How to Color Grade in Final Cut Pro (2021)

this video is sponsored by squarespace the best place to build your portfolio all right here's the final cut pro grading tutorial you will have wished you watched earlier we're going to cover everything from the basics of transforming your log footage to making it look really cinematic and there's a lot of ways to color grade in final cut there's no one correct way to do it but there's a lot of wrong ways to do it so i'm going to lay things out in the simplest way i can we're going to move kind of quickly but by the end you'll know the right way to do this without screwing up your footage or picking up too many bad habits on the way so i'm going to use this commercial that we shot a while ago for a brand called northwater and you know what you're after is probably something like this let's look at the before and after of a final here here's one way that this could have that cinematic look but i don't want you to get too focused on this end result because this part's the easy part it's everything before that that really matters so let's get this back to a neutral place i'm going to turn off all those effects actually i'm going to delete those effects and just restore everything to the original log that it was shot in so this is what the footage looked like this is canon log two c log two first step before anything edit your footage i know it can be tempting to grade as you go but if you're not finished editing and you start grading you can waste a lot of time digging into files that you don't end up using and it slows down your render time so finish your edit and then do a few preference changes so i like to go into final cut preferences and under general you can choose the default color correction method i would absolutely not use color board i always have it on color wheels which is the most useful the most standard way of adjusting colors and so all that does is if i select a clip and i go to the color adjustment area you can see this is what shows up by default and that's what i like let's also turn on our scopes which you can find in the view menu but i strongly recommend remembering the shortcut command 7. because i turn them on and off a lot while i'm editing so try to remember command 7. the way i use mine is i go to view and i show two of them at a time one is a vector scope and the other is an rgb overlay if you're not already sure how to read these the vectorscope is basically a saturation chart so if i crank the saturation make this look really bad you can see how saturated each color is in the image this will become very important later on i'll show you how it works and then i use rgb overlay as my waveform a lot of people choose luma that's really common advice but i find you actually lose information here and i'll show you why rgb overlay is much more useful later all this will make sense in a bit another little thing setting up final cut for grading is you're going to want to grab an adjustment layer i've got some links to free ones you can download in the description to oversimplify what this does everything below it ends up inheriting the look that you give it so you've seen those files now if i turn on the effects they all change in the exact same way so that they can all match you can imagine why this is handy but for now we're going to delete it come back to it later just get it installed so you're ready and the last thing on your checklist make sure you have the transform luts for the log file that you're working with if you shot in log i'll explain how to use that right now let's get into this log profiles these super flat to saturated things are very common in modern cameras i mean i'm shooting in it right now for example even the new iphone 12 can shoot in 10 bit log which is very impressive but it's the best way to get the most image quality out of your your colors and your dynamic range if you're not shooting a log things are simpler you can skip this chapter you could of course do it yourself so let's look at the most basic things if i click on this clip i could go over here to my color wheels bring the shadows down and looking over at my waveform on the left here i can see once they start getting near zero that means they're almost black then i could bring my highlights up until they start getting kind of close to 100 i never want them to actually clip but they're you know sort of touching that 100 line and then bring back the saturation which i prefer to do mostly in the mid tones and highlights a little less in the shadows you can see something like that that's basically restoring the color and contrast to this image but i don't recommend doing it manually like that you should go find a good transform so for example part of the reason i really like the c200 is it transforms really cleanly like it looks great as soon as i add one simple lut which in my case this is a lot that i adapted from the alexa transform so we can put on the log 2 and you can see it really brings it back to looking beautiful so when you see people's before and after and they show the log image and then they show this like that's not interesting that's really really easy everything else is the hard part okay but what did i just do i skipped around a lot here so over here on the right uh you know there's the overall inspector this is where our filters will end up showing up there is the color inspector this is where our wheels are and some of the other tools that if you click here you can get a preview we'll play with them later and on the info tab here there is camera lut now this is one place that you can place your transform it is the simplest workflow method and if i go back and i select again the the lut here it's very easy to stay organized and you could i could select everything and i could apply that same lutch to all the files that i'm working with in this case though i'm also working with some stock footage so you got to be careful not to apply it to the wrong thing and the best time to use that method is with controlled lighting so here's another different example this is a recent youtube video and everything's basically the same right just like this video i'm recording now i'm sitting in the exact same place not much is changing shot to shot and here's a very good trick if you have a long take like me talking i i'm going to open it up and you can see that i've actually put it in a compound clip the way to do a compound clip is just select any video and press option g and then inside that clip any changes you make will show up everywhere so if i go in here i can turn my effects on now you can see my color grade if i click back it changes all