7. FINAL CUT PRO: INTRO TO COLOR CORRECTION [10:08 min]
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What You'll Need: Final Cut Pro
TRANSCRIPT
Hi I’m Kiarra Drew with We Make Movies.
Color correction has typically been one of the most mysterious and difficult aspects of video work. In this tutorial, we’re going to give you the basis of how to approach a basic color correction in FCPX so you can get going on the right path and start creating consistent, professional looking videos.
First things first, with the timeline you want to color correct open, immediately go to the window layout menu, then select under workspaces the color and effects workspace or press ctrl_shft_2. You’ll see your screen change to see your browser go away and reveal video scopes in the upper left corner. Video scopes are how you can digitally read your footage to quickly understand where something is wrong and how to approach fixing it. In the FCPX color layout you have a waveform monitor in the top left, a histogram in the top right, a vectorscope in the bottom left, and RGB parade scopes in the bottom right. We’ll quickly cover what you can use them for before diving into the lesson.
The waveform in the upper left displays the brightness of your image with numbers corresponding to the brightness level of individual parts of your image. What you need to know is for your video to be broadcast safe, you want all of the values of your image to be between 0 and 100. 0 corresponds to black, so you want your blackest values to be at 0, and 100 corresponds to white, and you want your white parts of the video to be at 100. Going above or below 0 and 100 will cause clipping or loss of detail so use your waveform as you color correct to monitor your progress.
The Vectorscope in the bottom left is a visual layout of the color of your image. The dots in the circle with letters next to them represent the colors in the spectrum of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta. If you see your video go past the dots of any of those colors, it means it is too saturated and you have pushed your color past legal broadcast values. The line in the scope is the skin tone line and is useful as you try and correct a person’s skin tones to check and make sure that you’re headed in the generally right direction.
Finally, the last scope we’ll focus on is the RGB parade scope. It lays out out the individual Red, Green, and Blue channels of your image visually, so you can see if one of the individual channels is off, and give you an idea of which part of the image you may need to adjust. We’ll return to this at the end so you can see how these scopes change as you manipulate your image with corrections. Now, onto Final Pro X’s grading tools. We’ll start by showing you the color board, the default tool for color correction in Final Cut Pro X.
First, choose a clip you would like to correct in FCPX and then park your playhead over a specific frame in the clip you think best represents the overall look of a clip by clicking above the clip in an empty area. For this exercise it’s best to choose a fairly static clip without a lot of changing motion in it like an interview clip so that the overall grade you choose for the clip will remain correct for the duration. Anyway, once you have found the frame you like, next, select the clip itself with the mouse or by hovering over it and pressing C.
Now either go to the color window in FCPX by pressing CMD-6 or by selecting the upside down triangle icon in the top left hand corner of the inspector. You should see the color board pucks come up. You’ll notice there are three menus in the color board labeled color, saturation, and exposure. Within each, there are four pucks that you can manipulate. The puck on the right represents the white parts of your image, the grey puck represents the midtones of your image, and the black puck represents the black parts of your image. The puck on the left with the white dot in the center represents a global correction that will affect your entire image. We’ll start by exploring the color menu.
Start by selecting the global correction puck on the left and drag it upwards towards green. Notice how your entire image becomes green. As you drag it upwards watch your video scopes and notice how everything is affected as you add green to your image. Now, drag the global puck downwards across the green spectrum. As you drag downwards you’ll see your image go from green to Magenta. That’s because as you drag below the line on the color board, you are subtracting green from your image instead of adding to it. So if you wanted to remove green from your image, you would drag the puck below the line. The same concept will work across all of the menus in the color board. When you drag a puck upwards, it adds, and when you drag down, it removes. Now, drag each of the pucks in the color window up and down across the color board and pay attention not just to how your image changes in the viewer, but also to how your video scopes change as well. This will teach you how images respond to your corrections in an organic way. When you’re done, reset your correction by clicking the circular counterclockwise arrow next to where it says exposure and it will reset your work. Finally, move over to the Saturation tab by clicking saturation.
The Saturation tab is where you control how much color is present in an image. It’s very simple to use. The best way to understand is to grab the global puck on the left and drag it upwards. You’ll notice that the entire image gets filled with color. Now, drag the puck down all the way down and you’ll notice that all of the color gets removed from the image. For more refined results, play with the black grey, and white pucks, and as you do so, watch how the video scopes are effected by this. When you’re done, reset your work, then move onto the exposure tab by clicking Exposure.
The Exposure tab affects the overall brightness of your image. It works similarly to the other two tabs but typically requires the most refinement to get right. Start by dragging the global puck up and down to see the exposure of your image get brighter and darker. For the most part, though, you don’t typically use the global puck in the exposure tab, and instead focus on a more refined approach.
First, begin by dragging the black puck upwards. You’ll notice that your image starts to become milky with a low contrast, which is because the blacks of your image are too high. Now, look over at the waveform monitor scope in the upper left of your screen as you bring the black puck back down. When you see the blacks of your image get to zero stop and look at your viewer. You should see now that the blackest part of your image looks black. This should be the default way that you approach the black parts of the exposure of your image.
Next, lets affect the highlights, which are the white puck. Drag the white puck way down and watch as your image becomes darker and your waveform scope progressively moves towards zero. Now, bring the whites of your image back up gradually until you see the top of the waveform hit the 100 mark. This means that the whitest part of your image is now at 100, which is the correct broadcast safe value. This is typically where you’ll aim for your highlights to live.
Finally, start manipulating the grey puck, which corresponds to your midtones. This puck is far more subjective and is typically where you affect things like skin tones and the overall contrast of your image. Drag it up and down and watch how it affects your waveform monitor. This puck is far more subjective in its effects. Drag it to your taste and when you’re done, you’ll now fully understand how to use the color board to maximum effect. Reset your work again and now try and grade your clip to your taste by using all three menus getting your blacks to zero and your whites to 100. When you can do this, you will have mastered the color board and can start applying this to all of the other clips in your timeline.
Some final tips to help you navigate color correction in the timeline. You can move back to the timeline with the keyboard by pressing CMD-2, or go back to the color board for a selected clip by pressing cmd-6. From there, you can move from clip to clip by pressing cmd-left or cmd-right arrow which will automatically select the previous or next clip in the timeline and this will allow you to modify the controls of whatever clip is selected. You can move between connected clips in the timeline by pressing cmd_up or cmd_down arrow. Also, the most important aspect of color grading is making sure things match shot to shot. You can do this easily at any time by pressing Cmd-2 to be in the timeline, using the up or down arrows to move from shot to shot, and then the left and right arrows to move from the top of the shot to the tail of the previous shot and back again to compare. Press C to select whichever clip you need to modify and then cmd-6 to return to the color menu for the selected clip, or just use the mouse.
Finally, if you want to copy and paste your grades from one clip to another, or remove them, it is very easy to do so. In the current clip selected, press cmd-C to copy. Then, select a few clips in your timeline and in the edit dropdown menu select paste attributes, or press shft-cmd-V and you’ll see the paste attributes window come up. You can apply as many of the attributes as you’d like to include, including your color board corrections. Select everything you’d like to add, and then press paste. The clips that you selected will now be updated to reflect the changes. If you’d like to remove a grade or any other effect or attribute from a clip or set of clips, you can do so by selecting them, and then go to the edit dropdown and select remove attributes or shft-cmd-X, and the remove atributes window will appear where you can remove them.
Check out the advanced color correction tutorial to get a better understanding of some of the more advanced tools for correction in FCPX.