In this episode of TFX TV, I'm going to show you how to prepare and clean up your video
footage, getting it ready for color grading, using Cineform and After Effects.
Also, I'll show you the file method I used to getting a faster render time.
It's time for TFX TV.
Let's plug in.
Everybody, this is Aaron Anderson with TFX TV.
Today we have a lot to cover, so I don't want to talk too much here, but this is part one
of two videos that I have based on how to get your digital video prepared for color grading.
Let's get started and jump right in.
Everybody, here we go.
I'm going to show you a little bit how I do my file setup and also how I basically render
to different hard drives.
This does speed up rendering a little bit.
If you only have one hard drive, and that would be your C hard drive right here, then
everything basically, you don't have much of a choice, but if you happen to have three
hard drives, this is how I set things up.
First of all, this little box here will represent my local C drive, where I have all of my programs
installed, and then I have two other hard drives.
I have some little icons over here to get to them quicker, but this will be one hard
drive representing over here and another hard drive over here.
What I do is, when I get back to the computer with all my footage from my camera, I'll go
ahead and drag it off of the card and put it on this hard drive here.
First what I do is, let's go back here, I'll make a folder and name it whatever the production
is, or the name of the video or whatever, I'll make a folder name it.
Inside that folder, I usually make two or three folders here.
One audio, that would be for special effects and music, voiceovers, and whatever you have
in the audio.
Any pictures that you might be using in the project here, and any video here.
Once I get the card out of the camera, bring it over to the computer, I will put it inside
here and I will make a couple folders here.
I'll make one folder and I name it bad, I name one clean up, one good, and one maybe.
Once I have all the footage right here, in this case we only have two footage because
no sense in showing you a whole bunch, it's the same thing with many, I'll go through
the footage and see which ones I'm going to use, which ones I'm not going to use, and
ones that I might use.
If I just go ahead and I play each video and if it's a good shot and I like it, I'll go
ahead and I'll drag it into a good folder just like that.
If I find any footage that is just really, really bad where I just didn't like it at
all or there was just something messed up on it, whether it was exposure or an actor
fell over and we turned off the camera, all those kind of things, I go ahead and I drag
it to the bad folder.
I never delete anything because you never know, you might use something from it, so
always put it in the bad folder.
If I come up on something that looks decent but not sure, then I put it in the maybe folder.
In this case, we like these so we're going to put it in good.
Then you see I have a folder here called cleaned up and we will get to that later.
Now that I have all the files and everything inside of this hard drive here, I go ahead
and I open up whatever program I'm going to use which is running on my C drive and I will
use the footage from this hard drive to edit on this hard drive and then when I want to
render something out from the project, I render over to this hard drive where you see I have
a folder here called rendered.
This is so that the information isn't going back and forth from one hard drive to the
other or on the same one which can cause some slowdown on your render.
We have the main footage over here being edited on this hard drive and then rendered to this
hard drive so everything keeps a little more speedy.
There you have it.
That's how I set up my folders and how I render a little more quicker using three hard drives.
I want to show you how to set up a couple After Effects projects to make this process
much quicker so you don't have to set it up every time.
What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and open up After Effects.
Now that After Effects is open, first thing we want to do is we want to change the 8 bit
here to 16 bit so you hold down your Alt key.
This is on Windows and click it one time with your left mouse button and it will turn it
to 16 bits.
Then what we want to do is we want to create a composition so go New Composition and now
this depends on what you're going to use but most people are going to use 1920 by 1080
and we can call this Cleanup 24p because we're going to make two setups here, one in 24p
and one in 60p so depending on what footage you're using it will be all ready to go for
you.
Since this is 24p we want to switch this to 23.976, make sure it says full.
I would put this to one hour so you can bring a lot of footage in and maybe not have to
mess with this later.
Go ahead and click OK.
Now what we want to do is save this out so we go File, Save As and let's just put it
on the desktop for now just for these purposes and we can call this Cleanup 24p and go ahead
and click Save.
So let's just check to make sure that all worked.
So now we've got the Cleanup 24p, we click on it.
We can see that it started up with 16 bits, Cleanup 24p, if we check the composition here
to make sure everything looks good, composition settings 1920 by 1080, oh yeah, square pixels
23.976, one hour full, everything's good.
So now we know that this works perfect.
So now to make the, we can click on Don't Save There.
Now to make another one for 60p, if you're someone like me that likes to do some 60p
filming, all we have to do is right click on this, click on Copy, right click and Paste
and we can go ahead and just rename this to 60p, oops, let's get rid of that copy there.
