Cinematic Color Grading in Final Cut Pro – Step-by-Step Tutorial

hey everybody today we're going to learn how to cinematically color grade your footage using the native tools all within final cut 10 so let's get to it here we are inside of final cut 10 and what we're going to do today is we are going to learn how to do a cinematic color grade on this footage right here for the upcoming documentary chicken king not really but that'd be cool all right so um what we have here is we have these two clips um that we're going to be working on to create a cinematic grade with now one thing i always like to note is when you're trying to grade cinematic footage you really want two things you want like highest quality footage that your camera can capture within reason and then also you want a flat color profile so all this footage you see here was shot on a canon c500 mark ii in the cinema raw so right when i exported or imported the footage you can see that it already applied the canon log 2 lut so there's two ways you can go about starting your grade is either you can do it completely flat from you know bare bones or you can go ahead and add in the rec709 lut just to give you you know a great starting point and that's how i'm gonna do it today so these first two clips here we're just gonna keep raw so we can have a good comparison and jump back and forth between we're gonna start over here so you can see over here that i already have my view panel up and you can lay this out any way that you want you can do single you can do all sorts of different types of grids and everything and just really fine tune it however you would like so what we're going to start out with first is we're going to come over here to our color panel and what we're going to do is we're first going to add in our color wheels now the color wheels here separate it into your master your shadows your mid-tones and your highlights so you have two sides here you have your luma side that's just going to basically adjust your exposure like this or you have the saturation side which is going to take all of the saturation your shadows and lift it up so to really determine how we want to fine tune here we look here at this little area and we can see that our zero is our shadow so when people talk about crushing your blacks what you're doing is you're taking this level here and pushing it past zero so if you crushed your blacks it would look like that and then your area up here is your highlights and you can quickly see if we go past that we blow out our highlights so what we want to do to get a cinematic grade is for this instance we want to push our footage as much as we can within reason that doesn't destroy the image so what we're going to do is we're going to take our shadow portion here i'm going to bring this down not so it hits zero but right above it we're going to take our highlights push those up okay and you can see here we're right below the 100 marker we take this look at it we can quickly see like okay we're already starting to have like a little bit more contrasty of an image starting to look good already now one thing that we can do to push this even more is we come down here and we want to add a color curve we're going to jump over here to our luma section which is the top one on your color curve and we're going to do a basic s curve so what an s-curve is you put a point right in the middle a point down here this represents your shadows your mid-tones then your highlights are right here up at the top so it's almost like a three-way color um wheels but a little bit more control in specific regions so you can see here we can drop our shadows i mean we could even move this down and really isolate the darker part of the shadows but we already kind of did that with our three-way so we just want to fine-tune it a little bit more and these are really just kind of small adjustments here we're going to lift our mid-tones a bit lift our highlights a bit more i'm gonna drop the shadows just a little bit more you can see here on our lumoscope that everything's still good we're still kind of where we need to be we can toggle this on and off and see kind of what we're getting here i do think that that shirt's going a little too high in on the highlights there so maybe what i'll do is i've come back to my color wheels drop down the highlights just a smidge keep that in some good detail there all right so now we're already having something that looks a little bit more cinematic than our original clip which is right here which you can definitely see a drastic difference between those two now right now we just have like a really nice good looking image but we can even push it a little bit more to make it even more cinematic so what we want to do to do that i want to come back and add some more color wheels and that's why they call it a color grade is because there's lots of layers to it to get it to a certain point but rather than just doing curves or doing one set of color wheels it's really a bunch of layers stacked on top of each other to get a great cinematic look so here we are back in the color wheels and really the color tools inside of final cut 10 are really great so what we're going to do is we're going to click this button bring up our color mask now our color mask what it does is it isolates a color so we can see here that we isolated this blue blue tarp here and what we can really do just you know to kind of see the power of this tool is now that we have it isolated and we can really change it any color we want we can bubble the saturation and we can see that it only affects that tarp which is really cool so we're gonna hit that reset button bring it back and maybe we'll you know just bump the saturation on it a little bit just to give it a little bit more pump back there okay we can see here off on just a little bit more punch there now if you're going for a classic like teal and orange look this is the perfect tool to use for that so to add to our grade we're going to add another color wheel here i'm going to hit this mask button going to add a color mask what we're going to do is we're going to select this whole background area and almost treat that as our shadows so we're we're gonna select that whole area which it seems like it did a great job there already um and you can see kind of all the areas that you're still seeing color on or the areas that are going to be affected if there's anything like these skin tones over here you want to get rid of you just hit command and it brings up like a minus dropper here to take out any of those areas that you don't want to affect just kind of get our perfect ratio here perfect okay all right so what we can do here is this kind of sets within like the shadow mid-tone area what we want to do is we just want to add a little bit of teal into that and you can quickly see how that affected our image went from that to that you may even just want to drop the exposure a little bit there we go and that gives us a nice teal effect right there inner shadow region now what we really want to do just get that teal and orange effect so we want to add another layer of color wheels what we want to do is select our skin tones here make sure we get as much skin tone as possible without getting too much of a background perfect okay we're gonna do here is add some orange into our skin tones give us a nice little playback here see what we're looking with cool it's looking great i think we can come in here and probably bring down our mid-tones a little bit there we go just enough to where you know we're still retaining a nice amount of detail there and so here we are with our clip and we can come over here to our original where we started and you can see a huge difference between the rec 709 just colored clip and then our final color clip so we also have two clips in here and what we can do is since these are in the same scene we can use the simple shortcut of just command c to copy those attributes and option command v to paste and that'll apply all of the same effects over then you just make you know small little adjustments as needed i think we can bring down the mid-tone saturation a little bit seems a little much and here we are with a look at our footage in the original canon log 2 no lut here we took the canon log 2 converted it to a rec 709 and here we are with our final color graded image and that's how you're able to use the native color tools within final cut 10 to grade your own cinematic footage just remember to have high quality footage have it in a log format and you'll be able to make grades just like these we'll catch you all next time [Music]

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 162,193

Keywords: PB, PremiumBeat, Cinematic Color Grading, Editing Tips, Cinematic Footage, LUTS, Moody Colors, Editing for Beginners

Id: ABK0S0rzyQk

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020