- Hey guys, welcome to Travel Feels.
Today we're going to take a look at
how to match different cameras
in your color grading process.
(motivational electronic music)
So, the other day I was watching
Macklemore's new music video called "Glorious,"
and it's a really cool video.
I really liked it.
But there was something that I thought
was kind of amateur about it,
and that's when the drone shots came in.
Not because the drone shots were bad in a sense,
but because the color grade looked different
when those drone clips came in.
It just didn't match the rest of the video
with the other camera.
And this is something I've seen in a lot of people's videos,
whether it's in vlogs, or some of the videos
that you guys have been sending me on Travel Feels feedback.
The cameras just don't match in their looks,
especially when it comes to drones.
It becomes really apparent with the drones because
the cameras are just so different from
the actual cameras that you're filming,
the DSLRs or whatever,
and the color science is all different,
and the camera just isn't all that great on the drones,
so it becomes really noticeable
if you haven't color-corrected the two different cameras
to look the same.
And it's actually not too hard to match different cameras,
different clips, as long as you break it down
into different steps.
But it does take a lot of practice,
and it really helps if you've trained your eyes
to see the different colors
and the different contrast in the clips.
It really helps if you're able to look at a clip
and right away say, "Oh, those highlights
"are a little bit warm," or
"Or there's blue in the shadows," or
"There's purple in the shadows," or whatever it is.
And then you can go from there and fix or match those.
So I'm a really logical person,
and I like to break things up into categories.
And when you're matching different cameras,
what you really want to be looking at
is exposure and colors.
Those are the two main things that we're going to look at
when we're trying to match the look
of two different cameras.
Alright, so let's head over to the computer.
Alright, so we have our little edit here.
There's two different cameras here.
One is a Dji Phantom 4,
and the other is the C300 Mark II,
which is the better camera of the two, of course,
because it's a 12 thousand dollar camera.
But let's see how we can make these two cameras match.
Oh, and just as a side note,
this city is called Ålesund, it's in Norway.
It's one of my favorite cities in the world.
Super cool place.
If you're ever in that area,
definitely go check out Ålesund.
So first things first, make sure to separate
your different cameras onto different tracks.
This will make it easier for you,
especially if you have a really long timeline,
to add effects to a specific camera
without affecting all the other cameras.
That way you don't have to search out each different clip,
you have them all on one track,
you can just highlight them all and add
whatever effect you need to to all of those clips.
Huge tip, enjoy that one, you're welcome.
Then whenever you're color grading,
you want to start out with your hero clip,
which is kind of like your nicest shot in that scene,
and color grade and match according to that shot.
So for this edit, I think the hero shot is this one
with the two characters in the same shot.
Then we're just going to take an adjustment layer,
we're going to add it, sorry you can't see it here,
but adjustment layer, and then we're going to add it
over top all of the footage.
And we're going to start off the look with a LUT.
And in this case, I'm going to be using my Cine LUTs Pack,
and we're going to be using the Cine Desaturated LUT.
They're probably still on sale right now,
so go and check them out.
It might be the last couple of days.
Make sure to buy those if you haven't already.
So we can see that that did something to our footage.
But now we've got to go through
and actually correct the footage,
because it just doesn't look good yet
with this LUT applied 100 percent right away.
So right off the bat, we're going to take down
the intensity of the LUT to somewhere around 70
and start off there.
And I really like this LUT, because it kind of just
desaturates everything else except for the skin tones,
which really makes the skin tones just pop,
and it just really draws the viewer's attention
to the people in the frame.
Them comes the trickier part, which is color correction.
And to help us with this, we're going to be using
Lumetri Scopes > the waveform and vectorscope.
And you can just get these from the Window > Lumetri Scopes,
and then you can choose which scopes you want to use.
I'm typically using the waveform for exposure and contrast,
and I'm using the vectorscope for different colors.
And I've said this before,
but the waveform just shows your exposure values from zero,
which is pure black.
Below that there's no information in the shadows anymore.
And then we have 100, which is pure white,
and above that it's overexposed,
there's no information there anymore.
And the vectorscope just basically
shows different colors, it's kind of like a color wheel,
you can see that we have the reds here,
the blues, teals here, green, yellow.
And then the further away the colors are from the middle,
the more saturated the colors are.
So as we add saturation, we can see
the colors go further and further away from the middle
towards the outside, because they're more saturated.
So first let's start off with exposure and contrast.
And we're going to take that hero clip,
and we're going to start tweaking it
so it looks really nice.
We really want this shot to look really good
because it's our hero shot,
and then match the other clips according to this shot.
So first off we're going to add some contrast.
This is log footage, so it's really low in contrast,
so we're just going to add a bunch of contrast first.
