Color Correcting & Grading in Final Cut Pro X

it's looking pretty dull around here let's see if we can't spruce this place up ah that's better [Music] hey everyone kyle erickson here today i wanted to switch things up a little bit i spend a lot of time on this channel reviewing products and giving tech advice and info but one thing that i've done a lot of as i've worked on this channel is learning i think with whatever i do one of the main things that i've always tried to accomplish no matter how much experience or skill level that i've got it's just always trying to learn new things and push myself to get better with that said over the last year or so there's been a pretty steep learning curve for me as a creator i went from basically having nothing in terms of gear besides a basic camera to slowly upgrading to a nicer camera with better lighting and better microphone and about seven months or so ago i changed my editing software over to final cut pro i did that for a few reasons but it was just a bit of a departure for me from what i was used to and because final cut pro has been around for a while i think like a decade or so a lot has changed specifically with color correction so there's a lot of different information out there and i just wanted to walk you through what i do to correct and grade my footage the clips that i'll be editing in this video are off my fuji xd4 so it's filmed in f-log and if you're filming on a different camera provided you can shoot in a log profile the steps should be relatively the same a lot of cheaper cameras may not have the option to shoot in a log profile so you will be somewhat limited in what you can do the log profile just basically pushes our shadows and highlights a little bit more in the middle and kind of crushes them all together so it retains more detail and that just gives us more control over them when we're editing so if you take a look at this waveform which i'll talk about in a minute you can see that we've got some wiggle room to play with our shadows and highlights if you don't have the option to shoot in a log profile these are usually pushed out more to the edges of the scale which just means that we have less control over them so you can still do a lot of the color correction steps in this video but you probably will want to make sure that your footage is filmed in the correct exposure as much as you can let's start off here just to start off this tutorial i've just imported two clips one is just a talking head video and the other one is just a random b-roll clip i'm gonna add a new project here okay so now we've got a timeline down here and just to start things off i'm just going to drag on this talking head piece here so this is log footage you can see that both of these clips are filmed in f-log and you can see it looks pretty flat there's not really any contrast there's no saturation at all and that's done on purpose so all the details are preserved in the video like i said before more expensive cameras are probably going to have a log profile option while cheaper cameras will probably not but we will get into that in a second so the first thing i like to do here is create a compound clip especially on talking head pieces like this where you know that things are going to be chopped up and you're going to be reusing a lot of this in multiple spots where i just want to make the color correction once and have it go on all those clips so i'm going to do that by right clicking or control clicking the clip and going to new compound clip so what that's going to do is basically put our video inside a container so as you can see here if i make a bunch of cuts in here to kind of simulate what our footage might look like after i'm done and after i've edited a bunch of stuff i can then double click on any of this and it's going to go into that base clip and why this is useful is let's say if i edit a clip here like i would normally if i didn't have a compound clip and crank up the saturation just for an example you can see it's adjusted the saturation just on this one clip whereas everywhere else is the same as it was before so if we undo that and then if i go inside the compound clip and actually adjust that value inside of here and then go back you can see it's made that adjustment on the entire timeline wherever this clip exists so it's really useful for things like talking head where you're going to have a bunch of these clips repeated and you only want to make one edit i'm just going to undo that and i just want to go over the first adjustment that i'm going to make in color correction i'm going to go over to this little info inspector here and if you're opening final cut for the first time you're probably going to see this basic option and what you want to do is just switch that to general so that's going to expand some of the options here and this is the value that we're most concerned with right here is this camera lut so right now it's sent to none and when you import log footage it's going to be probably in a different color space than what you're outputting so you just want to make an adjustment for that lots of log footage is probably going to be in something like rec 2020 whereas we're looking for rec 709 those numbers aren't really that important the important thing to know is that it's just in a different color space so you can see the differences here normally log footage is just going to have a little bit different color space so we need to make those adjustments so that our image shows the proper colors in my case right now things are looking a little bit yellow so if i go to my camera lut i've