Grading

[jgharding]

There's definitely an argument that excessively digitally graded film will date quickly. Some looks are trendy, some are timeless.

 

I'll start with balancing, pulling black mid and high levels to what looks right for the shot, and getting the balance relatively neutral, maybe with a slight hint of the final look i have in mind.

 

Then I'll apply my "look" layers.

 

This will inevitable react with the initial correction layer, I will either adjust this, or use secondaries to push back against the grade.

 

As more layers get added it becomes a balancing act.

 

You do not need to have levels hit the top or bottom in a shot, that's one thing I'd say is often missed. You can lose the top and bottom, that often looks nice.

 

It's easy to make artificial rules about what should and shouldn't be done, but don't. just  do whatever it takes to reach the look in mind.

 

If you don't have one in mind, well... that's step one, go back to the start ;)

[Shane Essary]

Try Speedgrade CC too, if you're a Creative Cloud guy, it's all yours. Pretty under-rated IMHO

I have CC, but haven't loaded in awhile.  Have they finally fixed the round-trip between premiere and speedgrade?  Previously, you could export to speedgrade nicely, but bringing graded footage back in was a gigantic PITA compared to the workflow between AE and Premiere.

[jgharding]

Fixed it? It's magic now :D

 

It's actually smoother than AE to PR dynamic link, because there's no argument between PR's realtime engine and AE's offline engine.

 

You say "Direct Link to Adobe Speedgrade" in Premiere, your sequence opens up in Speedgrade, do your work, the click "render" in speedgrade to come backl

 

You're saving to the Premiere file all the time, and the results of speedgrade appear as a Lumetri plug-in in Premiere so you can switch on and off, copy etc.

 

No render, no proxy round trips, just native all the way baby ;)

 

That's what converted me from DaVinci shortly after I started learning it, the 30 second round trip, you can go back and forth, make edits, grade, change edits...  Great for real-world deadlines

[jgharding]

Here's the second version of my C100 test grade, password is test

 

The skin secondary worked very well, even at 24mbps 420 8-bit AVCHD

 

I assume this is a benefit of 1080 sensor with no debayer, crazy colour resolution even after a huge amount of compression

 

[sunyata]

Plot scanline was a way in Shake to visualize what color operations are doing to your blacks (bottom left) and whites (top right). Someone was kind enough to make an expression for this in Nuke.

 

This is a cheat-sheet for the basic functions combining the often redundant names.

 

 

For example, Photoshop, After Effects and I'm guessing Premiere, have a "levels" tool that is an expand, with a gamma (the midpoint slider) and a min / max at the bottom.. all in one tool. If all you want is an expand, then hopefully this helps show how you can do it with blackpoint and whitepoint, or lift and gain in Resolve. You could then add a gamma right after and have 2/3 of the levels tool.

[Caleb Genheimer]

Well, here's one I did with Resolve. I battled Vimeo tooth-and-nail with this one, their re-encoding was doing some seriously strange stuff to it. I ended up screenshotting the Vimeo playback, and correcting the screenshot back as close to "target" as I could. Then I applied that correction to my footage and re-exported/uploaded. It's fairly close to my intentions, but still not exactly what I see in Resolve or in Desktop playback of the file. The video isn't really released public yet, so keep it on the D-L.

 

Password: Danger Dave

 

[jgharding]

It's nice warm inviting tone!

 

I don't know about your audience, but I can see some of your masks floating about there! Maybe some more feathering on those facial exposure boosts, so they don't look like tracked halos. Big feathers make things a bit more natural

[Caleb Genheimer]

It's nice warm inviting tone!

 

I don't know about your audience, but I can see some of your masks floating about there! Maybe some more feathering on those facial exposure boosts, so they don't look like tracked halos. Big feathers make things a bit more natural

 

Yeah, I worked and reworked those a few times. Haven't taken another pass yet because I'm in the middle of switching editing machines. The new one should make things a bit easier.

[Bioskop.Inc]

!?

[RamblinR]

I'm not sure that this is the right spot for this post but couldn't seem to find a better location for the problem.

 

I am using an OMD EM5 and recording at the highest level.  

I import the full size file into iMovie and edit in 30fps

The blacks and dark colours look fine when editing and playing in iMovie

When I export to Quicktime the blacks and dark colours go blocky and lose detail.

The linked video was exported to Quicktime at 720p and uploaded to Vimeo (also notice this video has a black edge around it (odd)).

If I upload directly using share I still have the same problem but here is something interesting.  After no success with the Quicktime 720p method I decide to do the direct share again instead to compare uploads … no difference accept the black edge was gone.

When I went back to view the video in iMovie using the full screen playback it now had all that blocking on it also.

To get it back to normal I had to edit a clip and it was gone.  So using direct share actually affects the movie file in iMovie until you re-edit it. 

 

Here is a short work I have just completed that displays the problem I am having.

 

https://vimeo.com/96366686

 

NOTE: Swapped video to the one uploaded directly with Share Vimeo to remove black boarders.

 

How do I fix this?

Is it because its the EM5 and something to do with the Codec?

Would a Panasonic G6 solve this?

 

I saw Andrews EM5 night movie and I didn't see this occur on his clips.  

