Color Grading a Theatrical Documentary [Show Me The Father]

hey everybody this is john clayburnette editor and colorist and today we are talking about the feature length documentary that i did the color grade for for the kendricks documentary show me the father this is going to contain some tips tricks and techniques that i used for the documentary this is not an exhaustive how to grade a documentary but we'll be looking at davinci resolve and bringing over clips from premiere and if you want to jump ahead or skip around there are notes in the description with time codes so that you can find just the section you are looking for be sure to subscribe like and leave me a comment i'd love to know what was helpful for you if you have any other ideas and tips i'm always looking to learn as well and with that let's get started sometimes when you are doing conforms you have offline clips and when those are in the media pool what you do is take that clip name you can go up here and search for that clip name and once you find it you can right click on this clip conform and it will link it up you may need to make any adjustments over on some of the metadata settings to make sure that the speed transitions come over as well often times speed transition ones don't copy over very well and need to be readjusted inside of davinci you may also need to re-line up the clip to make sure that it has the correct in and out points here on the left hand side i have the i have the offline reference clip that i can see the input and the output and i can line that up here's another example conforming from the media pool so i just went through the whole timeline and each for each one i was searching the name and reconforming the ones that were that were offline sherman 16 conform luck here we have an error in which case i drag it in manually and it looks like there is a speed adjustment on this clip that is causing an issue so here we can make this speed adjustment which allows us to drag it out to the length of the other clip and then once you have the settings correct you can just replace it something i needed to do for this project is to replace all of the jpegs for some reason jpegs do not handle well in davinci resolve and their their links get adjusted all over the place and it'll overwrite other footage you can see here i've bumped up to track three a lot of the jpegs that needed replaced and i went ahead and rendered those out of premiere where the the project was edited um as a high-res prores dropped it back in and then went through and used the scene detect tool in premiere to cut it up i also used the jpegs underneath to quickly find all the blank spots but i had to go back and check it to make sure that it was catching all the jpegs correctly like here for example i had to go back in and put the correct cut i chose to select tracks three and four so that i could quickly up and down arrow to just the jpegs in that in this sequence instead of having to click through every single one or you know drag with the hand to find each each one of them i could easily jump from one to the other using the up and down arrows then i went through and made sure that the other cuts and transitions reflected so that when i did the color in davinci that would translate it's pretty easy to just select copy paste each one it'll copy the length and exact transition so you don't have to go find it or reapply it you can go up here and click copy select the next transition point and come up and click paste or you can use your keyboard controls to use copy paste command c command v on on a mac once we are done make sure to duplicate it so that we have versions that we can come back to if we need to so we're going to select just the images now that we know that they are in the correct timing make sure snapping is turned on and we drop those down correctly the images that are not working before are now replaced with the prores export versions here we deleted everything else in this one now that we know those updated prores ones are in the correct position we'll export this xml and we will send this over to davinci resolved here we can go and import that xml correct title here and make sure it's right one open we want to automatically import the source clips because these will be new prores versions so that would be the xml we would import but i've already imported it so i'm not going to import this one it brought in the media file of the new images since that was new to this project and i made sure it was in the correct folder then in davinci i go over to the temp export where i rendered out those still images into video files made sure to import those so that they're in the media bin and then go over to edit find my folder of xmls and i'd right click and import my new xml which was this one here in this instance i don't want to do project settings because i don't want this to override i already have my project settings so i uncheck that i want to use the sizing automatically i also uncheck this which then when you click ok it will then ask you to pick which folder and i just pointed it to these other folders i still had to go through and re-line some of this up and re-conform it to some of the clips in the up here just because the timings were off and such so it does take a little bit of work but then i went through and copied this entire selection and went over to my main sequence and added a video track you would do add add tracks turn this one down above video one add track and it popped up and then i went to the first clip where i have updated media here it defaults into the first track so i just go to the end of the project pasted it and then drag it all up and then lined it all up that way i'm sure there's a way to turn these off i tried locking i wasn't quite sure how to make it populate on the second track without going on the first track unless because it was on the first track in the other sequence so anyway if you've got tips i'd love to see a comment down below how to uh how to get this to pipeline on second tracks when it originally was on a first track i'd love a little tip like that so and then i went back through the project and for the jpegs that are that are not working and causing issues um i went through and made sure to delete those out of there so we don't have any unlinked footage in the project now we go back and we reset up our our reference offline and make sure the offline reference