For the past two days I've been plugging away on this promo video I shot for the Bococa Arts Festival. For my first shoot with the camera, I'm happy to say that the footage came out much better then I expected. After putting some clips down in the timeline, and getting pretty close to the final edit, I decided it was time to do some color correcting.
Admittingly, I really don't know a hell of a lot about color correction in general, let alone how to do it well in Final Cut Pro. I know what images look good, and which ones don't, so that's general my method for correcting color.
I found this easy tutorial on using the 3 way color corrector in FCP. I gave it a shot, and it's not half bad. It certainly went faster then when I used Magic Bullet's Looks effect. However, I think looks has more of the tools I need to get the job done.
You see, I had read, that due to the compression on most DSLR cameras, it's better to over expose in production, and pull it down in post to keep good quality. On top of most of my shots being intentionally over exposed, I think I unintentionally forgot to set the white balance when I switch from indoor to outdoor shots. BAD DAVE!
Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me.
If anyone has suggestions for how to do simple and effective color correction, feel free to drop me a comment.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
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The problem with overexposure on video is that once you go over 100% you're dead, you're out, no more detail.
ReplyDeleteAnd since one usually crushes black in post anyway, you could argue that keeping your highlights under control is the most important thing after you make sure your skin tones are somewhere reasonable where you can deal with them.
I did notice that in some of the promo footage I shot. This weekend, while shooting a webisode I decided to over expose less so as not to blow out any parts of the frame.
ReplyDeleteI noticed the camera also has highlight tone priority, which is also supposed to help in over exposed shots, so I'll have to test that out as well.