ReelCast Color Correction

ReelCast is now offering Color Correction services using Apple Color 1.5!
You can watch a larger version here.

When is color correction useful?

- Bad color balance
- Mismatched cameras
- Matching scenes
- Enhancing a story arc and character development.
- Day for night
- Punching up the image to make it "pop" like sky or water or grass
- Current levels are too low and/or levels are too high
- Mimic chemical processes
- Adding vignette, soft focus, selective focus, glow and diffusion effects
- Isolated and/or replacement color effects
List used from the ColorList group on Yahoo.

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Color Correction: Pendragon

Last year, while working on Pendragon one of my jobs was the color correction. Let me just say that I love doing color correction! Not much can compare to taking an "average" looking shot and turning it into something beautiful. Sometimes it takes a long time and sometimes its just a few tweaks.

Click on the pictures for a larger version

I'm planning to write an article for my blog about the process and some step-by-steps of the color correction process for Pendragon using Apple Color, but that is still in the works. For now, I've put together a 4 minute video of before-&-afters from Pendragon. You can view it here on my website.

Spin the Wheels

Time to spin those color wheels - Digital Juice has another training video about color correction.

Watch it here and learn how to make this.....

...look like this.

It looks like they'll be spinning the wheels in more ways than one.

Camping BTS #5

GRAPHICS AND TITLES
MOTION
I do most of my titles in Motion, because it has a better text resolution output. All the titles for the Camping video were designed in Motion and animated in Motion using a couple of presets. I didn’t do anything really complicated.
BLUE SWIRLY
The blue and yellow swirly thing that “revealed” the number for each point, was a free download from Digital Juice and is part of their Motion Design Elements Library - "Logo Revealer's."

SPECIAL EFFECTS

COLOR CORRECTION
I briefly touched on this in my last BTS, and I don’t have a lot more to add. One benefit I have found is to use a proper “production monitor” when doing color correction. These monitors can be rather expensive and range from around 7” to 13” in screen size. I bought an 8” JVC model off of ebay for under $200. My computer screen is VERY noticeably darker and different in color than my external monitor. A monitor isn’t a must, but if you plan on doing any serious CC work, especially if your finished movie will be viewed on DVD (thereby often using a TV screen) and/or your movie will be projected on a screen using a projector, I highly recommend some extra thought and care when doing the color correction. Most of the CC for this project isn’t very noticeable, and I hard a time finding a cilp that would show the differences very well. Because I shot at sunset and I shot on a couple of different days, some shots were warmer than others and I decided to CC to make all the narration clips a warm orange color……

Before

After

SPECIAL FX
Since my camera doesn’t do well when shooting at night, meaning the video doesn’t show up very well….the “night shot” is really the only shot with special FX applied, but I liked it so much I just had to tell you about it. Here are the stages I went through….

Original shot

Color Corrected using Magic Bullet Editor's "Night" preset, with a few custom tweaks :)

I then added several layers of stars that I created in Blender, and used the compositing option in FC to help them blend into the shot better. It isn’t perfect, but I was pretty pleased with the result.

[CLEANING UP THE EDIT FLOOR] coming next….