already downloaded and installed this camera lut that converts my fuji f log to rec 709 so if i click that you can see that the color changes just slightly it's a little bit less yellow and it looks a little more accurate you can usually find those lots on your camera manufacturer's support website so in my case i just went on the fuji website and there's a lot for f-log so there's a few in here i'm under xt4 in my case i only needed this one i'm not going to get into this too much but just know that in most cases you will need to make this adjustment so it's super easy to add if it's not already in here you just go to add custom camera lut and then you'll just find wherever you saved your lut to and just click open in my case i'm just going to cancel because mine's already in here next we're going to hit on this color tab here if you're opening final cut for the very first time you probably won't see these wheels and it will have a color board so to adjust that what you'll want to do is go to final cut pro and go to preferences and then just hear where the color correction is you just want to go from color board to color wheels color board is just the old way of doing things whereas color wheels is a lot newer and it's a lot easier to work with and then because i'm not going to be using this panel here for the next little while i'm going to close that and i can do that by hitting control command 1. so it just gives us a little bit more screen real estate we are going to use some other scopes and things here in a second on that side so it's just really useful to have the extra space so now i want to get rid of this washed out flat look so i'm just going to bring up another panel by hitting command 7. so this is my vector scope you can actually bring up other scopes here by clicking on this little icon there's a histogram and a waveform we're going to use the waveform right now so i'm just going to click on that waveform and you may have like a weird rgb parade or something in here but we want to be on the luma so this might look completely foreign to you but what we're looking at here is basically the highlights which are represented at the higher end of the scale and the shadows which are represented at the lower end of the scale with the mid tones obviously in the middle and you can see it kind of goes along with the image on the right hand side i've got my lights on either side of my shoulder and you can see those right at 100 because they're a little bit blown up it's not super important in this image i don't really want any detail in those anyways on the shadows you can see that they're pushed up a little bit here and what i want to do is actually bring those down a little bit so i'm going to start off by just looking at these color wheels and just explain here how these work so on each wheel you've got a slider on each side so the left hand side is just going to control the saturation like i showed before whereas this right hand side is going to control the brightness level so i want to bring my shadows down so i'm just going to click and drag this and pull it down so it's just above that zero value and then the other thing i'm looking at right here is my skin tones so there's an ansel atom zone system that i like to pay attention to for skin tones so i can pull that up you can see here around between six and seven is going to be white pale skin which i would say lines up pretty well with my skin so i usually like to be around 66 67 somewhere around there for my skin tones so i can actually just bump up the highlights just a touch here maybe so that looks good and then i can just kind of cycle through here and make sure there's nothing weird and then one thing i usually like to do too is pull down the mid tones a little bit in my images to me it looks better just dragged down just a touch here now the next step that i want to show you is white balancing so final cut pro does have something built in to auto balance your image and that's under here under this magic wand and under balance color and you'll see in a second here what the problem with that is so you could see maybe it did white balance my image but the problem is is it's dragged down all these other values and moved everything all around in here and i don't really want that to happen i've already made some adjustments so i'm just gonna back out of that i'm gonna go back to my regular timeline here and then i'm gonna bring up that side panel again and just for demonstration purposes i'm just gonna drag this other b-roll clip on here and show you a really easy way to do this if you have white in your scene and you want to white balance really quick so i'm just going to go through this really fast select my camera lut go to my color tab i'm going to drag down my shadows just really quick you can see here i've got a little space to work with on my whites or my highlights so i'm going to bring this up so we'll call that good for now there's a lot of white in the scene so it's going to be pretty easy to tell if things are properly white balanced what i'm going to do is change the scope back to my vector scope and what this vector scope is showing is just kind of the saturation and where the colors lie in the image so you can think of the center as pure white and then everything that comes out from here is different colors obviously in my scene i've got some background color here from the backlight of my leds so that's kind of represented here and the more saturated it is the further this will go out so you can see if i scale up the saturation here it'll push everything out i'm just gonna undo that