In this episode of TFX TV, this is part two of preparing and cleaning up your video footage
and getting it ready for color grading using Cineform and After Effects.
We will pick up right where we left off on part one, then I'll show you how to color
correct using First Light.
It's time for TFX TV, let's plug in.
Everybody this is Aaron Anderson with TFX TV.
This is part two of the part two series of how to get your digital video cleaned and
ready for color grading.
So a lot to go over again as like the first one and let's get started.
Okay so now I'm going to show you how to render the clips out using the script.
Click on your first footage, hold down control, click on your second footage, go up to animation,
keyframe assistance, sequence layers, don't overlap, click on okay.
What this does is it sequences your layers so that they're not all on top of each other
so you don't have to keep hiding the eye for everything, it just automatically sequences
these.
That's why I have this long one hour composition set up so if you have a bunch of files here
they're going to sequence themselves all the way expanding that hour there.
So here we go, we wanted to fix that which we did and we come over here and we want
to fix this one.
Now you can't just go ahead and copy and paste because the noise in this footage is going
to be drastically different than this footage so you're going to have to just go through
and do all the cleanup again for this footage.
So here we go, we finished cleaning up the footage let's say, we want to render this
out.
If we render it out like if we were to go to composition and add to render queue, it's
going to render all of this out into one long footage and you don't want that.
So what we need to do is render these out separately.
So if we shrink this to the actual first clip, to shrink this actually you hold down shift
and you can drag the work area thing to the end of the clip and of course to the beginning
of the clip and what you want to do is go to file and we come down to scripts and we
click on the queue work area.
This little script here is only like five bucks so it's really cheap and a very good
script to use and what you do is once you basically, let's zoom in here, once you go
ahead and bring these into your work area, click on queue work area, okay so now that's
in the queue.
Let's go back and we can move this to our next footage, click on queue to work area.
So you do that to each clip, it's not as quick as a batch but after effects doesn't have
a batch, you can add all your effects here and you'll just have to one by one do it that
way and as you can see they're all queued up into our render queue and then all you
have to do is click on render.
Okay so after we render this footage out, remember my little file structure here, the
bad cleaned up good and maybe well after we cleaned up all the footage and rendered out
of after effects I go ahead and I put my footage here in the cleaned up folder and then what
I do is I open up Cineform first light.
This is an amazing program because it'll allow you to change the metadata and then no matter
what program, let's say you have this clip inside after effects and let's say you also
have it in Premiere Pro and you're bouncing back and forth or whatever, anytime you change
anything here in the first light it'll also automatically change in those other programs.
So let's go ahead and go file, import file, click on one of the clips we want to use,
open it up.
So here's the clip we got.
What these little check boxes down here do is allow you to whatever you check here will
allow you to manipulate it up over here.
So I always have the white balance, the primary that's the color correction and overlays or
tools actually and now we got our tools, we got our different tools here and let's say
we want to do a white balance which isn't too necessary here but let's say we have it
checked down here, we click on white balance, you click on this pick, click a white spot
in there and it fixes it, you can also change all these different things here.
I'm going to reset it because we really don't need that.
So there's that, let's say we want to do the primary correction, let's say this scene
had two cameras, one at this angle and maybe another one off to the left here, I use this
program to match those two up so if this was a little maybe under exposed and the other
one was maybe a little brighter of course I use this to match those up and here you've
got exposure so you can change the exposure and I'm looking at my graphs down here making
sure you're not crushing the shadows or blowing out the highlights, that's the same with this
at the top and at the bottom is the shadows, skin tones here.
So we can mess with the exposure, we can also mess with these here are the shadows, mids
and highlights so if we raise this up, what I usually do is try to get kind of a flatter
look kind of like when you have those flat picture styles in your Canon cameras, I like
to just kind of, before I color grade, use this to kind of flatten them out a little
bit, not too much but just a little bit, I'm not going to do a big tutorial here but you
know I'm just messing around with some of this here because when I color grade I don't
want this to be too dark like that and then once you start color grading and adding on
certain color grading effects and after effects you know you're going to really crush those
black or those shadows so I like to kind of brighten everything up here.