is selected and then we're going through each clip and making sure the ins and out points are still correct sometimes the image settings do not come over accurately and have to be adjusted in the project oh this one it's a keyframe adjustment on the zoom and so i need to make sure that that is reflected correctly and then going through each of the clips based off of the reference and making sure that the sizing and inputs and outputs are all correct this can be a bit tedious but it is really important to check meticulously to make sure that when you the conform from what was what was in premiere over to davinci is is an accurate translation then as i scrub through i want to make sure i look at the edges of the frame to make sure that the the timing and the the layout and sizing is correct so sometimes stepping through frame by frame to make sure that different portions of the image are in the same position is is helpful we have a clip that's out of sync find in media pool open it here i'll go back to premiere what i have here is an adjustment layer adjustment layer and on this adjustment layer i put in a clip name and timecode so you just search timecode you can drop that on you also can search clip name here i already have an instance so i won't put another one on there but you can drag it right onto your adjustment layer and here i justified left and display sequence clip name but i set the video track to track one so every time it hits a new clip this will change out to show the name of the title of the clip and then i also set a time code that references video track one and so it will also display for me the in and out points of the time code so what i can do is i can quickly come in here to the clip that is out of sync and know that this is the correct clip this is 9 28 22 11. go back here go 9 28 22 11. set an end point play for about three seconds set an out point and you can drag that video down drag it out to the length and you can also enable and disable so we want to make sure to also include this horizontal clip switch this back to offline and we can see that these match now they have some resizing here that's different so that's reflected here and you can copy go here to paste attributes and you can make sure that zoom and when you select zoom x and y both go and then make sure position click apply and now it matches you can just drag this down on top of your previous clip and it all matches now if i had exported this reference clip with this information i wouldn't have to go back to premiere i'd be able to reference it right inside of right inside davinci so i didn't get that done this time i'll probably do that on my next project what i just found is that a middle click will drag the timeline back and forth since there's no hand key to drag the timeline like in premiere but you can middle click and drag the timeline which is very helpful instead of having to scrub down here you can also use up and down arrow keys to move between clips but instead of having to go back and forth to click if you highlight this box right here if you need to resize a lot of images your up and down arrow will still select in the timeline and then you can use the number pad to directly input into this box and so you never have to move back and forth and click it automatically selects the clip that you're on this would need to be two times the size down arrow two times the size down arrow next next next and so on very very helpful keys to help speed up efficiency now that we have everything conformed over here to the light box one of the things you want to do is start grouping especially in a project like this where there's a lot of different file formats and different source media so one of the things i've done is flagged all of the still images with this white flag so this is what i exported from premiere and i can easily find and reference them here so when i go to grade i can quickly look through here and find other references of the same clips if i need to to copy and paste grades or to fix things so that's easily just selectable but you're not able to sort by source footage or for file format unless you create a custom filter so what you can do is create smart filter and what i did was clip details and video codec contains and then you can type in here whatever you want i used h264 and i did one also for h.265 and for this one edit smart filter we can see this is video code that contains prores but i didn't want to show still images video because that's also progress but i want to be able to see the other footage color timing properties flags does not contain this cream colored flag so to give me everything prores and then filter out the stills because those have the flag on them i'm able to see everything here very quickly at which point i'll go through here and start selecting uh hold shift and then command and we'll go through the project and select all of these close-ups of tony evans and i'll right-click and we will create add into a new group and then as i run across any of the other images if i miss them or i'm back in the timeline i will be able to then right click and add into one of these groups so that even those these have remote grades sometimes there's multiple start and stop clips that happened and so we want to make sure these are also all grouped so that any changes ripple out across all of the dot to keep copy and pasting back and forth one of the things to think about when doing color grading is remote grades versus local grades most of the time for documentaries or even features i like to at least start with remote grades and you choose that here use local use remote grades and you can tell by this little icon here other clips that are referencing the same source media and therefore using the same grade and even the same version of that grade when you change to a different version it will then be linked with the clips using that version referencing that media however one thing you do not want to do is switch to use local grades this will affect it globally and then switch it back to use remote grades globally if you accidentally click one of these it'll be a bit of a problem because it will when bringing it back to remote grades if you click this one accidentally and bring it back to remote grades all of your clips that are using remote grades will default to version one and you'll have to go back through all your clips to pre reselect which version