of the talking shots so i don't have to go back and grade each clip individually it can be really hard to keep that in sync if you have a long clip put it inside a compound clip but now if we look at our commercial again a lot of this is shot outdoors there's a lot more dynamic range and shifting light values and stuff so we want to be more careful with it so we're going to do this the slightly more complicated way i'm going to select the clip go to the effects menu over here and inside of color i'm going to select custom lut and i'm just going to drag that over and drop it onto my clip now you can see up here in effects we now have custom lut and i'm going to use my alexa adapted lut that i like for c log2 and there we go same effect as before the big difference here is now i can make adjustments before the transform does that make any sense at all i'm going to try to show you right here so if i drag this lut onto a clip and i add this is the incorrect transform so this is a c log 2 transform to a c log 1 clip let's say i want to recover those clouds so i drag my highlights down see how they're just becoming gray but there's no detail there well if we look over at our effects stack here like these are applied in the order you see them so the top is first and goes towards the bottom if i move that adjustment above my transform all of a sudden i've recovered all of those highlights like that's a huge difference this is what happens if you try to make your adjustments after your transform light this is what happens if you apply them before your transform light and this info panel is the first step in this stack of of lut so if i apply it here there is no way for me to then later recover all that information and maybe you're already stuck at this point you're like wait i don't have a nice transform lut that makes my footage look beautiful well there's a lot of options out there i'll put some links in the description below so you can find some of them my favorite unfortunately isn't on final cut pro yet it is called cinematch it's coming soon it's available on premiere and resolve right now but there are luts for all the different camera manufacturers i don't really like the canon ones or the sony ones because let's say you're shooting on an 8-bit camera like an eos r or an a7s2 or something like that those transform luts from canon and sony assume that you have the more professional cameras they didn't really design them for the consumer cameras and the transforms look weird and why am i explaining this examples help more so let's look at the built-in transform the final cut comes with so this is for canon log2 and we compare it to the one that i'm using there's a whole world of difference so compare some of the different transforms and choose one that you like again links in the description below including you can purchase the ones that i use if you want so now we want to make all the footage that was shot on the c200 look the same so i'm going to select that clip hit command c for copy and go to other clips and press command shift v like command shift paste and now you can choose exactly which video attributes you are going to apply i don't need to apply the scaling transform just the lut so i'm going to turn that off paste and now this clip also looks good so let's do that to everything and now as we flick through we can see that everything looks contrasty it looks like proper footage transform complete but there's still a lot to learn about them don't think you've mastered it because you've just found one lut that kind of works in fact if you have a lut pack and all of them just have like standard log transform don't use that it doesn't really work step two correction so this is at least as important as transforms if you don't have your colors looking accurate all those fun filters and luts you're gonna add later are gonna look like crap so you gotta lay a foundation first and that's what we're doing so these shots look pretty good overall i mean you know it'd be nice to do this on one of the most majestic shots because it just looks good but um i think i could demonstrate it more clearly in a little simple b-roll shot like this so first of all we want to be adjusting for both the white balance and skin tones in this case we're looking at the white balance and what i'm looking at here is over here on the left hand side are our rgb overlay waveforms i can make them a little bigger so i can really clearly see them and without looking at the actual image over here i can tell that this is a little bit too blue because our blues are higher up here in the highlights and there's also something going on down here in the shadows so these shadows correspond to this dark part of the backpack and this streak going across the top this is all that gray back there so this should be pretty neutral and fortunately it's really easy to do that so we're going to start by creating a correction layer and first we look at the highlights honestly you can do it with this by feel and just start like moving these in a circle and you can see what happens over there see those waveforms moving around i'm basically just going to keep moving them until they start to line up and converge and once they're all in a line and white that means the white balance is now neutral can you see that as i click it on and off this like blue cast just disappears that you didn't even really see it before but now you definitely see it when it goes away and also let's keep our order of operations correct here i'm going to move those color wheels before our transform light and also the shadows this dark area over here you can see that there's some color visible in them where this should just be straight up black so as we move it around those will gradually start to line up but keep an eye on your highlights too like everything is moving even though i'm only grabbing the shadows and sometimes if you move it until they are perfectly aligned like that now we have made our highlights too warm so we can bounce back and start to play with our highlights again but there's also such thing as playing with it too much so kind of find this balance where both of them are mostly white and now if we turn this on and off you can see we got rid of a lot of color cast there and then the other most important thing is skin tone so in this example we have lots of skin tones to look at and we're going to use our vector scope a little more for this one so i'm going to make it a bit bigger and i find it really helpful to just crank the saturation when you're getting started make it too saturated and all of a sudden it gets really big over here you can clearly see what's