And you can see right away on the waveform
that the lines start going closer towards the zero
and closer towards the 100.
And it's still not quite enough,
so we're going to go into the color wheels
and we're going to start adding more contrast.
We're going to take down the shadows even more.
And here you can actually see
that the LUT is doing something to the shadows.
It's not letting it go all the way down to zero.
So it's keeping it a little bit higher than the zero mark.
And that's okay, we just want to aim towards that level now.
Then we're going to take the highlights
and we're going to bring those up,
and get it closer to the 100 mark.
We don't want to overexpose the shot,
so we don't want it to go over 100,
but we want it to go pretty high.
This is also a sunset clip,
so we don't need to go super bright,
it's not the most brightest sunlight on this frame.
Then we can take the mid tones
and we're just going to bring those down a little bit
so the skin tones look a little bit better.
And as you're doing this,
you kind of need to go back and forth and finesse.
So we're going to bring up the shadows just a bit
and bring up the mid tones just a little bit.
And we're going to drop the highlights just a bit.
I think it's a bit too overexposed.
That's looking better.
And so here is the before and after on the exposure changes.
That's all I did, was change the exposure.
I didn't change any of the colors yet.
We're just working with exposure first.
You want to take things in steps, bit by bit.
So first, start off with the exposure already.
And that's looking much better than it was before.
Next we're going to take a look at the colors.
And we can see everything is kind of going towards
the yellow-orange section, which means that this
is a little bit of a warm clip.
And that's okay, because this is sunset,
and it's supposed to be a little bit warm.
If it was pushing way over to the blue side,
I would be a little bit worried
because I don't want this to be a really blue image,
because it's sunset.
I want the audience to be able to feel
the warmth of that sunset.
But it is a little bit desaturated right now.
The lines don't go too far up from the middle.
So we're going to add a little bit more saturation to this.
And you can see the lines go further out here.
And I also wouldn't mind getting
a little bit more teal blue into the shadows.
So we're going to go into the color wheels,
and we're going to take the shadows towards the teal blue.
And you can see that's kind of changing everything,
including the skin tones.
So we're going to take the mid tones over to the orange
to kind of combat some of that.
And we're going to go back and forth
until we have a nice little image here.
And now if you wanted to make this more warm,
you could take the highlights
and bring them over to the orange.
You can see that's also affecting the skin tones,
so if we did that we would actually
bring back the skin tones a little bit.
I don't actually want it to be that warm,
so I'm going to take this back a little bit,
take the highlights down, and there we go.
Let's see what the color wheels are doing.
That's looking pretty good, I like that.
So we have our hero clip.
Now we're going to move on to the other C300 clips,
and we want them to look as close as possible
to this hero clip.
So we're going to start off by just copy and pasting
the corrections and seeing what happens.
And that's actually not too bad.
If we go back and forth
and we look at the vectorscope and the waveform,
they look pretty similar.
The waveform is a little bit different on this clip,
it doesn't go quite as high up,
so we're going to just add a little bit more
into the highlights here,
and we're going to drop down the mid tones just a bit
because the face is overexposing.
So there we go, the exposure looks pretty similar,
looks pretty good.
But the colors are a little bit different.
This clip is actually a little bit more saturated
than our hero shot.
So we're going to go and desaturate this clip a little bit.
And now when we look at the vector scope,
they're really similar, they're on the same levels.
So those two clips match really well now.
Then we're going to go into the third clip,
and again, we're going to copy and paste
this hero shot correction, add that to there.
And here we can see that the exposure values
are a little bit different.
Here we have the sun in the background,
so of course it's going to be a little bit brighter.
And that's actually okay, because that's the sun,
it's supposed to be really bright.
But we are going to play around
with the shadows and mid tones just a little bit.
So we're going to go to the color wheels,
and we're going to actually
take down the shadows just a little bit,
but then we're going to up the mid tones just a tiny bit.
And that's changing the highlights a little bit,
so we're going to take down the highlights just a tad.
And now that's looking better.
And then we can look at the vectorscope,
and we can check out the colors.
We're in the right range, but the saturation
is definitely a little bit less on this last clip,
so we're going to add a little bit more saturation
to this clip.
And there we go,
now we're pretty much exactly at the same levels.
So that's looking really good.
Our three C300 clips are looking great,
they look really similar, really good.
And now let's take a look at the drone clips.
How are we going to match those C300 clips
to the drone clips?
And this can be a little bit tricky,
because the sensors are just so different.
I mean, we're talking about a 12 thousand dollar camera,
the C300 Mark II, and then a tiny little camera
inside a drone that's not that high quality.