they are using if they need to use other alternate versions it'll be a real pain don't ask how i know this so instead what you can do we'll click over here to the editing page these are all clips from the same source if you change one clip here it will then reflect or affect the color over on this side so in the color section what you can do this is the nifty little thing i love you can see here that these clips are all referencing the same grade if i were to just copy this by using the middle click this clip then would also reference so what you need to do as you can see here is you can switch it right here by just loading this local version one so i need to switch this one to local versions do not use this button it's very sad use local version load and then you can middle click and it will bring over just that one this one local version version one so that's how to use local versions inside of a project that's also using remote versions it's not uncommon for one person to end up being a little lighter or brighter than the other depending on the way the scene and the people are being lit in this situation the key light is coming from this side and so her being closer to the light would make her a little brighter than than steven back here so i did go in with this one create just a power window uh on her side i didn't need to track this one since it didn't go anywhere much um we did use uh the selection here to just select skin tone and then with the power window to select just her side and then being able to to just bring a little bit more warmth and depth there to help match a crossover when it's retracting it looks more normal because of the key light that's a little more off to one side here in this shot when it comes to the interviews i did start by trying to use the davinci color managed settings for 709 gamma 2.4 but i didn't really like the way it was putting some of the footage in the color spaces originally the pocket 4k um so i ended up switching them back to just the overall project and i didn't use a lut from this side i can i chose to put a lot in here at this point so this is um kind of a an adjusted node tree structure that i've adapted for this project so we had this one is a lut that's using utility lut for blackmagic but i was able to go through some of these other options and found one that worked better for blending with also this contrast and this color adjustment so the three three of these were a starting point and then we had a little bit of a vignette on the edges and more touches to the white point this one was to flatten out a spot on the forehead and you can see before after a little bit and this is actually just over here and there was one group node that happened to further tone down some of the pink and warm color that was in the scene some of these extra ones depended on throughout the project where i needed to use these there's grain noise reduction other vignettes we didn't end up using any of the rest of these so you have a before and after i started here with color space transform same one as before this utility lut converting it over and then this contrast adjustment and then this color adjustment is just the starting point for for getting this going we did want to so we had a lot of similar color tones happening so here's a few of the things we did on this one to help draw some distinction and help the viewers eye focus here and not get distracted by the lamp or these walls in the background so starting with this slight vignette on the edges and then a little bit more of a refinement to the white point to cool it off just a touch this is one where we did a selection skin selection and power window to counteract some of the cool tones happening now in the rest of the image we didn't want this to feel too cold or dull we wanted it to be a little more warm and then this was a fun one where we went in and used a color selection on just the walls used used a lot of these additional adjustments to not select the face but to select just this background than to blur it out and blend it enough so it wasn't distracting but then to drop the saturation of that way down here so that it allows him and his face to stand out more than the color of the background we had one more here on a group with all of his interviews to cool it down just just a little bit more to match the rest of the rest of the documentary and so we have a before and an after hopefully focusing the viewer's eyes right right here on this on his wonderful story for the film this is where it looks like raw and then using this color space transform with this contrast and this color adjustment we're into a decent starting place for this image there's a little bit more of a shift here this one helps with the white point just color color shift is just really warm overall and a bit a bit green and so it's also a little tough with some of the um the tonal values here matching a little more than that i would like so bringing bringing a little bit of a cooler look back in because i'm pretty sure this is natural windows back here and then trying to bring some life back into the skin tone and then this is where the blue was popping a little bit here on the saturation more than we wanted and so we were able to bring that back just a little bit by using the hue versus saturation and bringing that just so it's not quite clipping there on that edge and bringing it back and then for the skin tone we used the highlight but we also used a power window and and then i toned it back a lot because it didn't end up being a lot more than i felt like we needed but we still wanted a little bit more to match some of the skin tone again this light is coming in pretty hot on this side and was creating more of a stronger brightness here and we wanted it to even it out just a little bit more but you can't just use contrast or you could do a lot of different selections but this with the qualifier was really difficult as you can see here because it's selecting a lot of the brick and stuff back here and it was really tough to get just enough of these adjustments done to get just the skin tone so i had a separate node here where i again used the color qualifier but combining that with the magic mask and this is not an in-depth tutorial on how to use magic masks but you can use just you can see this blue line here you can use very simple strokes to pick and it will then choose and try to find the outlines