Welcome back to MacBreak Studio, I'm Mark Spencer and we have our special guest
Sam Mestman whose been with us a few times befor, welcom back. Thank you, sir.
Thank you for having me. Yeah all the time it's fun to have you, you're always doing something different.
Well there is a lot going on I mean, what's nice is there so much
development happening here, every time I turnaround I'm like this is the thing that
I've been really wanting forever, and then BAM, it's there, you know. It's either new
features in Final Cut to talk about, or there's a new plugin to talk about, or in this case
you're gonna do something by combining the power of two separate plugins in
Final Cut to do something pretty amazing. So, pretty much my two favorite actual
video plugins for actual real video work are SliceX and Color Finale, and what Roger
Bolton did with the latest release- Roger Bolton, who runs Core Melt that produces SliceX
and Track X. What he did is he put this little special feature in the latest
release of SliceX, that allows you to track a mask on a Color Finale
correction, specifically for Color Finale, and for those guys you don't
know what Color Finale is, it enables really deep powerful curves and vector
color grading, which I'll show you guys in a second, to allow you far more control
of your footage then you would typically have with just the Final Cut Color
Board. Right so, it's a another plugin for Final Cut Pro X but it's a
color correction plugin. So, for a person who uses DaVinci Resolve a lot, where
I'll typically track power windows in Resolve. This allows me to do the exact
same thing, right in
Final Cut Pro X, without having to do the extra conform step, and- Well let's look, show us, cuz this is exciting.
Basically, the really cool thing about this is, ordinarily you have, or used to just have SliceX
but if you have Color Finale installed on your machine when you have
SliceX installed, you're gonna see this little SliceX extras folder. And one of
the filters in there is
is Color Finale with shape mask, and what this allows you to do, is it takes
it takes the regular standard you know Core Melt interface, and it puts a little
mask on. And what we're gonna do right now is we're going to track his face. If
you notice he's got a little bit of a ruddy complexion the little red, and and
she feels to fit this yellowish scene, a little bit more than he does. He feels
kind of red in this correction. So what I want to do is take some of the
saturation out of his face, and sort of lighten him up. And it's really
subtle correction, which is kinda what I recommend you do. So, you want
to do a color correction to just his face, so a secondary color correction and
you want to track that, so it moves with him. Exactly. You can do that in Final
Cut Pro natively, but you need to use keyframes to do it. And it's a very, this
would be a very long process with those tools. So we're gonna use tracking tools in
SliceX. We're going to use the tracking tools in SliceX, combined with
with the Color Finale tools that come by default, and it's going to be very
simple process and I'm gonna do a larger adjustment before we really dial this
in, so you see the results. So, all that happens is now, with the selected, I'm
going to Color Finale was shape mask. Open the control panel for Color Finale.
And there's three distinct controls in Color Finale. There is Color Wheels-
There are four actually, we're gonna use three of them. Curves and the Vectors.
And I'm gonna start with the Color Wheels, and what I want to do is, I just
want to pull just a little bit of red out of his face. But I'm gonna do that on
the mids. And if you notice it's not quite doing what I want it to do. Where
I'm making him very red, and so it's a very very subtle shift. I'm just gonna pull
just a little bit out, just to remove some of that there. And that's
really all I'm gonna do. I'm also gonna tighten up his face, by going into
the blacks here, and adding couple points on the Curves and the Luminance Curve. And
if you noticed, thats gonna really kind of put a little more contrast in there, and make
him really feel- But what I've then done, is if you notice, because I added this
contrast. I've added a little bit, and if I pull, you'll see what this is doing on the
curve side. Yes.
I've now added more red than I wanted to, because the contrast is adding- is
allowing me to see a little bit more of that red channel. So, what I might do is go
into the vectors here, and this is unique to Color Finale, and select the
Red vector. And now i can tweak just the red channel, which I want to reduce.
By clicking in here, and just dragging down the red slider, and this is gonna change-
You're adjusting the hue a little bit, to shift it away from red? Yeah, and now there's still a little
too much saturation. So I'm gonna go into the saturation, and pull that down as
well. And then I can adjust the luminosity, if I want to do the overall,
you know, brightness. And now maybe I'm there, and I'm maybe just gonna pull the saturation
back a little bit more. And now he's largely matching with significantly
better contrast. In fact, he looks better than her now. So that mask came from SliceX
and then the color correction, with the Collar Finale. They're working together,
and you can ask I'm assuming, to get some fall-off on it. Yeah, so there's the blur in the mix and
the blur strength. And we actually don't even need it in this scenario. And if you look-
So now, I'll the before and the after with the image, then we'll go
ahead and track it. So now, this is before. That's after. It's a subtle
adjustment. Yeah, you can definitely see it. And that's really what you want in a typical
secondary anyway. You don't want anything that's going to pop out from the image
you want it to be very subtle thing. Now because if you notice his face
sort of moves around here. Well this would not look good at all, just standing
there you know. So what I really want to do is get back to the frame that I was
on. Right about there, where his face is. And I can now track, by pushing the forward
track button on this. Now you're going to be able to see that the circle is gonna sort of
move with his face. So it's analyzing the clip and tracking the motion. It's tracking
it perfectly.
And I can keep that little subtle adjustment. And this is you know,
it's the sort of thing that you can do just to target, and this saves endless
amounts of time keyframing, because it's also just in the shape of the mask too.
And this is largely would you would do in DaVinci Resolve. Its automatically
just in the shape of the mask? Yeah, so it's adjusting, it's
determining what's happening to that area that you targeted. And then it's
going to change the shape as you go, and you can track forwards and backwards. So
now I track the second half of that mask, but it didn't track the
beginning of it. So if you notice, it stays still in the- I would
pick the pick the best frame, that's most representative of what you're doing
and then you track forward and now trackback, and now it's going to go
backwards in time, and track that way. And it's even modifying the shape of the mask, it
understands the part that's moving. Exactly, and its analyzed that image.
So, this is something that you mentioned you can do in DaVinci Resolve, but
now this is something you do by staying right inside of Final Cut Pro by
using two plugins together. And the amount of time that you spend conforming
and round shipping, depending on what you need to do, this really enables a lot of
functionality that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Great, very, very cool, awesome,
awesome tip. So where can people find out more about what you're into, and what you do?
So there's three places you can go to FCPworks.com that is
where we do workflow integration. If you're interested in getting involved in
what we're doing on the independent film side, that's wemakemovies.org. And
if you're interested in group work flow or collaborative workflow, we have a new
product called the ShareStation and that is LumaForge. LumaForge, ok
you're busy man. You know, I'm having a good time. Excellent Sam, thank you very much. Thank you for
watching MacBreak Studio. I'm Mark from rippletrianing.com and we'll see you next week,
right here.