How to Color Grade A Music Video in Final Cut Pro X (Color Finale 2)

what's good man today i'm gonna be doing a color grading breakdown now i haven't done a computer based tutorial in so long these are like the most boring things in the world to me so if you want more things like this you want more of these sorts of tutorials the best way and the only way to show me is to hit the like button hit the thumbs up you don't even got to do it right now i hate when people say yo like this video you ain't even show me none yet i could be completely trash i want to break down the color grade from this most recent music video i just did for my homie ace haven uh so i'm gonna take you through the two scenes i'm gonna show you guys how to color grade these from scratch using final cut pro 10 and color finale within final cut pro 10. this isn't necessary by any means this is just something that i like and the most recent update with color finale with them adding uh the color mask is just incredible it's just great good tool not getting paid to say this uh so throughout this video if you like it you can go check it out and purchase it no affiliate links i'm not getting paid at all uh a couple things before i get into this and i don't waste a ton of your time here at the beginning keep in mind that when i do this for my own projects i take forever to do this i'm literally gonna sit here for hours just doing it and i'm gonna go eat and i'm gonna come back and look at it because it's this phenom where you think you killed the color grade and then you come back to the computer and look at it and it's just like yo this is trash you always want to give yourself that little bit of time to realize if it's trash or not so i'm gonna run through this fairly quick i'm not gonna be breaking down color finale and everything that it can do this is not a review on that this is how i color graded this video uh this is a shot on the canon c200 if you don't have a camera with high bit depth and you're not able to push and push colors that push and pull colors that well i highly suggest you invest into like uh what is it a denoiser plug-in if you use davinci just use the the noise on there it'll take out some of that blotchiness from the colors but i thought i said let's get into it i got the two shots right here inside the color finale and i already recorded this tutorial and when i did it the first time i showed you guys every single layer on the original gray i'm not going to do that because it'll take a ton of time i'll just hop straight into the color grade now i got my my scopes over here this is the vectorscope and this is a waveform these are pretty much the only two scopes that i use when i'm color grading and i don't really pay too much attention to these when i'm color grading if i'm being fully honest with you unless i need to like reference the color and make sure it's accurate i found myself like really like going about a book when i was color grade i wanted to drag my black point all the way down to zero i want my white point all the way up to 100 on the on the the waveform and this is what people tell you to do but if you look at stills if you look at color grades from actual like films and stuff that you like you'll notice that these points are nowhere near that so i just color grade off a vibe you know i reference this in terms of color i like to get my skin tone as good but beyond that that's all so we got color finale pro i'ma drop this straight onto this first clip which is him in the bathroom and this is the first color grade that we're going to be doing now in the actual music video this had like a super green vibe and i knew i wanted to go for this because it just feels gritty and grimy and that's what i'm going to recreate right now so in color finale you have all these different adjustments over here exposure temperature saturation all that i like to just go into the edit layers and just drop my layers in layer by layer rename it to what i need it to be and then just rock that way so i'm gonna start doing that so first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna drop in the color wheels and i'm gonna rename this tones i like to first go through and adjust my shadows mid tones highlights just to get to the vibe where i want it to be and again i'm not referencing the waveform super hard either this is just all off of like my own personal vibe so shadows go right there bring my mid tones down just a tad bit i'm gonna bring them way down actually because i want this image to feel darker let me draw my highlights down too i just want this to be like a darker looking image from here i had just a tab at the saturation and not too much and this is my tones next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to add in a gradient mask i want to add more focal point more of a focal point on him in the image i feel like this is just kind of flat lighting it doesn't have like a like a super like shadow to highlight bob to it so i'm gonna add another layer so i'm gonna do a color wheels i'm gonna rename this gradient and then from here i'm going to click on this and add a mask i click on this mask i'm going to click on this one right here which is the edge mask if you've ever like uh colored photos in lightroom this is like a gradient uh what is it a gradial mask i think that's what they call it it's basically just a slight gradient to uh add in whatever you want you can do color tone whatever you want so i think that's good i'm gonna drag it up a little bit and then from here i click back on this color wheels there i'm just going to bring down the mid-tones you can see like this is adding just like a dark point down at the bottom it's almost giving like a gradient like uh this is right up here this is dark down here drawing mid-tones like way down like that then from there i'm gonna readjust this i want to bring this up just a little bit like right there so this is before the gradient after the gradient see what it's doing to the image giving us like more of a dark feel to it next thing i want to do is i want to adjust this red because it's like really bothering me so if i click on this i'm gonna add in the six vectors and i'm gonna just rename this red just so we know exactly what's happening