and you can refine a lot of these numbers and options to um to to simplify this edging the the feather uh where it's doing what you need to or not and then again with the color qualifier it was selecting just the skin tone and again dropping that down a little bit here but this magic mask was fantastic and did a really good job of following her across and just the skin tone and was very very helpful in being able to key not so i don't have to manually rotoscope all of this out and so here is before and here is after and it brings just just a little bit of lowering the contrast and evening out these skin tones so that people can focus more on the person and her wonderful personality and character and are not distracted by the visual image on this one i did use the input color space for black magic pocket 4k to get it into just a starting point from here we had other contrast this was basic color started there's a little bit of a vignette up here we continued to refine the color looking even better this one we're focused on the eyes we wanted to brighten that up and help draw attention to the eyes in the interview is always a nice touch they didn't have a lot of makeup at the time of filming and so i use the face refinement options you can see some of the settings here to help smooth and soften the skin and also brighten the eyes here again as well always looking for ways to draw attention to the face and focus on the person talking and then there's a little bit of a touch here to continue taking the hue of the red shirt down just just ever so much to help with the saturation levels throughout before and after something else that often occurs in a documentary is the need to blur out faces and i'm not going to turn this one off for the example just because the nature we need this face blurred out so instead i'm going to use the same technique but here in a in a separate node just for demonstration purposes so what we have here let's say sometimes there's logos that need to be blurred out along with faces or other things for documentary purposes but we have a start with a power window that we then set here and then it would track to this position so that as the people and objects and things move in the scene this would then track along and we could get a whole lot of their tutorial on tracking but there's a lot of refinement and things that can be done but the goal here is to look at blur so what i did for this one is i went to this tab and used blur here to about 70. and then i also used the openfx lens blur and i already have the presets on here to continue to blur that out even more you can see here some of the settings and just the different sizes that i used to get enough of a blur to remove the features so that it's not noticeable and traceable recognizable in this documentary we also wanted to watch out for large saturation color spikes which you want to look out for anyway but with a lot of this being shown the black magic or i'm not exactly sure why but certain of the footage came in with some of these stronger spikes which you can also see if you switch over to scopes and your vectorscope yeah you can definitely see that reaching up here and uh it was beyond what was looking pretty average throughout the film as well so if this is where you're averaging out then it may be fine but for our project this was not so i did here is started with qualifier and selected just this color used refinement here to just select this shirt color and fortunately with enough uh color information and depth we were able to separate that even from this background in similar colors and and then be able to bring that down with saturation and make sure that that's reaching now down into some of the more consistent ranges with the rest of the film instead of being a little bit distracting and spiking out there and then if it ended up being too much you can adjust the saturation or sometimes i go into the key and just to tweak the amount that this this node is affecting everything else in the image here's an instance of the hue and color skew from the black magic camera can come into play at least that's my perspective on on how this happens but you have a red shirt with a lot of blue natural light also which then turns this into a bit more of a purple but doesn't match the same color the shirt is in other places in the documentary and so utilizing this node as you can see we're able to tone that back into something that matches the overall scene and is less distracting allows you to focus on the subject matter but that's using hue versus hue and you can start here and click i'm not going to do it now but you can click and it will refine you can choose other selections and then drag that into whichever area helps bring that back into what's going to look natural normal now you can go too far and you can see it even starts to break down if you're trying to change this color too much it can be very helpful in just helping some of this stuff match and feel more neutral and natural in this case we had some really odd color hue skews happening which was not what we were looking for i wanted this to look a little more natural so here's the before and here's the after this is done pretty simply on this uh this particular shot where this is just in the input color space i just set it to 709 scene so nothing complicated this is the before and with a little bit of contrast adjustment and then moving right into the color most of this is happening here and the hue versus hue and just going through and selecting these purple red colors and then pushing them in the direction and this bluish color and just moving the hue versus hue around until it gets more into more of a normal warm sunny day with less less saturation in these brick colors back here instead of trying to use this qualifier and all of that uh the hue versus her hue worked really really well and then we also did i did use hue versus saturation for some of the brick wall um and i think some of the some of the ones here in his hair we can undo this yeah this is more the one on the brick wall we'll undo that and this one is taking more of these colors and pushing them into a more normal expected direction to help help all this blend and look nice before and after i used this one a lot on a lot of the footage throughout this documentary this series of football footage that was filmed recently but needed to look a little more historical to fit