David A. Cox: Hello everyone. And welcome to chapter 10 in my 12 part
course on video production for small business owners and nonprofits today, I'm
going to teach you how to color, correct. In final cut pro you are watching
the free version of this course that I've made available on YouTube. But if you would like to take the
full course, be sure to head over to the website you see on your screen,
or you can find the link in the video description without any further ado. Let's begin the class. Hello everyone today, I'm going to
teach you how to perform a basic color correction in final cut pro
of all of the different chapters that I've created for this course. This is by far been one of the
most difficult topics to cover. What you have to understand about color
correction is it truly is a science. That's why there are people
who are full time colorists. So what I'm going to do is teach
you how to use the most important tools that will help you achieve
a more professional and polished. Lesson one, no matter what you
do, your video is going to look slightly different on every screen. It's a little bit like when you walk
into a big box store and they have that giant wall of TV's when they're next
to each other, of course you can see the difference between the different
brands, but when you're at home, you only have one screen in front. I'd also like to remind you that
the Mac, iPhone and iPad now have features like true tone and night
shift, which will automatically shift the white balance on your screen,
depending on the time of the day. So what I'm basically saying
here is no matter what you do, your video is not gonna. Perfect on every single device. The main goals of color correction
are, we want to make sure that your skin tones are accurate. We want to make sure that the colors
appear as they are meant to be meaning. We want red to appear as red
blue to appear as blue and green to appear as green. And finally, we want to make sure
that everything is properly exposed so that there's nothing that's
either blown out or underexposed. There are a few settings
that I recommend you change. Anytime you're color correcting,
let's go to the apple icon at the top left and let's go into
system preferences from here. I want you to click on displays
and make sure that night shift. And true tone are both turned off. Then let's go into the color tab
and uncheck the option where it says show profiles for this display. Only if you use your iPhone to
shoot your video that most likely uses a profile called rec 7 0 9. As you can see it's here in this menu,
the name is a little bit longer, but what I would recommend that you do
is set it to that when you're color correcting again, this is provided
that you shot your video with your. There is one more setting that
I recommend that you change, but that is back in final cut pro. So let's go back into that app and click
on where it says final cut pro here at the top left and go into preferences
from here, click on the general tab where it says color correction,
and I recommend that you change it from color board to color wheel. For those of you who are taking
my course on Thinkific, you should see a video associated with this
chapter that you can download. I would like you to do that at this time
and please bring it into a new project. Let's now rearrange our windows a bit. I would like you to close the browser
window by clicking here at the top. Then in the preview window, I
would like you to click on where it says view and select video scopes. Or if you want to use the
shortcut it's command seven to the left of our preview window. I would like you to click
on where it says view. And I'd like you to drag this slider where
you see this sun icon all the way to the. Above. I'd like you to select the
box that only has one square. That just means that we're only going
to work with one tool at a time. You can always change this later on,
but for this point in time, I would like you to just use one below the view menu. I'd like you to click on this icon. And in this list, I'd like you to
set this first option to wave form then click back into this menu
and let's view the Luma Channel great. We've got our windows set up. So let's begin the process. The thing I always like to start
with is setting the white balance. Ideally, when you shoot a video, you
want to start by having someone on camera, hold up a white piece of paper. You can also use a gray card. It doesn't really matter. This is used partially to set the white
balance, but it's also really handy when it comes to setting the levels for
the shadows mid-tones and highlights. That being said, if you are working
with footage that you already shot and you didn't think to do
that ahead of time, don't worry. You can make adjustments after the fact. And I'm going to show you how
to do it in just a moment. I'm going to start by showing
you how to wipe balance using the white piece of paper. Thinkific students. What I would like you to do is
click on this clip so that it's highlighted, then click on this magic
wand, icon and select balance color. Now let's go into the inspector
and here in the video inspector, I am going to change this from
automaic to white balance. If I move my cursor over the
preview window, it has now turned into a droplet icon. So now I'm going to place my cursor
on that white piece of paper. And I'm going to click down and drag out
just a little bit so that it can sample as much of that piece of paper as possible. And as you can see here, our colors
have shifted and my skin tones look a lot better than they did a second ago. If you want to see the before and
after you can just uncheck this box. If you are working with footage that
you already shot, here's another method. Click over to this triangle icon in
the inspector, and here below the color wheels, you will find a slider where you
can manually adjust the white balance. And just to be clear when you change
the temperature in doing so, you were also changing the white balance. They are the same thing. You're either warming things up
or you're cooling them down until theoretically they are balanced. Now, the other thing to keep in mind
is that you might not always want that. Look, you might sometimes want
your shot to look warmer or cooler. So just please know, there
is no wrong way to do it. Ultimately it is your product. Thank you so much for watching everyone. We will be. It is a little known fact that the
