was taken right in the middle of the day.
So most of what we see here is going to fall into the highlights and the midtones
so watch as I now grab the slider for the saturation levels in the shadows
and drag it dramatically up and down, see how it's changing the color.
So what I want to do is initially over-correct and then dial it back,
then we'll move on to the highlights and we'll do the same thing.
We'll initially over-correct and then dial it back.
And finally, let's go into the midtones and do the same.
Here's another trick.
Take a look at this shot of this line of candy bars.
See this first bar that is actually supposed to be purple, but as
you can see here, it looks pretty washed out to remedy this problem.
I'm going to add a hue/saturation curve.
The most important tool in this list is where it says hue versus saturation.
So watch this.
I'm going to click on the eyedropper and I'm going to select the shade of
purple that's in our shot now to enhance.
I'm going to drag up on this point and see how now the color stands out.
Looks great.
If you look at the center of each of these wheels, you will see a dot.
If we grab that dot and drag it, it's going to start to add a
tint to that part of the image.
In the case of this shot, it looks like we still have this
very subtle yellow tint to it.
So yellow's complimentary color is purple.
So let's now correct it and add a ton of purple and then dial it back
until we find the right balance.
It's basically fishing, but with.
Thanks for watching everyone.
We will be right back.
Another important tool that I want to show you how to use is the color match tool.
This allows you to sample the color from one shot and then paste it onto another.
Let's use these two shots as an example, to make this second shot matched the
first shot I'm going to select the magic wand icon and choose color match.
Now I can see a second window.
And all I need to do is click on the part of the clip that I want
to sample and then click "apply.
Now that we've gone over the basics of color correction.
I have one more technique that I would like to teach you, and that
is how to copy and paste corrections from one shot onto another.
This is very similar to copy and paste with a slight twist.
Let's say.
All of the corrections that I made on this shot and paste them onto
the following shot to do that.
All I need to do is copy the first clip by highlighting it and then
pressing command C on my keyboard.
Then I'll select the second shot.
And this time I'm going to press command shift and the letter V.
So it's just like paste.
All you need to do is add the shift key.
And when I do, you can see all the corrections that I had on my
first shot.
And if there are any that I would like to exclude, I can
uncheck them from this list.
So now I have all of those corrections from the first shot now applied to the
second shot and just be aware, you can also do this to more than one shot.
So for example, if you are filming in a controlled environment, or if like
when I'm filming these videos, you can do all of your color corrections to one
shot and then copy and paste them to.
In chapter 11, I'm going to teach you the best settings when it comes to
exporting your video from final cut pro.
After that, we only have one chapter left and that is where I'm going to
teach you how to make your commercial appear as a targeted ad on YouTube.
Thanks so much for watching class dismissed.