what i want to do is just show one white spot on this clip without anything else in the scene so in order to do that i'm gonna go into my effects panel i'm just gonna search for draw mask so i'm going to drag this draw mask onto my clip and then if i come over here you can see the draw mask so what i'm going to do here is just mask out a clip here i'm not going to use the monitor because there's usually some weird colors associated with my monitor i know that my desk is pretty white and that the light here is a really really neutral color so i'm just going to select this and for this purpose because we're on here i'm just going to click v to hide this for now we've just got this one piece selected here pure white is basically right in the center here so you can see we're off a little bit so a really easy way to adjust this yourself is just to come into your color tabs and scroll down if i move this temperature around you can see it kind of moves back and forth and if i move the tint it's going to go this way in this way so in this case i'm probably going to have to adjust both of these sometimes you can get away with only having to adjust one value but we're going to have to use both here so i'm going to pull this up a little bit and just make incremental changes it's pretty much in the center of my scope so then i'm going to come back and remove this draw mask and everything's white balanced the way that i want it in the case of our clip here if i just hide this and go back to our clip there is white in the scene but it's kind of polluted with all this blue color and these really warm lights but the one thing that i know doesn't have any color and that has light on it that doesn't have warmth or cold tones to it is this zipper here so i'm just gonna find a spot on my timeline here where it's showing really well and reflecting the light and then i'm basically gonna do the same thing i'm gonna mask out this zipper but because it's so tiny i'm going to blow things up here i'm going to show this transform panel if it's not already showing i'm just going to scale this up and then i'm going to push this down i just want to get this right in the center [Music] okay so that's good enough i'm just going to do that same thing i'm going to take my draw mask and put it on my clip and then i'm just going to grab this right here [Music] and then i'm going to bring back up my scopes with command 7. you can see that's pretty close already actually to where we need it so i could come back in here if it wasn't perfect maybe make an adjustment i don't think i need to do much here maybe bring this down just a hair it looks pretty good the way it is actually then we can go back here and just do this and i can actually just remove this and then we'd be white balanced for this image as well again this isn't an exact science or anything you can get color correction cards if you want to use those at the start of your video or something or hold up a piece of paper or something like that but you can also just do this in a pinch another thing that i want to do is make sure that my skin tones look like they're the right color so one aspect to this vector scope that's really useful that you can use for all skin tones is i can hit this icon again and i can go to show skin tone indicator and what that's going to do is show the skin tones line here to just make sure that your skin tones are the right color and again it's kind of polluted here with all these other colors so we can use our draw mask again i'm going to drag that on there and then i'm just going to do a mask on my forehead here it's just going to mask out my skin so you can see i'm pretty close again to this skin tone line but i do want to make some adjustments and to do that i'm going to go to my color tab again and then i'm going to click on this down arrow and i'm going to add a hue and saturation curves i'm actually going to go back and just remove this mask now i just want to target my skin tones and nothing else i don't want to adjust the background or anything like that so i'm going to make a mask for just my skin tones and i'm going to do that by hitting this little mask button here and it's going to ask me if i want to create a shape mask or a color mask i'm going to start off with a color mask here and then i'm going to go to my skin tones and just drag here and you can see it's going to select just my skin tones now oftentimes what you will find is when you select your skin tones especially if you've got warm lights in the background or something as it will kind of bleed into there as well and one way to alleviate this is to actually add another mask here and add a shape mask and these masks will intersect with one another so if i actually adjust this just to my skin area let me just rotate this a little bit here and that's generally going to be the right placement my head's not going to move around too much you can see if i go click view masks it's going to show where the mask is lying so if i scroll through my timeline you can see it's pretty consistent all the way through nothing that you'd ever notice just watching the video so i'm gonna click that again now we can go back and turn on our mask again come back to our colors so now i'm gonna play around with my skin tone a little bit i'm gonna grab this eye dropper on this hue versus hue i'm just gonna select the middle of my skin tone here so what that does is isolate a single color so if i turn off my mask here you can see it's targeting just that color just my skin tones basically so i'm going to turn my mask back on i'm going to try and line this skin tone line