Do I need to purchase FCPX and will this resolve the problem?

 

The viewing video was

 

Many thanks to those that can assist with this.

[dafreaking]

Guys, a super quick question. What settings should I export a video at for optimal results with youtube? I have exported a 720p file with a target bitrate of 7.5 mbps and it has an added pinkish tinge to it when on youtube. Is there any fix for this?

[dafreaking]

Ok so it's not youtube per se. The colours in Premiere are just different to the rest of my computer. Even when played with MediaPlayer it has this pinkish tinge. Any advice?

[sunyata]

It's probably not the colors in Premiere, more likely its the color space selected for the imported footage. You need to match the color space of the footage based on how it was recorded, then make sure it looks correct in Premiere before you export.

 

See what you can do with interpreting footage preferences.. I don't have Premiere so I can't tell you exactly where it is. This is AE:

 

 

You have to play around if you don't know what the source was to match your footage correctly. 

 

p.s. you just need one, there are 2 in the example.

[dafreaking]

So it's the export from premiere that seems to have a colour issue. If I bring back clips exported from premiere back into premiere then the color shift disappears. Really don't know what to do know.

[jgharding]

So it's the export from premiere that seems to have a colour issue. If I bring back clips exported from premiere back into premiere then the color shift disappears. Really don't know what to do know.

 

Are you on PC or Mac? I've known Macs to do this kind of thing with Quicktime-based files...

[jgharding]

I'm not sure that this is the right spot for this post but couldn't seem to find a better location for the problem.

 

I am using an OMD EM5 and recording at the highest level.  

I import the full size file into iMovie and edit in 30fps

The blacks and dark colours look fine when editing and playing in iMovie

When I export to Quicktime the blacks and dark colours go blocky and lose detail.

The linked video was exported to Quicktime at 720p and uploaded to Vimeo (also notice this video has a black edge around it (odd)).

If I upload directly using share I still have the same problem but here is something interesting.  After no success with the Quicktime 720p method I decide to do the direct share again instead to compare uploads … no difference accept the black edge was gone.

When I went back to view the video in iMovie using the full screen playback it now had all that blocking on it also.

To get it back to normal I had to edit a clip and it was gone.  So using direct share actually affects the movie file in iMovie until you re-edit it. 

 

Here is a short work I have just completed that displays the problem I am having.

 

https://vimeo.com/96366686

 

NOTE: Swapped video to the one uploaded directly with Share Vimeo to remove black boarders.

 

How do I fix this?

Is it because its the EM5 and something to do with the Codec?

Would a Panasonic G6 solve this?

 

I saw Andrews EM5 night movie and I didn't see this occur on his clips.  

Do I need to purchase FCPX and will this resolve the problem?

 

The viewing video was

 

Many thanks to those that can assist with this.

 

The video is compressed by you camera when captured, then compressed again when you export, then compressed again by Vimeo or YouTube.

 

With each generation of compression, the dark area get worse.

 

You can control this to some degree by exporting from your edit software at very high bitrates. 

 

To be honest, iMovie is made for the basics, I have no clue how its engine works, it's probably transcoding on import, adding a fourth compression stage.

[dafreaking]

Are you on PC or Mac? I've known Macs to do this kind of thing with Quicktime-based files...

 

On a PC. 

 

A sort of work around I have found for my use for now is using Fast Color Corrector, change the Hue angle to -9.0 and Saturation down to 95%. It looks greenish in Premiere, but on export it's closer to the colours I wanted.

[RamblinR]

The video is compressed by you camera when captured, then compressed again when you export, then compressed again by Vimeo or YouTube.

 

With each generation of compression, the dark area get worse.

 

You can control this to some degree by exporting from your edit software at very high bitrates. 

 

To be honest, iMovie is made for the basics, I have no clue how its engine works, it's probably transcoding on import, adding a fourth compression stage.

 

Thanks for your reply

 

If I were to purchase FCPX would this fix my problem or is it related to the EM5 codec also?

[jgharding]

I don't use FCPX (I've only had about 30 minutes on it) so I should leave that answer to others.

 

I do know that it will give you access to comprehensive editing tools that iMovie is unlikely to, but as I say, best ask an expert in FCP X.

[jonpais]

@RamblinR First of all, you do really nice work! I've uploaded bunches of video from iMovie and never saw issues like the ones you're experiencing (I was uploading to YouTube, but I think that's irrelevant here). Then again, I would seldom upload directly from within iMovie - you'll have much more control if you first convert your video using software like MPEG Streamclip, which is completely free and awesome. Secondly, you should absolutely, definitely and without a doubt switch over to FCPX or another professional NLE. 

 

/edit/ Because the behavior is restricted to dark grey and shadow areas, it almost resembles banding from lifting the shadows. But if it isn't appearing while you're editing, it's beyond me why it would show up after sending it to QuickTime. It also occurred to me that it could be the bit rate is too low, but the rest of the image looks great, so I'm doubting that's it, either! The frustrating issue I had with uploading to YouTube via QuickTime was the gamma shift: colors were pale, and there weren't any true blacks. That's when I began using the free X264 Encoder. I've written about X264 here.