going on now make sure that in your vector scope preferences you do have show skin tone indicator on and that is this subtle line that is running up and to the left and that is the universal hue level of skin tone regardless of the complexion of the person whether they're darker or lighter the hue of their skin should be somewhere pretty close to that line in this example this orange roof up here is actually kind of distracting us so i'm going to zoom in a whole bunch now everything that we're seeing the vectorscope like all the orange stuff is pretty much his skin and over here i have a little bit of gray now i'm just going to kind of tweak both of those until they're you know pretty much lining up right on it and then i can restore that saturation back to normal and zoom back out you know one more thing you might have been considering is you might have been looking at well what about this temperature in tint slider like if we're going to be fixing the white balance right like why don't i drag this to be more yellow or more blue let me try to demonstrate why i don't like these if i start to move the temperature slider to get her skin over here to align with our skin tone line you can see that here in the highlights it's starting to get like weirdly yellow like if i drag this far look at how yellow the highlights are and the shadows everything got super yellow it's really not discerning about which parts the image you're trying to affect whereas if you were setting white balance within your camera it would look a lot more like this which here i'm just grabbing the mid-tones and can you see that i've got the skin right on the line like it looks a lot better but our highlights haven't moved so much like our highlights are still neutral which is exactly what we want we don't want to add weird coloration to different parts of the image just to fix our skin or white balance so don't use the sliders use the color wheels we're gonna look at the contrast so there's a few things you could do from color wheels like you can bring your shadows a little closer to the bottom if i look over to the left you can see they're almost touching zero i don't want them to clip and go below zero and then highlights can go up towards a hundred if there's anything that would be clipped in your image then you could be like right at i'd put it at 95. but in this photo nothing actually should be pure white like those clouds aren't supposed to be blown out so i'm going to keep them down below my white point of 95 which by the way you can move this line i just i set it here because for this project 95 is my white point that's actually up to you but now our image kind of makes sense this doesn't let us affect what is called mid-tone contrast for that i'm going to go here and use color curves and a curve lets us be a little more precise about where we are moving the highlights and shadows up and down towards the right are the highlights and towards the left are the shadows and anywhere you click you add a point so i'm going to add a point towards the right for highlights point towards the left for shadows and i'll bring the shadows a little bit down and the highlights a little bit up the classic s curve and i think actually i'm losing too many details in those shadows and this is this is why i don't do with color wheels i'm going to take that off i'm just going to do this inside of my color curves and this is just a totally different type of contrast like see how i can move these points closer together that contrast looks different from this contrast and this is up to you this is a creative decision exactly where you want it to land you know i like to have what i call you know a little bit of mid-tone contrast by having these a little bit closer together and that that'll be different from your other contrast so you add this to taste it's up to you and before we move on i want to emphasize why i don't use the luma waveform i'm going to make it bigger so we can see what's going on here if i switch back to luma you can see that it's only barely bumping up against a hundred you know looking at this waveform everything seems fine nothing's really clipping here from what i can tell but if i switch back to rgb overlay you can see there's actually a lot of the blue channel that has clipped that is past 100. that is bad that is horrible like we have a beautiful expensive camera here and we're just making it look cheap like these clips this looks horrible this is what an old-fashioned camcorder looks like the reason you paid for your nice new camera is so you could get rich tones which you know basically they have to be below 100 to do that so you can only see that really clearly for me in the rgb overlay so that i can see blue is now no longer clipping and while we're on this clip a final thing that i like to do is i usually bring my mid-tones down a little bit for things i want to feel a little more cinematic a little cinema ish is um the the mid-tones coming down gives it that sort of like richness of tone let's do it to a few different clips the best way i'd describe it is it makes the colors feel thicker like they're just kind of more substantial whereas if you're bringing it down say in the highlights like it just looks darker and and flatter those mid tones coming down that's where you get the the sort of the juice the richness of of cinema so yeah i i really like to keep those a little bit low so something in the image is kind of up near 95 but a lot of those mid-tones are coming down towards the the lower half of of the waveform and by the way 10-second rant it is offensive to me that photo editing apps do not have these waveform functionalities these scopes inside of them things like vector scopes are essential to me why can't i check my skin tones in photoshop the same way i can in final cut pro it's totally insane and maddening that yeah photography doesn't have these basic monitoring tools i don't understand it anyway back to back to final cut now there's another trick i have up my sleeve i do this very often where i'll add what is called a hue saturation curve and go into it and look for saturation versus saturation now everything on the right is the most saturated parts of the image the left is desaturated what i do is add a few points on the right side and bring it down so what this means is that the most saturated parts of the image are a little less saturated like i don't go crazy with it it's a very gentle slope but if you i turn it on and off you can see that it's those blues that are just way more saturated than her skin for example it helps bring everything a little bit more into the same saturation value sometimes