so i click on the red i just wanna adjust the hue looking at my vector scope up here i can see that this red is shifting more towards the magenta side which i don't want i want this to be like more red so i'm gonna just adjust the hue of this slightly more towards that r and i'm looking at it i don't want it to be super orange but i don't want it to be magenta either so that looks good another thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna just punch the saturation because i know that this is the focal of the shot i know that this is gonna be the poppy thing in the shot and i thought about this before i even colored it i thought about this when i bought the outfits for the video so i'm gonna punch it before after more red more poppy more contrasty more saturated um next thing i'm gonna do is i wanna let's start color grading so i'm gonna drop in another color wheel let me rename this um color grade now looking at this image just off of my eye i can tell that it's leaning more towards the magenta side so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna adjust the tint on it just to add more green um so i mean really i could just keep adding the tint right here you can see that we're already getting closer to what we want to be with the color grade i'm gonna just up this to like five still like five and it's not much but definitely adjust this a little bit to bring out a little bit of that magenta so in the color grade i'm gonna bring my shadows down to like more of a teal tone and i'm a teeter between the shadows and the mid tones so what i'm doing with the mid tones is i'm just trying to keep my mid tones warm i want my mid tones to still feel like skin right now so i'm a teeter between the shadows the mid tones trying to get blue in the shadows but still trying to keep our skin tones looking natural for the time being so if we do before and after you can see that um we're getting a little bit of blue in these tones but we're still keeping that warmness and that warmth in our in our skin next thing i want to do is i want to adjust the highlights and this is where the magic is going to come in with the green so i'm just going to start dragging this towards green you can see we're already getting pretty much close to where we need to be without color gray so after i do that i'm a teeter between the mid tones and the highlights so i'm gonna go add more one back into the skin then i'm gonna go add more green into the highlights and i'm gonna add more warmth into the skin and this is just like a kind of like a balancing act if you will and uh don't worry about this too much like this might look over the top but if you like think about like films that you like and like music videos the grade is over the top so that's what we want to go for this like i want this to be green green i want this i want you know i want it to really really really pop off the screen so i'm gonna leave that like that for the time being a lot of people might say that this is done like this looks good but one thing i really want to do is i really want to bring the skin tone back into this like i i i want i want him to still feel warm all right so i'm gonna add in another color wheels layer and then here on this one i'm gonna rename this one skin and i'm going to add in a mask for this one click on our mask and then we're going to do a hsl mask and through this we'll go through the key out of the skin and then we're going to bring some of that warmth that warmness comes right come on like dang bro like you just gonna draw the 18 wheeler up the block while i'm doing my tutorial that's crazy all right so first thing i want to do i want to go into the mass source and we're going to do input image unmanaged and the reason we do this is i don't want it to be based off the previous uh layer if we do it based off the previous layer then we can see we got a lot of like green in the skin we want to just key it how it was before we first got into the image all right so this is that we're gonna do the input image i manage and then from here we're gonna click this and we're just gonna start selecting the skin tone so if we wanna see what we've already selected down here on the right side this display button we could do composite masks and this is going to show us what we have selected the white is going to indicate what's selected in our mask that we're trying to do so i'm going to do plus and i'm just going to go through and select more of a skin tone just to be careful like not to add in uh too many other colors because it's going to be really easy for me to start selecting the wall because the wall is also warm so i'm gonna just keep clicking in until i get to a point where i selected way too much like if we do that right there we can see alright that's way too much selected so we're just gonna refine the mask so i'm gonna open the saturation up just a little bit on the mask this feature is a little bit finicky because color finale just added it in so like you know sometimes it it you might feel like you're moving a slider but you might not move a slider so just be mindful of that open the saturation up a little bit i'm gonna open up the the luminance just a little bit as well and i'm gonna just pull these off at the bottom so this fades off a little bit better from here i'm just gonna adjust where this is let's go more towards the red side i mean more towards the more saturated side and i'm gonna move this over a little bit as well that looks good and then from here one thing i want to do is i want to adjust my blur and this isn't and this isn't an incredible key by any means this is just me trying to key this out for the sake of this video i'm not gonna lie to you but this is fine this will work really well for what we needed to do anyways it's not gonna matter at the end regardless because we're gonna drop a ton of film grain on this to give it that really gritty vibe so we're not gonna see any sort of color splash in anyways once that's done so once we get out the skin we get the the tone that we want the only thing we need to do is add warmth into the mid tone so i'm gonna just grab this joint and just drag it straight up and you can see like this is just adding that warmthness back into his skin tone