But how can we make both those cameras
look a little bit more similar
so that the viewer doesn't notice that,
"Oh, this is a low-quality camera,
"and now we're on the high-quality camera".
We don't want the audience to be able to distinguish that.
We want them to look as similar as possible.
So again, we're going to do the exact same thing.
We're going to take a look at
the exposure and then the colors.
So we have this hero clip here,
and then we're going to take a look at this drone shot.
And right away, we can see that
the contrast is definitely not the same yet,
so let's do that first.
We're going to add some contrast.
And then we're going to go into the color wheels
and add a little bit more to the shadows.
They're still not hitting that zero IRE.
That's looking better.
And we can see in our hero shot
the highlights hit about the 80 IRE,
so we're going to try to aim for
that same mount on this drone shot.
So we're going to take the highlights
just a bit down, actually.
There we go, now we're on the same levels.
So now the exposure is the same on the two different clips.
But the colors are definitely different.
If we look at the vectorscope,
the colors don't go nearly as far to the outside,
which means it's a lot more desaturated.
So let's add some more saturation to this.
Real easy, just take the saturation
and we're going to slide that out.
And now we're going to compare the two different shots.
And that's starting to look a little bit better.
But remember, we did those little adjustments
adding a little bit more teal blue to the shadows,
so let's do that same thing on this drone shot.
We're going to go into the color wheels
and add a little bit more teal blue to the shadows.
And, like we did with the other clip,
we're going to add a little bit more warmth
to the mid tones.
And we're going to tweak this back and forth.
And now we can compare again.
A lot of this has to do with going back and forth.
That's really how you can see best
if your clips actually match.
And that's actually looking pretty good now.
I'm liking this.
And color is the hardest part to do,
so what I like to do
is break them down into different parts.
So if we look at the highlights here,
we can see that they're a little bit more warm
than in our hero shot.
The hero shot is a little bit more blue.
So what we're going to do is we're going to
take those highlights and we're going to go
to the opposite direction of the yellow
to get rid of some of that yellow,
which is the blue area over here.
And that looks better now.
The colors are definitely more similar now.
And then you want to take a look at the mid tones
and see if they look similar.
And I think they're actually
a little bit too warm on our drone clip,
so we're going to take that back a little bit and compare.
That looks much better, much more similar.
And then also take a look at the shadows.
Are they looking the same?
So the dark areas of the clips,
are they looking the same on the two different clips?
And I think they're pretty similar actually right now.
So let's just play that through
and see if we notice that there's a drastic difference
in the color grades.
And I think that matches pretty well.
We can check out what our corrections did.
They're doing quite a bit,
and it's just really helping to just disguise
that this isn't the same camera
flying in the air and then on the ground.
And then we can just take that same adjustment
And move it to the last drone shot here.
And you can see that didn't quite work out.
Not the same exposure on this.
So we're going to have to
fiddle around with this a little bit.
First off, we're going to take the mid tones higher up,
keep the shadows down a little bit just to correct that.
And we're going to keep the highlights at the 80 IRE,
which is what we chose for the hero clip.
That's looking a little bit better.
It's still pretty dark, so again
we're going to move up the mid tones,
and brighten this image up a little bit.
And to keep those dark shadows, those real blacks,
we're going to bring down the shadows
and just keep going back and forth until it looks the same.
So now if we compare it to the other drone shot,
it's looking pretty similar.
And we can see that the first drone shot
has a lot more saturation than the second one,
so we're going to actually add
some more saturation to the second one, keep it the same.
Now they're looking much more similar.
And there we go, the color grade is done.
They're looking really similar.
The colors match really well.
And you can really work on this a lot,
and just finesse it forever.
But at some point you're just going to have to
put it out there and be happy with it.
So there we go.
That's how I would match different cameras
when you're color grading.
And really the key here is to take it in steps.
Start off with the exposure, the contrast,
make sure that's good, and then look at the colors,
look at the highlights, the mid tones, and the shadows.
Check that the colors are all good
in each of those different areas.
And again, it really helps to use
the waveform and vectorscope tools.
It's a little bit hard at first
to understand what's going on,
but once you start using them more and more
you start realizing how useful they really are.
They're just a scientific, unbiased way
of looking at colors,
because our eyes can kind of mess with us sometimes,
and we don't see colors the way they really are always.
And again, if you want to learn more about color grading,
I have the color grading course,
you check it down in the description.
And also check out the Cine LUTs Pack,
I think they are still on sale, they should be.
They won't be on sale for too long anymore,
so make sure you grab those before they go off sale.
I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did,
hit that like button, subscribe to the channel.
And guys, enjoy the film-making process,
and go get some of those travel feels.
(upbeat electronic music)