up so it sits just perfectly along this line [Music] okay so that looks about good to me again i don't really have to make that many adjustments here it's looking pretty good out of the gate and another thing i'm gonna do it does look a little bit pale so i'm just gonna go down to this hue versus saturation i'm just gonna drag it up this whole line here and to just bump up my skin tone it's just a touch i'm just going to double check here and make sure we're still along our skin tone lines did bump up the saturation so it's just good to double check sometimes make sure everything's still good so that looks fine to me so if we go over here and just check out this waveform again i think that looks pretty good everything looks pretty well color corrected the white balance is adjusted our skin tones are good everything is sitting along this line in between 60 and 70 for my skin tones i'm really liking this so far so with everything now corrected what i'm gonna do is actually add a little bit of style here so i am gonna just add a new color wheels i'm not going to go over my old one at all because that's the one that i've done all my correction on whereas this one's going to be specifically for style so i do think that i want to bump up just the general saturation in this entire image a little bit so i'm just gonna crank that up just ever so slightly and then i want my shadows to be a little bit more teal i think to match that back light behind my head so i'm gonna just pull these down just a touch and then i'm gonna bump the highlights and make those a little bit more warm i might just adjust my mid tones just a little bit here into this magenta not too much just barely anything at all okay so i'm really liking that i'm gonna call that done so i can actually come out of this clip here now and you can see that everywhere has got this correction on it so that's taken place on my entire timeline wherever this clip is used and one really cool thing is if i've done this and i'm filming in a lot of the same circumstances say like these videos where i'm doing talking head i'm usually speaking in the same place with the same lights so what i can do is actually save these settings so i can pop back into that compound clip and make sure that my clip is selected that i just did all my edits on and i can go to file and i can go to save video effects preset and then i can select all the effects that i want to apply in this so i'm obviously not going to use these masks same with these transforms i just got my color wheels here and my hue and saturation curves and then i can give it a name so i'm just going to put talking head correction and the cool thing about this is is if we come here and i can then just delete all this stuff out of here so we got our base clip and then i can come back into here and search for talking head and when i drag this on to my clip it'll place all those effects back on so really handy you can do this with audio effects too say if you're adjusting your audio and adding compressors and stuff like that and when you do this incrementally it might not seem like you're doing all that much but it really is night and day when you toggle your effects off and on there are lots of other video effects in here if you want to apply different looks and things that come right out of the gate with final cut pro but i don't really find any of them useful there's maybe a few for different scenes or something that you might end up using but i just like to approach things and do my own again you could save all these effects so that's super useful you can also download free and paid lut packs that other people have made and apply those after you've done color correction or sometimes even to your log footage you can just go to your effects panel again and just search for lut and just grab this custom lut and just drag it onto your clip and from there you can add your downloaded luts and pretty much doing the same thing that we did before in the info panel when we were just adjusting the color space but i'm not going to get into that too much the whole point of this was just to get you in here familiar with things so you can color grade your footage and maybe add a few different looks and effects and kind of know your way around how to do all of this and that's basically it there is a bunch of other stuff that you can do in here in regards to color correcting and adding style to your videos but i just wanted to show you some basics and give you a good jump start i think there are a lot of powerful options in here i didn't get into adding any custom style blots or anything like that but if you are interested in having me kind of expand on this topic please let me know in the comments i hope you found this video useful if you had a super fun time with me here today don't forget to use your cursor to hit that like button if you want to see more videos like this and tech related stuff please subscribe thank you guys so much for tuning in and i will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Kyle Erickson

Views: 480

Keywords: color correction, color correcting, final cut pro color grading, final cut pro color grading cinematic, final cut pro, color grading, final cut pro colour grading, final cut pro x tutorial, fcp tutorial, final cut pro x, color grading tutorial, colour grading, fcpx color grading, final cut color grading, final cut pro color correction, fcp color correcting, fcp color correction, fcpx tutorial, video editing tutorial, final cut pro tutorial, color correction tutorial

Id: f1AWcuY3ey0

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 15 2021