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- Hey, guys, welcome to Travel Feels.
Today we're gonna look at how to make Go Pro footage
look cinematic.
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We all have to deal with Go Pro footage at some point,
and maybe some of you are even just shooting
on Go Pros for your films,
so I wanted to show you my workflow
and my process and how I work with Go Pro footage
to get the best results and make the most
cinematic image possible.
Alright, so we have our project here
with our Go Pro footage clips.
And the way I like to start my sequence
is to just drag and drop the clips
on to this little button here.
And that creates a sequence with
the right settings from the Go Pro footage.
Then I'm gonna just delete the audio here
so that you don't have to hear the annoying drone noises.
And then we are gonna look for
my favorite parts of these clips, so
I remember there's a good clip in here,
so just gonna watch for a bit.
Alright, so somewhere around here.
Gonna start it, let it play for a bit.
And that looks good.
Oh, and by the way, this was filmed
on the Phantom Two, using the Go Pro Hero Four.
Alright so now we have our little sequence here
with our clips, we have four clips.
And so we could try to do this all in Premier Pro,
but I find it a bit lacking in plugins
and tools that I can use to manipulate the image.
So what I like to do is bring this
into After Effects and manipulate it in After Effects.
So what you do is you select all the footage,
you right click, and you
Replace with After Effects Composition.
And this will bring those clips into After Effects
and then you can start editing from there.
Alright, so we have our clips in After Effects now.
You can see clip one, clip two,
clip three, and the last one, four, here.
After Effects can be a little bit daunting at first,
but it's really similar to Premier
and you don't really need to know too much
to start using it.
So first off, what I like to do
is to de-noise all the clips.
This way you can get rid of any
annoying noise or artifacts that might be in the footage.
And it'll be a little bit better to grade after that.
So we go into the effects, and I'm going to use
Neat Video's Reduce Noise.
This is a plugin that you have to pay for,
but it's really useful.
You can also use something like Red Giant's De-Noiser,
but I think Neat Video's Reduce Noise
is a little bit better than Red Giant's De-Noiser.
So we go to Options here,
and they're trying to find a uniform area
to get rid of all the noise, so
this is a pretty uniform area.
I'll select that.
It said it's not uniform, but it's close.
Click Auto Profile over here,
and I'm gonna check how much de-noiser it's applying.
I'm gonna go a little bit less,
I don't think this needs that much.
Then we're gonna apply.
And then for the purpose of this tutorial,
I'm just gonna copy and paste this,
even though you probably should
go through clip by clip and select an area and de-noise.
So I'm gonna copy, and I'm gonna select
the last three clips, and paste.
So that was step one, de-noising.
After that, I would usually stabilize the footage.
And so I use Warp Stabilizer.
You can find it in Effects, Warp Stabilizer.
This is the same stabilizer they have in Premier Pro,
works pretty much exactly the same.
And I do a very small amount of stabilizing,
so I try to keep it between like five and 10%,
so let's just go for 10% here.
And then we gotta wait for it to render here.
Alright, so now it's done and you can see
how it zoomed in a little bit on the footage.
I don't think that this shot was very shaky,
since it was filmed on a drone and a Gimbal,
and it's really wide to begin with.
So I would do that for each of the clips,
stabilize them all.
Alright, now we're done with that.
They are all stabilized.
And the next thing is probably the biggest process,
and that's fixing the wide-angle look of the Go Pro.
That's probably the biggest give-away
that it's Go Pro footage, and makes it really not cinematic.
So the way I fix that is using
the Optics Compensation plugin.
And so we're gonna go ahead and apply that
on the first clip.
And so what we're doing here is
we're gonna click Reverse Lens Distortion.
We're gonna choose diagonal,
and optimal pixels.
And then we're just gonna start adding.
And usually, the amount is I think
about, around 70 I think is the right amount.
If you go too far, it starts warping it too much,
and if you don't do it enough
then it still has a little bit of that fish-eye look.
So I go around 70.
And now you can see that it causes
these little black bubbles on the top and bottom.
And I'm actually not too worried about this
because almost always I'm making it
into anamorphic crop, so
it has the black bars on top and bottom anyway,
so that will cover up those.
So you're good.
Then we'll go to the next clip,
we'll add Optics Compensation,
do the same thing.
And then
add it to where it looks,
where the horizon usually starts to look straight.
It's a little bit hard in these clips
cause there is no horizon,
so you can't tell exactly.
Again, it starts to look right at around 70.