and i'm gonna drop down the saturation in the shadows just a little bit and then i'm gonna go add a little bit more of those warm tones in there so this is before after before after you can see he looks a lot more brown he looks like he's actually alive in the shot so i'm gonna add a little bit more of that warmth in the mid tones and this is pretty much it now if if i was doing this for my own sake what i would do is i would draw i would click on my skin tone and i would drop down the opacity of the skin tone layer i don't want him to be too separated i want him to feel like he's in the scene so i don't want him to be too warm i still want to have him catch some of that green cast so i'm gonna bring that up to like 75 75 or so maybe like even 70 70 ish and then i will also go back through the tones and readjust these i think this could be a lot more dramatic i would uh i would actually drop in like a a curves layer right here and then i would mess around with this curve like this right here looks closer to what i would like it to look like just drop those shadows down and bring the mid tones and pop them a little bit harder and this looks a lot closer to what i what i would like it to be and i'll also drop maybe his skin tone down just a little bit maybe like 50 ish and this looks good so this is the before i mean this is the after as before and that's after and keep in mind too with this shot i forgot to mention this is this is also not even uh like straight out of the camera this also has a conversion light on it as well so on the c200 and pretty much every other cinema camera because final cut pro is going to read the codec and use the the camera that it was shot on and then it's going to automatically apply conversion so if you want to look at the shot before it even had a conversion light on it that's what it looks like that's straight out of the camera the conversion light is just going to bring it closer to like a rec 709 and then from there this is like where i started to color grading put my grade onto it so what i'm going to do for my last touch is i'm going to add some film emulation click on that at the bottom and then i'm just going to drop that grain all the way up to like 35 just to add that additional grittiness to the shot and this grade is pretty much done so i'm going to take you to layer by layer and show you the before and after and so you can really look at the things we did to it so tones this is shadows mid-tones highlights we went back in and added a contrast curve just to give it more of a pop more of like a i guess like a contrast pop to it then we added this gradient layer and this is help us this is helping us give more focal to him in the shot the shot was kind of flat lighting wise without it and this just gives us more like a like a viewpoint to what to look at in the shot from here we adjusted the red we met the red pop in this uh hat then we did the color gray which brought those green tones in the shot and then we went in on another layer and we refined the skin a little bit to add more of those warm tones back in there so that's the color gray this is how i color graded the shot in the bathroom um not done to a t but this is just like how i would do it if i redid it i would go through and i would do this again for probably like two hours for the actual project now another thing that i really like to do when i'm color grading as well is i like to preview what the show looks like on black and white the reason for black is i want to see i want to make sure my shadows aren't favoring too much color all right so what i do is i just adjust my scales in like 80 and then i can see what this looks like on like on white i think this looks great on white this looks dope and then in final cut and the preferences i can change my player background up black and then i can see what it looks like on black which it actually still looks really good on black as well so this is like a this is a fire color gray yeah this is this is dope all right so let's get into this next shot um the homies in the ski mask so i'm gonna drop a color finale pro layer on this and then we'll go and adjust this let's do edit layers hop straight into that and the first thing i want to do is drop on the color wheels rename this tones and uh before i even get into this like just looking at this vector scope i can tell a lot about this image i can tell that the blue is really saturated which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's kind of overpowering the image the red is supposed to be like the focal you want the red to pop like when i got the outfits when i did the color design when i did the color choices often said all that i knew i wanted the red to pop so i can already see looking at the vector scope like this cyan this blue tone is like really really popping and it can also lean more towards this way to get like a a better um color contrast we'll adjust all of that so let's just adjust that tones first again i'm not really paying attention to the waveform i'm just kind of i'm just going over eye just going off that looks good to me i'm gonna drop my uh my mid tones down just a tad bit not too much punch my highlights just a little bit and then from there i bring my mid tones down and i'm gonna just go ahead and add in a lot of my saturation right here good tone wise let's drop in a contrast curve um for the contrast curve i'm going to drop the string down just a little bit and then i'm going to pop the midtones so if i drag it this way you can see the midtones like the red and also like in the skin it's just popping so i dragged that a little bit towards the left not too much the shot looks back like poppy in the highlight so i'm gonna go to tongues and bring those down just a little bit that looks good all right next thing i want to do is i want to adjust these red tones so i'm gonna drop into six vectors and i'm gonna do um let's do color adjustments because i also wanna adjust this blue tone as well i think the blue is popping too hard it's like we can clearly see this blue is reaching the square on the vector scope which we don't want because we don't want the color to clip when it exports so i'm going to decide and adjust this first i'm gonna bring the luminosity down