i find oranges sort of clip and this just kind of brings it back whatever the color is it'll recover some of those clipped saturation points now let's get into the fun part adding film emulation adding some looks but first a quick thank you to our sponsor squarespace now whatever kind of filmmaker you are i'm just going to guess that you might sometimes want to show your work off to the rest of the world am i right well squarespace is the best possible way to do that they help you create portfolios either for filmmaking or photography by embedding your work in the highest quality and surrounding it with a website that is all your design you can post things on social media that can get lots of views but you don't actually control that and it can get shut down at a moment's notice so don't rely on another platform to keep your precious work online invisible take control with squarespace you're going to be able to design every aspect of it in just a few minutes it's really simple they have drag and drop templates that are completely responsive created by their professional designers and then the back end is taken care of for you so you can see all the analytics that you're going to need the seo is done for you you really don't have to learn anything to run a professional website even if you already know how to do one it's so much easier to let squarespace take care of it for you so i'd highly recommend go to squarespace.com and just spend a few minutes designing your new website and then when you are ready to launch you can head to squarespace.com tylerstallman to get 10 off your first website or domain i've used squarespace for more projects than i can count and they all look completely different because it's so easy to work with so thanks again squarespace link in the description moving on to luts this is the fun part this is when you can go crazy first of all let's put an adjustment layer over top of everything now all you have to do is drag it on top it's a title by the way it's inside of this title menu and i'm just going to extend it to cover our whole video here because what we're trying to do is add a unifying color grade to everything that kind of brings it all together i use the same lut for pretty much everything again we're going to go into our effects over here i'm going to drag over custom lut and select the one that i always do and even though i've used this a million times it's never perfect at the beginning uh you know it's a pretty soft one like you might want to push this further but i'm going to play with it for now first of all i don't even use it at 100 all the time for this video i will but it also does some things i don't love so if we turn it on and off let's watch our rgb overlay over there you can see it's squishing the highlights a little more than i really want it to so next in the chain i'm going to add another color wheel and i'm going to bring those highlights up just a little bit more i don't want them pushed quite that far down let's take another look it's pretty good and keep in mind anything you do on this top layer is now going to be applied to everything so you're going to have to probably go through all your clips again and kind of you know rethink them a little like this now feels a lot brighter than i want i'm going to bring those mids down this feels warmer than i want also feels more saturated than i want but there's really just no way to do all of this in one pass you have to go through it multiple times comparing clip by clip and it's also really useful to use the compare to so if we go to window show in workspace comparison viewer and i could click save frame so now i'm seeing the frame that i was just on and i can compare it to anything else so i'll go to this other clip with our same actress here and uh you know look at things like oh is her hair a similar shade of red is the saturation similar it's their skin on a similar level and just kind of sync those up so whichever one i've selected now that's the only one that i'm affecting here here's something i don't like that my lut is doing so i'm going to manually fix it by going to hue saturation curves i'm going to use this eyedropper and select the grass which is our kind of green area it actually happens to be a little more yellow and i'm going to pull it towards being a little more so a little more green because to me this is a little more dead grass this is a little bit more a live grass as you make changes like this make sure that you flick through the rest of the video and be sure that it wasn't you know damaging anything else like here we have a lot of green in this one as well so we'll just turn that on and off and yeah it's also better in this one i like this slightly more cyan green here and here's another one where i'd bring the midtones down a little bit by the way i said there's a million different lights out there it's really true like let's take a look at some others just to remind you there's not just one way that things can look but i wouldn't do a lot to do something like this press command 7 to bring our scopes back up you can see it's added a ton of green to the highlights this is a look you'll see in movies this is like a legitimate thing to do but i try to make sure you have control over that don't let the lut push your image that far because it's really hard to bring it back later so again if you go back to mine i prefer things that really keep the highlights and shadows clean and are mostly playing with everything in the mid tones and now the final step we're going to export it and look at it on a lot of different devices look at it on your phone put it on a white background watch it on your tv just see it all over the place and get a sense of what it really looks like because everybody has a different device and you want to have a sense of how it's going to appear wherever it's going to be seen and there's a lot more to color grading in final cut pro than i was able to go over here but i will help you out with it if you want if you follow me on twitter i'm at stalman and same thing on instagram and if we had more time there is so much more to color grading in final cut pro than i have time for today but if you have any questions you can hit me up on twitter i'm at stallman or listen to the podcast installment podcast it's got lots of great info from creators you probably like and follow but thanks for watching this video guys and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Tyler Stalman

Views: 225,296

Keywords: Tyler Stalman, Final Cut Pro, color grading, luts, workflow, film look, log, fcp, 10.5

Id: k9s4hwjcJwk

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020