human eye can much more easily correct for exposure when you remove all color. So when I'm color correcting a shot,
the first thing that I like to do is make it look perfect in black and white. The easiest way that you can do that is
to go here into the global color wheel. And then you can drag this left arrow. That will remove the
global saturation levels. And when you take it away, all you're
left with is a black and white image. So now that our shot is de-saturated,
I would like to bring your attention to the Luma channel when it
comes to the highlights, 100% is considered to be a light source. And because my piece of paper isn't
producing light, it's just reflecting. We probably want that to read right
around 90% to adjust the levels. We can use the highlights slider
here on the right hand side, when it comes to the shadows, you want
to make sure that those levels never drop down below zero that slider you'll find right here. So for example, I'm going to adjust
the slider so that my levels get really close to zero without actually hitting. When it comes to setting
your mid-tone levels. My advice is that you
just simply play with it. You know, sometimes you just have
to export a copy and then see how it looks on a bunch of different devices. Before you find that happy level,
you should also know that the iPad pro is actually one of the best
calibrated monitors out there. So if you're trying to get an accurate
feel for how the colors look, you can always hook up your iPad to your Mac. Thanks to the sidecar feature,
which by the way, you can find in system preferences. And that way you can get
a much more accurate. Of how everything looks. In earlier chapters, I recommended
that you consider not shooting an HDR only because it does
add an extra step in editing. If you did shoot any of your shots in HDR,
please note, all you need to do is go here into the effects panel, go into color,
and you will find the HDR tool right here. So all you have to do is
drag and drop that onto your. And finally, the last thing you'll need
to change is here in the inspector. We're going to need to
change it from HD R to H L G. And when I make that switch,
our shot now looks correct. I would now like to show you a
few different ways that you can enhance the colors in your video. There are several techniques that
you can utilize to tackle this. But what I want to do is
show you how to use the most important tools for this example. I'm going to use the quick clip of
the sign that says entering Truro. If I play this clip full screen, you can
see, it looks totally washed out the sky. Doesn't look that blue, the
greens don't look that green. Hmm. Perfect for color correcting
one of the techniques that I encourage you to use when you're
color correcting is to initially over-correct and then dial it back. I'm going to start by
adjusting the exposure. And what I forgot to say a moment ago is
you actually probably want to start with the shadows first, then do the highlights
and finally deal with the mid-tones. The shot was taken right
in the middle of the day. So most of what we see here is going to
fall into the highlights and the midtones so watch as I now grab the slider for
the saturation levels in the shadows and drag it dramatically up and down,
see how it's changing the color. So what I want to do is initially
over-correct and then dial it back, then we'll move on to the highlights
and we'll do the same thing. We'll initially over-correct
and then dial it back. And finally, let's go into
the midtones and do the same. Here's another trick. Take a look at this shot
of this line of candy bars. See this first bar that is actually
supposed to be purple, but as you can see here, it looks pretty
washed out to remedy this problem. I'm going to add a hue/saturation curve. The most important tool in this list
is where it says hue versus saturation. So watch this. I'm going to click on the eyedropper
and I'm going to select the shade of purple that's in our shot now to enhance. I'm going to drag up on this point
and see how now the color stands out. Looks great. If you look at the center of each
of these wheels, you will see a dot. If we grab that dot and drag
it, it's going to start to add a tint to that part of the image. In the case of this shot, it
looks like we still have this very subtle yellow tint to it. So yellow's complimentary color is purple. So let's now correct it and add a
ton of purple and then dial it back until we find the right balance. It's basically fishing, but with. Thanks for watching everyone. We will be right back. Another important tool that I want to show
you how to use is the color match tool. This allows you to sample the color from
one shot and then paste it onto another. Let's use these two shots as an example,
to make this second shot matched the first shot I'm going to select the
magic wand icon and choose color match. Now I can see a second window. And all I need to do is click on
the part of the clip that I want to sample and then click "apply. Now that we've gone over the
basics of color correction. I have one more technique that I
would like to teach you, and that is how to copy and paste corrections
from one shot onto another. This is very similar to copy
and paste with a slight twist. Let's say. All of the corrections that I made
on this shot and paste them onto the following shot to do that. All I need to do is copy the first
clip by highlighting it and then pressing command C on my keyboard. Then I'll select the second shot. And this time I'm going to press
command shift and the letter V. So it's just like paste. All you need to do is add the shift key. And when I do, you can see all
the corrections that I had on my first shot. And if there are any that I
would like to exclude, I can uncheck them from this list. So now I have all of those corrections
from the first shot now applied to the second shot and just be aware, you can
also do this to more than one shot. So for example, if you are filming in
a controlled environment, or if like when I'm filming these videos, you can
do all of your color corrections to one shot and then copy and paste them to. In chapter 11, I'm going to teach you
the best settings when it comes to exporting your video from final cut pro. After that, we only have one chapter
left and that is where I'm going to teach you how to make your commercial
appear as a targeted ad on YouTube. Thanks so much for
watching class dismissed.