because i want it to be darker i don't want it to like overpower the entire image so i'm just bringing luminosity down also the saturation and i'm gonna go until i read and i want to adjust the hue of the red because we can see right now it's leaning more towards the magenta side we just want to bring it closer to like a red actual red and then there i want to punch the saturation i want the string to be like popping off the screen popping all right so that looks good i'm going to drop the luminosity down just to tap it on the red just to make it deeper and i think that looks good i think that actually looks really good so the next thing i want to do is i want to i want to adjust the skin a little bit because once when we do these red adjustments the skin tends to sit here a little bit as well so you can see it's it's it's very saturated in the skin tone area right there which isn't a bad thing but i think it's like a little bit too red so i'm gonna drop one hsl curve and i'm gonna go to hue versus hue from here i'm gonna select the skin tone right here you can see that this is like favoring a little bit of red too much i'm gonna click it i'm just gonna mess around with it go up and down with it see which what looks best and i can actually look at my vectorscope over here to get us closer to like a real a real like the real tone it should be so i'm gonna go here our skin is like like right here so you can see that like this is leaning more towards like uh the red side so i'm gonna just go up a little bit i don't want it super warm but i also don't want a super red either i think like that looks good and i'm also gonna go into the humversity saturation and i want to bring the saturation down just a little bit in our skin keep it in the red but bring it down on my skin that looks good to me alright so before after before or after skin tone looks like good right there all right so from here i want to do a little bit of grading so i'm gonna drop in one i'm gonna do uh let's do color grade and the colors are already here it's not much adjustments we need to do with the color we can see we got like a perfect perfect color contrast like this line is pretty much straight so this shows like these two colors are like on the opposite sides of the color wheel the contrast is great um but one thing i do want to do is i want to add in some teal into the shadows and this is going to do a lot for this image just add some teal into the shadows just a little bit do before after before after i like that adjustment but one thing that it's doing is it's kind of like dropping out a little bit that saturation in the skin tones which i don't want i'm gonna bring my waveform back up too because i want to look at this so once we do that i'm going to add in another layer just to adjust our skin so let's do a color wheels let's do rename name that skin and then from here i'm going to add in a mask click on the mask let's do a hsl mask and let's just start selecting some colors in our skin tone do the display down here at the bottom to composite mask and we can see what we're selecting and i'm just going to go through and just like add more little skin tone more skin tone range without selecting too much like that wasn't bad actually select that color right there um let's deselect some of this red let's deselect some of this red yeah all right this actually looks pretty good i'm just gonna adjust it down here throughout my saturation and luminance values it's about my saturation a little bit and then i'm going to open up the luminance a little bit and this looks good from here just adjust my blur get that to like three and then now it's just trying to just adjust this so what i want to do from here is i just want to add in a little bit more of that warmth into the mid tones because it's kind of getting lost when we brought those shadows in and then i'm gonna adjust the opacity of the skin layer to like 50 and this is pretty much done i will go back through and maybe adjust my mid-tones just a little bit bring those down i think this overall shot can be a little bit darker like that i like the way that this looks and this is pretty much done so this is before this is after i'm gonna go in and add a little bit of uh film grain at the end so boost setups like 35 get the grittiness back into the shot and let's preview this on black and white so we can know if our skin tones i mean our shadows are too saturated we want the shadows to still feel black not too blue so up against black this actually looks really good and then looking at this up against white this actually looks really good as well up against white it's a little bit dark so i'm gonna go in and i'm just gonna pop my highlights a little bit on that bottom tones [Music] and from here bringing that up because i can see my reds are clipping a little bit up here so i'm gonna go into my my color adjustments and drop the saturation on that red tone just down a little bit so it's not it's not uh clipping and that looks good yeah so that's the before and after again like i said if i was doing this for my actual project i would take a ton of time and go outside for a walk and then come back and look at it because this could look totally garbage you don't know once you uh you won't know until you look at it for a second time so that's my calibration breakdown outside do my color grading process inside of final cut pro 10 use the color finale again if this helps you at all drop this video like drop a comment down below let me know if i should do more of these if you're new to the channel you like content like this consider hitting that subscribe button but with that being said i'm out y'all peace [Music] you

Channel: YCImaging

Views: 28,271

Keywords: final cut pro x, color grading, final cut pro, final cut pro x tutorial, ycimaging, yc imaging, music video color grading, final cut pro tutorial, color finale tutorial, color finale 2, color grading tutorial, color grading final cut pro x, final cut pro x effects, cinematic color grading, final cut pro color grading, how to color grade in final cut pro x, final cut pro x color grading, color grading central, final cut pro x color grading tutorial

Id: gK7SJZmReEg

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021