Rename that, now we have to just double click on that.
Now we just, everything's the same except the names of this stuff so we want to click
on the composition here and click on Enter and just change this to 60p.
And composition settings, whoops, let's make sure we click on the composition down here,
composition settings, change this to 59.94 and I actually shoot with the Sony Next VG20
which actually shoots in 1080, 60p, if you're using one of the Canon DSLR cameras then you
might not be able to shoot in 60p at 1080 so you want to change that to 720, that's up
to you.
But everything looks good, everything's an hour, click on OK, that's 16, we'll close
that out, sure, save it, make sure you save it.
So now you've got your two cleanup projects here.
Okay so now I'm going to show you how to set up a render queue so you don't have to do
this every time.
We'll leave those alone here, what we'll do is just open up a new After Effects and we'll
do this just for setting up a render queue.
Okay so let's go ahead and drag in some footage here, this could be any footage, we just want
to get to a render queue, let's just drag in some footage there, okay, let's drag this
into a new comp, okay and then go to composition, add to render queue.
Now once we're in this render queue, we can set up our own render queue so every time
we add something to the render queue, it'll hold these settings.
So what you want to do first is click on this little arrow down button, click on make template.
We're going to make a test one here since I already made my own, but we can put test
and we can call it 4.2.2 at 24p.
Then what we do is we click on edit and you can change this to whatever you want, but
we're going to be working in the Cineform because when we transcoded all of our footage
into Cineform and we clean up our footage, we want to render out in the same Cineform
that we were working with so we're not doing any kind of a compression here.
So we want to go to Cineform AVI, we want to put this on high HD, you can go on high
HD optimized film scan scan 2, but this really is absolutely plenty, anything else is overkill.
Here you can see you can go to 4.4.4 if you'd like, make sure this is checked, click on
OK and click on trillions of colors.
This should probably automatically be on RGB plus alpha and we want to click on audio output,
make sure that's at 48 at 16 bit and stereo, go ahead and click on OK, click on OK.
So if we open this back up, make template, we can move the default to that new one that
we just, where was it at, I clicked on test, test 4.2.2 24p, click on OK.
Now we can set up where we want these to be rendered out and I always click on my transcoded
hard drive, there's my render and click on open and save.
So now what we can do is let's just cancel out of this, don't save, let's open it up
just to see if everything worked.
OK, so let's just see if this all worked, so let's grab some footage real quick, whoops,
so let's say we cleaned everything up there, dropped into a new comp, let's say we want
to render this out, composition, add to render queue, so there we go, it automatically comes
in as that test 4.2.2 24p that we set up.
OK, so now let's go through the cleanup process, I use a program called Cineform, it's called
HD link right here, Cineform Studio, I use the premium version, if you don't have Cineform,
it's a really, really good codec to transcode all of your footage whether you're using the
iPhone or AVCHD or any of the Canon line of footage, just about any footage will be translated
really nice into a 10-bit 4.2.2 or you can actually go to 12-bit 4.4.4 even with an alpha
channel, a lot of times it could be overkill but some people say hey why not, but sometimes
when I'm shooting at 60p and I change it to 4.4.4 with alpha channel the files are really,
really, really huge, so for most of my work I just use the Cineform HD link and it turns
the 8-bit 4.2.0 Canon footage and all these other different camera footages to the Cineform
10-bit 4.2.2, so here's what we do, okay first let's go, we've got the Cineform HD link open,
we want to click on convert, you can select by files or select folder, let's just click
select files here, now let's go look for the footage that we brought in from our camera,
I have it under workflow folder layout, this is just for the demonstration, I got it under
video and here's the file that we put everything in good, we want to click on that one and
if we select this one, now we both got them here in the render queue, let's go to preferences,
since I'm on Windows I'm going to automatically convert it to AVI, well right there and down
here is the AVI or MOV, it's up to you, AVI is good because I'm on PC, if I have a client
that wants MOV because they're going to be on Mac or whatever then I click that one,
we're not going to remove any pull down or anything from here, keep source aspect ratio,
render quality high, you can put on film scan too but I've read so much about this issues
here and really high is probably all you're going to need, I have it on automatic, iframes
only click on OK, oh first of all here, you want to browse if you have that third hard
drive or whatever, where are we at here, computer, here's all my transcoded stuff on my other
hard drive and I click on transcoded, got that set up, of course if you only have one
hard drive basically put it wherever you want, click on OK and we click on start and these
are going to go ahead and take our footage and transcode them into the Cineform codec.