So we'll keep it there.
Next one we'll just copy and paste that effect.
And it looks pretty good.
This one the horizon is off a little bit.
It's a little bit tilted.
This happens a lot with Phantoms.
It's not leveled on the horizon.
So what I would do is just change
the rotation a little bit,
and you can even bring out a ruler
to get it nice and straight.
And that looks about right,
and we're just gonna scale up a little bit to
cover where we, to cover the rotation.
And that's good.
And so we'll copy and paste onto the last shot,
and there we go, getting rid of
that fish-eye, wide-angle look.
And that's the biggest step in my Go Pro footage process
is this Optics Compensation.
And you can't use that in Premier,
which really sucks.
I wish you could use it right in Premier already.
But I do a lot of my color grading in After Effects anyway,
so it doesn't really affect me too much.
So next we will start color grading this,
so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to
add a new adjustment layer.
I'm gonna put it over the whole sequence.
But I'm gonna add a LUT, so I'm gonna use apply color LUT.
And I'm actually gonna use one of my new LUTs
that'll be coming out soon.
We'll use Ciniti Saturated.
And so you can see that that affected the footage.
You could just stop here,
but I would never do that, I would actually
correct all the footage afterwards, still.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna use
Colorista to do all our color correction.
And this is a plugin from Red Giant, I really like it.
It costs a little bit, but I think
it's definitely worth it.
So here we have the shadow wheel,
the mid-tone wheel, and the highlight wheel.
So we can adjust the exposure
of the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows separately,
and also the color of each of those sections separately.
And so we're gonna add a little contrast here.
And we're gonna bring up the mid-tones a little bit.
I don't like bringing the highlights up too much.
You see right away the Go Pro footage starts to blow out.
A lot of times I actually bring down the highlights
and then bring up the mid-tones
and keep kind of going back and forth
until it looks right.
I think we can add a little bit of saturation also to this.
And it's also looking a little bit blue,
so I'm just gonna bring the highlights
and warm this up a little bit.
I know it's a cloudy day,
but I like it to be a little bit warmer.
So that's looking pretty good,
we can see what that did there.
Subtle changes, but I think it's looking pretty good.
We'll move to the next clip here,
add Colorista, and we'll do the same thing,
bring down the shadows, bring up the mid-tones,
bring down the highlights a little bit,
keep playing around with these until it looks good.
And we'll also add a little bit of saturation,
see how much we added on the last one,
it was 21, so we'll go around the same amount
so they look about the same.
And again we're gonna make this a little bit warmer.
And there you go, that's the before and after.
And here's the next shot.
We'll add Colorista.
Do the same thing here.
Try to protect the highlights from clipping,
get some contrast in there,
and add some saturation.
And again, we'll try to make this a little bit warmer.
There you go.
And then for this last one, we'll just copy and paste,
just to show a different way of doing it.
And let's see what it's doing right off the bat.
It's looking pretty good.
It's a little dark, though, so we're gonna go
up on the mid-tones and bring down the highlights
just a little bit.
And I think it could use a tiny bit more saturation,
this one's pretty saturated.
And also a little bit more warmth to keep
in line with the other clips.
And there we go, that's how I would color grade
and color correct the footage.
Lastly, what I would do is just add some sharpening
to the footage, so I would use
the Unsharp plugin, that's built right in.
We can put it on the first clip here.
And you don't want to go crazy with sharpening ever.
I go around maybe 70 or so.
And it's hard to see for you guys
with YouTube compression, but I think
that's a good amount.
And we'll just copy and paste that
to the rest of the clips.
And so now we're done in After Effects
and we can either render this out in Pro Res
and bring it back into Premier,
or we can just go straight back into Premier
and this will be in there already.
And so you can see here is our project file
from After Effects,
and it's gonna be a little bit slow,
but all the corrections are added onto here already.
And lastly, I'm just gonna fix up these black bubbles here,
which I'm just gonna basically cover up
using a PNG of the anamorphic crop lines, basically.
So I'm gonna bring that in
and put it on top, then scale it.
And there you go, now it's hidden.
And then you're good to go, render this out,
export it in H264, and you're good to go.
And so here's the before and after of the Go Pro footage.
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So that's it, pretty simple, fairly easy to do.
It's a little bit complicated with After Effects,
but once you get used to it, it's pretty easy.
I hope you enjoyed this,
and if you want to see more of these tutorials,
make sure you subscribe.
Have a good one, guys.
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