- Sapphire ColorFuse is a new color filter
in Sapphire 2022.
Let's see how we can finish the perfect color grade
with Avid Media Composer and ColorFuse.
(bright upbeat music)
Before we get into ColorFuse,
let's take a quick look at the timeline here,
and just how the sequence has been edited.
So we have a short spot here,
that's been broken up into a number of short scenes.
And we have done the primary color correction,
so all of the clips within the different short scenes
match each other,
and so at this point where we're going
to be using ColorFuse.
ColorFuse is Sapphire's first creative LUT effect,
and we're going to be using it to heighten up the color
in the scene.
So it's really is the final little bit of seasoning
we're gonna put on the scene to finish everything off.
If you're not familiar with LUTs,
LUTs stands for Look Up Table,
as it's basically a way of describing the transformation
of different colors.
It's often used when we're recording logarithmic footage
on different cameras, to try to squeeze
as much dynamic range out of our data, to try and get
as much useful color information out of our data
as we possibly can get.
ColorFuse doesn't deal with that technical side of things,
we have another filter for that.
If I come in here and type in OCIO,
we have Sapphire's OCIOTransform,
to transform things from LOG to Rec 709
or to work in a linear sort of color space.
What ColorFuse does it lets us work with LUTs
in a creative way.
And we could apply this to individual clips,
but I prefer to apply this to multiple clips
in the sequence as a sort of filler layer.
So I'm going to come in and I'm gonna add
a new video track up here,
and I'll apply over the top and just fill in on V2,
and you see when we bring this up,
we now get a different looking image.
Scrap that through to find something
as a little bit more representative.
If we take a look at the parameters in ColorFuse,
the controls are actually very straightforward.
I'll ignore the top of this for now,
and I'll just get to the ones that are going
to be the most interesting for us.
It's our three buttons where we can input our three LUTs
and it's our three sliders.
And those control the strength of the looks
that we're mixing together.
So if I wanted this to be a bit stronger,
we've already got a LUT loaded in to the first position
by default, so all I have to do
is play around with our slider here
until it looks right.
If I want to change this up,
I can press this little button
and this will bring me into my LUT folder.
Now ColorFuse ships with 30 different LUTs,
as part of the Boris FX LUTs Starter Pack.
And these have a good naming convention.
So we have CF for ColorFuse,
BW for black and white film stock emulation,
C for color film stock emulation,
and S for stylized looks.
So if I come down, we'll choose
something in the stylized looks,
maybe dystopian values, double click on that.
And that will load that new look into the top LUT slot,
and I can just then adjust that as I need to.
Now I'm gonna make this quite hard,
'cause I wanna show you one other thing before we move on.
And that's the two drop-down menus that are just above.
So we have host color space and LUT color space.
And these are very important,
because you know how I said the ColorFuse doesn't really
deal with those technical transformations.
Well, that's not exactly true.
To get your grade looking correct,
and looking the same between different hosts
and between different projects,
we are doing color transforms in the background.
So your host color space should match
what your project settings are.
So if we come to settings,
I can see here that my color space is YCbCr 709,
so Rec 709.
And I can change my host color space from sRGB to Rec 709.
Let's take a little look at that skin.
So, I'm gonna go from sRGB
to Rec 709.
Great, you can see there is a slight difference.
Now the LUT color space,
lets us know what color space the LUT was designed
to work in.
Now all of the ones that come shipped with ColorFuse
are sRGB, so you won't have to change those.
Now with that being said,
let's come in and finish up our look here.
So I'm gonna mix this down,
and come up to the top and bypass the effect
to take a look at before and after.
This was very useful to be able to do,
and you can do this with every Sapphire effects,
bypass the effect there.
Much more important with color effects
because your eyes do get very used
to looking at certain colors,
you stop seeing how strong they are at some point.
But I'm going to come down now and choose my second LUT.
And this one, I'm gonna take one of the color film stocks.
We'll go with the top one, up here.
And I can mix that back down,
there we go.
And if I don't like that one,
then I can come in and maybe choose something else instead.
So I'll choose the Kodachrome.
And I think that one's going to be better for me.
Now with all these subtlety can often be your best friend.
You don't wanna crank everything all the way up to one,
some of these are mixed a little bit strongly,
so taking these down to just no 0.2 or no 0.4
is often going to be enough.
Remember this is going to be the seasoning
that we're gonna add.
You don't have come in and made this delicious meal
only to dump a huge amount of salt in at the very, very end.
I'm trying to be a bit more, a bit more subtle with it.
Okay.
So let's take a little look now
at how that works in context.
So play that back.
And it looks pretty good on this clip,
but on this one,
and I think we could maybe do with just lightening this clip
up a little bit.
So even though we've done primary color correction
across this sequence,
sometimes when you put on that final little look
you'll need to make a few small adjustments.
So the nice thing about having this a filler layer
over the top, is that if we need to make corrections
to individual clips we can still
do that without any trouble whatsoever.
So just apply color correction on there.
I'm not gonna do anything amazingly clever with this.
I'm just gonna bump up the gamma a little bit,
and maybe we'll take the setup down,
just a wee touch as well.