OK so Cineform is finished, we can go ahead and close that out and now we can go into
our folder where we transcoded everything and here's the newly transcoded footage and
what we want to do is, I shot this in 24p so we're going to click on our clean up 24p
comp or project, this is why it's handy to do these and just put them somewhere on your
hard drive so you don't have to set the compositions up and the projects up every time, so here
we got it, let's drag these clips into our project, let's close that and all we have
to do is, what I did is I clicked on the first footage, hold down control, click on the next
footage and I just drag them into the comp, so now we have, we can actually, we'll just
do one for this lesson here, let's just delete that there, we'll just do one clip, so here
we are, nice little footage in a movie we're going to be doing soon, it's been taking quite
a while to finish this film but it's going to be pretty cool, but anyways, here we go,
what we want to do first is click on the footage, you can actually see quite a bit of noise
here over in here, a lot of just issues, you can see that right there, it just looks pretty
bad actually, if you're really picky like me you want to clean that up, sorry I moved
the footage here, so here's what we do, if anything gets out of line like I just accidentally
moved it, you can just go ahead and right click transform, fit to comp and it will fit
back up for you, so first of all we want to go to effects, we want to go to neat video,
choose noise, want to click on options, now what you want to do is pick a spot on here
that doesn't have any texture because if we were to like, let's say make a square over
here to get rid of the noise, it's going to see everything in here and get rid of that,
so a lot of these patterns are going to disappear and you don't want that, so we want to move
this somewhere where there's not a lot of detail, so one place we could do it is somewhere
over here, we could do it like right in this black spot here, or now there is some texture
in this shirt here, we could try, how about over here, let's give it a try, make a selection
like this, click on auto profile, this says this selected area is small, you should make
a bigger one but I think this will be fine, so we click on yes, click on auto fine tune,
click on noise filter settings and all this, you could play around with all this but very
low frequency is what I usually check and I click on apply, so now we can see the difference
here, let's look at this black part, if I go ahead and take off the effect, you can
see all this really bad noise that these digital cameras make, if we turn it on, it's like
really smooth now, we look over here, let's turn it off, you can see all this terrible
noise here, if we turn it on, it's all gone, so now when you go out, turn it off, turn
it on, it looks nice and smooth here, now a lot of the times when you add neat video,
you'll get some banding and let me see if I can find any banding on here, the shot might
not have any, I moved the footage again, let's see, I guess I could have picked another
footage with more banding on it, due to neat video, I do not see any banding here, there's
a little bit of banding here, I mean I don't know if you guys can see that but let's try
it, let's see if we can get rid of some of this banding, so to get rid of the banding
and this might, you might want to do this anyways, it kind of evens the pixels out, make sure
your footage is selected, go to effects and we go down to brain freeze, noise, where's
noise, noise in grain, we want to click on noise and I know it sounds weird adding noise
to a footage you're trying to clean but this noise is much more pleasing than the blocky
noise from digital footage and this actually is going to get rid of some of this banding,
it's just a little bit here but what we can, usually 0.4% is good enough, if you look right
here, let's see if we can catch some of this, look at this area right here, I'm going to
turn this off and you can see some banding there and you turn it on, it goes away and
if you want to get rid of more it goes 0.6, let's say, now all that banding is literally
gone and there's not too much noise anywhere else that you can see, so it gets rid of the
banding, evens all the pixels out and it looks pretty darn good if you ask me, okay so this
is how to clean up your footage for color grading, since I'm using a screen capture
program to do this tutorial, it doesn't show the difference from the before and after very
well because the quality is kind of low, so here's a picture of the two clips, actually
it's the one clip is before I added neat video and the noise to get rid of banding and the
after is all cleaned up with neat video, so I blew the pictures of the videos up to 200%
and if you look closely at let's say the very lower right hand corner of the shoulder there,
you can see how drastically it cleaned up the noise there, also even in the back orange
wall back there, although it's kind of blurred out you can see a dramatic difference on the
before which has a lot of noise in it and the after one is all cleaned up, also the
ear area you can see the clean up difference and especially on the black rubber on the
mask on the left you can see a lot of the noise there and on the right it's all cleaned
up, okay so there you go that's how to clean up your footage, remember this is part one
so please check out part two which will be coming on the internet pretty soon here, also
go to trinityfxmg.com that's my website where in the description of this video I have links
to the Cineform and the script that I use and also some links to other more detailed
information of what we covered today, so this is Aaron Anderson with TFX TV, till next time.