the storyline so this is how the footage came in very crisp very even has more saturation very clean and so for a starting point this is in a rec 709 and we went with some contrast here we have a lut that i put on this is from film riot standard burn after reading and this is the full look so we have that on here off on to start getting a little bit of some different color tones and hue skews happening but then we counteracted that quite a bit with this one where i also added in i unsplit and you start i started blurring out one channel just to give a little bit of uh to degrade the image a little bit and start getting a little bit off from looking so crisp and clean then we added a lens blur here and just just overall a little bit but then brought down the global blend so that it's it's creating just a little bit of a haze again trying to give some vintage some vintage look to it we have a lot of effects here on this one next we added in lens reflections which you can see starting to happen here off and on just to give some more character to the lenses again and some of the settings i just went and tweaked these until it looked kind of how i liked it and just kind of messed around with it this one i added some flicker so that it didn't play back just perfectly smooth we went with a vignette to darken the edges a little bit again giving some character to the lenses here i used some film damage to provide some flex and streaks and i went and toned this way down it comes on pretty strong when you first put it on there and i didn't want it to be huge i just want it to be a little more subtle and just add some some nice kind of background scratches and such then we added in film converts grain and last but not least some jpeg damage to make it more blocky i was kind of referring to some of this other footage that was from a kind of a similar era and uh and time and so we were kind of trying to match some of that a little bit in an attempt with what we had here we also then had a few more here on the back end a bit more of a lut uh and then some more adjustments and uh and such to continue desaturating and helping it match some of that other footage this ended up being a little bit much for what they were hoping for i i had some other options in here that we could play around with as well if they wanted to go more of a sepia and orange i'm seeing some of the stuff we go in here and turn some of these other things on and off to we have a we have a lot of options here and anyway what we ended up going with though was this version two and let me get these turned on correctly which still has a little bit of the desaturated and bluish tone but we went in and turned off a lot of the degrading the jpeg damage and we left the vignette in the grain but we we took a lot of the other image degrading stuff off took out the flares and the flicker and and such and then worked to make it match overall this one is before and after and here's another one here in this series where before looks like normal current day practice squad and after lots of fun one frame of painting something out in davinci resolve now there's a lot of options including object removal patch replacer dead pixel fixer there's a lot of things that can be dragged into a node and removing things uh here in davinci resolve and they're really really really great but i didn't know what to do when i had just one what we have here is one hair one film hair on the on the screen and it's very very distracting we wanted to pull this out so i tried a variety of options and then decided to dig into fusion which i have not used much until this point and so bear with me here so the way this works is you need paint so when you open fusion for a clip it shows these two media and media out and this right here would be a paint well that you could drop right on here now i'm not going to because it's already here this one now when you have this open you have all types of controls you have all these different paint options what you want is the clone tool and then this is what i missed for a little while you want the stroke tool and then when you hold alt or option it will let you click on the area you want to copy and then when you release option or alt you can then drag and paint over the selection or the item you want to paint out and then you have all types of adjustments you can tweak the size of the brush the softness of the brush how it responds if you want to paint you can paint on here as well but i was looking for a clone to paint this out so you can see here where i painted out the the hair that was giving me a bit of grief so now once i painted over it the hair is gone now what's tricky is that this clone stamp or paint will continue to follow the image and then create more issues there are ways to track this onto the image i didn't need to do that for what i was doing i had just one frame so that you can see this doesn't track in and would then create other clone issues so what you want to do is with this selected that was also one of my problems is you want to come back over here and you can do select and drag when you have this selected you want to choose limited duration here we go now we have this stroke selected with the stroke selected you want this needs to be highlighted you can choose it's it defaults to all frames which you can see then is causing those problems because it's continuing what you want is right on the frame that you want you do limited duration one frame and then it just pops on pops off and then it's gone and it's only on for one frame you have all sorts of other options you can tweak and adjust but this helped me in just painting out the one thing that i needed for this shot and i learned a new thing in fusion and i hope that's helpful for you hey thanks so much for watching if you liked it be sure to hit like leave me a comment let me know what your favorite part was or if you've other questions and you can also subscribe to keep getting more content i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: John-Clay Burnett

Views: 1,354

Keywords: John-Clay Burnett, color grading, behind the scenes, how to color, making of, tips and tricks, color, davinci resolve, film colorist, documentary, theatrical, christian film, show me the father, Kenrick Brothers, feature length, cinematic, before and after

Id: Ia6ps5qxT3s

Length: 40min 27sec (2427 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021