HOW TO COLOR GRADE IN FINAL CUT PRO X (NO PLUG-INS)

hello everybody and welcome back to another tutorial today I'm gonna be showing you guys how to color great in Final Cut Pro 10 and this tutorial is gonna be different from the other ones you've seen because I'm not just gonna tell you to mess around or play with different settings I'm actually gonna be showing you a set in stone method that you can follow when you're color grading absolutely any shot and this will be extremely useful for you because if you are new to filmmaking or you're just trying to step up your color grading now you're going to learn a lot because I'm gonna be going over the steps to color correct and color grade but also some of the terminology and things that you need to understand when you go out on your own and you start color grading more footage so you read that title correctly we're not going to be using color finale this is gonna be plugin free color grading done all in Final Cut Pro 10 using the color board that comes with it the only thing you need to download is these two adjustment layers right here the base correction in the look grade and I'll have those links down below now it's not mandatory but I highly recommend you do this because it is absolutely free and it'll make your life a ton easier when you're grading clips and when you're bringing together your overall video but enough of the chitchat let's get right into the tutorial so for those of you don't know me my name is Daniel Schiffer I make videos here on YouTube all about filmmaking whether that be tutorials or reviews so if you're into that stuff then I highly recommend that you subscribe I guarantee you you will not regret it but let's get into this so once you've downloaded the file link down below you're gonna want to unzip it open a new Finder window type in movies open the folder go to motion templates and drag the new folder into titles I'm not gonna do this because I've already done it but once you've done that you will see this adjustment folder in your titles which comes with your base correction and your look grade and as this tutorial progresses you will understand how these both work so the first step to color grading in a video is to identify which shot is your hero shot basically this means you need to find the clip that you're gonna base the rest of the video around now obviously you can make adjustments in each clip to make it work but you need a clip that will act as your starting point so that everything else can follow suit for me I'm gonna be using this clip because we do have some skin tones and we have the same lighting that'll be consistent throughout a lot of this video these are the things you should look for when you're trying to identify your hero shot so once you have the clip in your timeline you're going to go ahead and drag in your base correction adjustment layer just lay it over top of footage and from here you can add the color correction video effect to the adjustment layer and this brings in a new color board adjustment so this first color board adjustment is gonna be our exposure correction we're gonna go into the color board and open the exposure tab and I'm briefly going to explain what each of these controls do so the very left we have our global slider this will affect the overall exposure of every aspect of our shot including the shadows mid-tones and highlights these sliders within this window right here get more specific because we can individually adjust our shadows mid-tones and highlights respectively the shadows represent the darkest points of your shot while the highlights represent the brightest parts of your image and the mid-tones is everything in between but in order to do that we need some guide that we could work off of Final Cut has this great feature if you hit command 7 it opens this window where you can view scopes I'm not going to talk too much about scopes but the one we're going to be using today is called the luma waveform basically you want to make sure you're on the waveform scope in the luma channel and here we actually get a visual representation of how exposed each part of our clip is so a general rule you probably want to follow is to bring your shadows down to almost zero i re not quite touching that zero line because once we hit that line and go below zero we are going to be losing data in the shadows and we do not want that we don't want our shadows to go quite down to a complete black but very close as for our highlights this is up for debate a lot of people say you want to keep it under a hundred but I prefer to go up as much as I can until I start losing data at you can see at the top of the window here when it starts to flatten out that's how you know you're losing data so I go up until just before that begins to happen so right around there looks good to me and for your reference my shadows are at negative seven percent and my highlights are now at nine percent I'm gonna close this color board and then I'm gonna hit command seven again to close this window and we can view what we've done so far here is the shot we started with and after our exposure correction we have this what this is done is added a bit of contrast to our footage made it a little bit more punchy and exciting so we're off to a good start the next step is to bring in another color correction effect and drag that into our base correction and this second correction is going to be our white balance correction basically solving any color cast that we might have our if we incorrectly white balance stand camera this is where we're gonna fix that so we're gonna open the color board and go to our color panel and again we have our global control as well as our shadows mid-tones and highlights for basic color correction in our white balance we don't have to worry about the shadows mid-tones and highlights rather we can just affect the global adjustment and something I noticed about this shot is that it looks a little bit cooler than I want it to I want to warm it up a bit because I do want it to have that summery vibe so what I'm gonna do is where it says a hundred and ten degrees I'm gonna click and drag down until my global slider is in that red orange area and as you can see nothing has happened yet because we're still at 0% from here I'm gonna click and drag up to introduce some warmness to the shot and I think I'm gonna stop at around five percent the difference is very subtle but if I click on and off here you can actually see that we have in fact warmed up our shot it's not quite as blue and cold looking as it was previously so that is how you do a basic color correction in Final Cut Pro 10 but I know that most people want to add a look or a grade to their shot to bring a nice vibe or cool feeling to their