Come back to our filler, play that.
Play then context 'cause all about context, obviously.
Yeah, that looks good.
Yeah, I'm happy with that.
If we look at this next sequence,
I probably wouldn't use this same look
to go over the top of this.
I don't think it actually fits in with the scene.
And again, this is another advantage for working
with filler layers,
is I can come in and just add edit points
along towards the different scenes,
and add another edit point.
And I can deal with these different sequences
as part of a sequence.
And let's come over here, find somewhere.
Again, it's going to be nice representative.
So it's a Rec 709,
and I'm going to go into my preset browser.
In Avid we currently can't preview the different presets
in the playback window,
but we can look at how they're gonna look on our sample.
And we also have descriptions of what they're gonna do
to your footage over on the side.
And we have 50 presets that ship with ColorFuse.
These follow the same basic naming convention,
so BW, black and white, C, color film, S, stylized,
and we also have M, and M stands for mixed.
So these are premixed LUT cocktails
that combine some of the different ColorFuse LUTs
into one delicious drink.
And these are named pretty interestingly.
There's a little bit of style to them,
but they do say what they're gonna do.
So, you know, cool defoliate.
We know that's probably gonna cool down the image
and maybe take away some of the green there, combat action,
head into the war zone with a slightly de-saturated warm
and subtly punchy look.
So we do have good descriptions going up there.
With a shot, I'm going to go with something like,
maybe cool defoliate or falling to autumn.
Let's try that one there.
And when I double click to apply that one,
it's gonna bring us back in, and I'll bypass that effect.
And you can see that before and the after,
before and the after.
So this is turning our leaves a little bit more,
more golden, and de-saturating us a little bit as well.
And just because we're working from a preset
doesn't mean that we have to stick
with what the preset says,
all of the controls are still editable.
So if I think that this has gone
a little bit too de-saturated, I can see the top one
of my LUTs here is BW, so that's black and white.
So I can just pull that down a little bit.
I pull that all the way up,
you can see that is black and white,
so I pull that down a little bit.
Maybe just give us a touch there.
If I wanted to get a bit more life into those trees,
I'll take us from dry county and let's just turn
the dry county down a little bit as well.
So we've got the foliage just livening up
a little bit more there.
We'll come over to another clip
just to see if that's working
across the line.
I think that's looking kinda nice.
Always useful to do that, just to bypass the effect,
make sure it's working across.
Just play that back
to see how that's working in context.
Yeah, it's going to be nice.
Okay, I'm going to skip over to our final clip here,
or our final section, I should say.
I can see that this one also needs a different look
than the one we had for our boxer at the start.
So let's come into our effects.
Let's reset all of this. Set our host color space
back to Rec 709.
Now, even though S ColorFuse comes with 30 different LUTs,
it doesn't mean that you have to use those.
If you have your own,
that you've either created yourself or that you've bought
from other places, then obviously you can use those too.
I'm going to come back in and just replace my LUT one.
It's going to take me into my main ColorFuse LUTs folder,
but I'm just gonna navigate out into my own LUT folder.
And these are external LUTs, my big folder of LUTs.
All right.
So let's come in into here,
and I can use any of these non bundled ones
in ColorFuse as well.
So long as they're .cube files,
they're probably gonna work.
I will use Ektar 100,
and I'll add another one in to LUT 2.
Maybe choose this one, kind of a bit to contrasty,
so I would just take the strength down on that.
There we go.
I think that one's looking a bit strong as well,
and I'll choose the third one just for good luck.
And this time I can use a regular ColorFuse one.
I will choose punchy slightly warm,
and take that down.
Bypass the effects, choose the before and after.
Yeah, that's looking nice.
Let's come over here.
Check it out.
Yeah, that works for me as well.
Now, what I think is really, really cool about this,
is that now I've created my own look
using a combination of ColorFuse, LUTs and external LUTs.
I can save this as a ColorFuse preset.
So I'll just call this one, Ben Big Blue Sky.
And I can add in any little characteristics
I want to down here, just as normal.
And I can export this to a separate file
to share between people or put onto a network drive,
or I can just save this as a preset on my own computer.
The advantage about doing it this way,
is that I don't have to keep track
of where any of these external LUTs are anymore.
All the data that I need is saved within that preset.
So I can just save that preset, share it around,
put it into other machines, use it in other hosts
that are working with ColorFuse,
and I don't need to keep track of any other files.
This avoids the problems of LUT files
just suddenly going missing, going offline,
and have to manually find them and re-link them again.
You don't have to do that anymore 'cause everything
is in that one file.
And that really is all there is to it,
to create some beautiful, unique looks using ColorFuse.
You set up your sections, set up the host color space,
I would like to start with a preset
and then just get creating.
And with that, you can use ColorFuse to heighten
and enhance your image, and create some truly unique looks
with just a few clicks.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and I will see you again soon.
If you enjoy this and you'd like to learn
more about ColorFuse,
then please leave a comment below with any questions
you might have.
If you want to try ColorFuse out for yourself,
then just head over to borisfx.com,
where you can download trial versions of Sapphire
and all of the Boris FX Suite.