footage and really tie the whole video together as a whole but before we do that we have to make sure that we do our basic color correction to every clip in the video so that they all match each other so that when we do add our grade we can nicely lay it over and all of the clips in the video will flow and not look drastically different from one another so in my example here I have three clips so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this base correction and drag it till the end I'm gonna click B to bring in my Blade tool and I'm gonna cut in between these clips now I've divided my base correction into three separate segments one for each clip and I'm gonna adjust these other two clips to make sure that they're properly balanced and exposed so starting with this clip here I'm gonna turn off my color correction - that would be my white balance crashing and I'm gonna adjust my exposure bring up those scopes and as you can see I'm way underexposed so I'm gonna bump up these highlights a whole bunch and like I said just before we start losing data and I'm even gonna bring these shadows up a little bit and as you can see we're much brighter now looking a lot better so this is what I was talking about that you don't want to just add the same base correction to the entire video you want to adjust each clip individually because not every clip is going to be exposed the same the same goes for white balance if we turn this on here my skin is actually looking a little bit green to me so I'm gonna take the slider and move it just a bit to the left away from green and I think that looks pretty good and I'm gonna repeat the process for this last clip so now that all three cliffs are properly exposed on white balance I can go ahead and add a look grade over top of all three clips I'm gonna go back to that first clip or hero shot and I'm gonna start adding a stylistic look to this video I'm gonna drag on my color correction effect onto this adjustment layer open the color board and I'm gonna start with saturation I'm gonna turn up my global saturation about 46% I really want to avoid over saturating my skin tone so I'm gonna take my mid-tones and bring those down about negative 15% to counteract that global saturation so if we turn this correction off and on you can see we've added a good amount of saturation adding some vibrance to the shot I'm pretty happy with how it looks and I would probably leave it at this but for the sake of this tutorial I'm gonna boost the saturation even more so we could really see the difference so I'm gonna push the global saturation to about 50 the next thing we're gonna do is go into the color board and go into our color tab and play around with the different hues and tones that we can introduce to our shot a very common look in film is the teal and orange look I'm not gonna overdo it but I'm gonna use this basic concept of complementary colors and color contrast to add a dynamic look to the video before I do that I'm briefly gonna explain how this color board works along the x-axis or horizontal axis the colors change from red orange yellow green blue violet and then red once again basically all the colors of the rainbow and then on our up-and-down or y-axis we are able to adjust the intensity of these colors based on the channel that we will be adjusting them in for example if I take my global slider and push it up into red you can see that most of the shot shadows mid-tones and highlights now have a red hue to it as I start dragging this across you will see it goes into orange followed by yellow green cyan blue magenta purple and red I'm gonna hit that button up here to reset and I'm gonna start adjusting these channels to get the desired look we're going for I'm gonna begin introducing teal into my shot by taking the shadows and pushing up in this teal region it's looking a little too green for me so I'm actually gonna move it to the right a little bit away from green I think that looks a bit better now we're gonna take our mid-tones and I'm gonna click and drag down so that they slide into the orange region and from here I'm gonna start lifting up and adjusting it until I'm happy with the level of orange that we have you could see our overall shot is looking very green I'm gonna take my global slider and I'm gonna bring it down in the screen channel to remove that green look and it's already looking a lot better the issue I'm having now is that we have all this pink in the highlights so I'm gonna take the highlight slider move it into the pink area and pull it downward to take pink out of the highlights I'm going to continue making minor adjustments until I'm happy with how everything looks so I've made some adjustments and I'm pretty happy with how it looks you can take note of the numbers I have down here and because we made that initial base correction on each one of our clips if I click through you can see that our look is consistent throughout our video the last step I would make with this color grade is to go into our exposure and lift up our shadows so that we introduce this faded cinematic look and then bring down the mid-tones slightly just to bring back some contrast and I think that looks pretty good and now that you are done your color grid there are some optional things that you do like adding a vignette I'm gonna add it directly on to my adjustment layer I'm gonna remove the blur turn up the fall-off all the way turn the darken down to about 0.5 and make it a bit smaller and lastly another optional step is to add a letterbox this also adds a bit of a cinematic vibe but again totally optional alright guys that's it for this tutorial I hope you found it helpful if you follow these steps and practice them I guarantee you you will get a lot better at color grading and when you get to the point that this feels limiting for you you can go ahead and consider downloading a plugin like color finale where you have a lot more freedom to adjust your footage but don't be afraid to challenge yourself and try out different things you don't have to follow what I did exactly you can use this knowledge to come up with your own looks and your own styles and on that note if you enjoyed the video then please hit it with a thumbs up do not forget to subscribe and leave a comment down below of what videos you guys would like to see in the future I would love to hear some of your ideas but that's it for today guys and until next time peace

Channel: Daniel Schiffer

Views: 686,151

Keywords: color grade, colour grade, final cut, final cut pro x, fcpx, color correct, how to, tutorial, easy, adobe premiere, plug in, color finale, a6300, a7s

Id: qVwH0V53o7o

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

wait so is the base correction just a simple adjustment layer?