So let's say that looks pretty good, another thing you can do here is this isn't really
a tutorial on this program but just really quick, you've got looks also which if we come
down here and we click on allow the looks there, we've got all these different looks,
here's like cool tones, you know film, all these different film styles, you know it's
just whatever you want there.
I don't always use those, maybe on some project I'll make a custom one maybe and use it but
I like using colorist2 inside after effects so I don't normally use this but you definitely
can make your own look right here, let's go ahead and reset that.
So there you go, let's say we matched up the two clips or the two cameras or brightened
it up, white balance and all that good stuff, oh we've got framing here too, you can zoom
in, let's go ahead and click on framing here.
As you can see you can zoom in on the clips and change stuff and whatever you want but
once that's all done, it's automatically to show this more extreme, let's go to primary
and let's just blow this out like this and I'm going to show you, over here's the clip
that we used and without even rendering it out you're going to see that it's changed
already, see that's the metadata.
So if we said oh that's no good, we can come down in here, I'm just going to go dramatic
on this so you guys can see, let's say that looked better, without rendering it out we
play the clip and you see it's like really dark now so that's what's really cool about
first light.
So now that we cleaned up our footage we rendered it out, we used first light to do the primary
color correction and white balance, maybe matching two cameras up, matching footage
up, giving it maybe a little bit of a flatter look.
One more step I do before I color grade is I actually edit my scene or my footage of
a short film or whatever you're doing because there's no sense in taking your time color
grading a large clip if you're going to cut it down anyway.
So I go ahead and I open up Premiere Pro, click on new project, where do you want this
to be saved, let's just for now, we'll just go desktop, here we go desktop, name it what
you want, we'll just go test, okay.
And we are using Cineform because we never changed, once we took the footage from our
iPhone or from our whatever camera you're using, your VG20, your Canon DSLRs, Nikons,
whatever, we transcoded it to Cineform and we're keeping that same format or that same
codec all the way through.
So what we're going to do here is let's just say we're going to keep it in the 1080p, we're
going to go 1080p right here, that's 1920 by 1080, 24 frames per second.
You can double click on this to find your footage, but I already have this window open
here.
This is a cleaned up folder where everything is ready to be color graded, but first we're
going to edit, so let's say we bring in this clip, we bring in that clip, we want to edit
these two.
Once you bring these two clips in, what we want to do is drag them down to our timeline.
Now these clips don't have anything to do with the order of the film we're making here,
I'm just doing this for purposes of showing you what to do.
So let's say we see this clip here and we want to edit it, remember this is just a rough
edit, let's say we cut that off and that's what we want.
And he looks over right there, oops, we edit that, then we come over here and we see this,
we want to cut it down there, and let's say we cut it there, oops, okay, so there we go,
we've got our edit, let's say you edit your whole scene.
So once we do all that, we want to color grade this and add special effects or explosions
or whatever you're going to do with the footage.
And instead of rendering this out and bring it into After Effects, we can just go ahead
on let's say this clip here, we want to color grade, we just right click.
And then what we do is we replace with After Effects composition.
This is called Dynamic Link, it allows you to color grade and fix the clips without,
let's go to desktop here, we're just going to keep it like that.
This allows you to color grade this footage without rendering it out of Premiere Pro.
So I'm just going to do something real quick here, let's say we want to do a color grade
here, colorista, let's say we just do a really quick color grade, that looks cool, bring
up the exposure, go to master here, let's say we add a little bit of that in there.
Like I said, I'm not doing anything big here, we're just going to quickly do something.
So let's say that's cool, that's the look we want.
Other things we want to add to this, this is the time you want to add any explosions
or special effects.
Also what I always do with all my footage is I always add sharpening.
So what I do is I go to effects, after I color grade everything and match everything up,
special effects and so forth, the last thing I usually do is add sharpness.
So we go to blur and sharpen, unsharpen mask, and a lot of times the amount of 50 is the
default which is pretty good.
We can see here if it's too much for you, I don't know if we can see this on YouTube
but it's making a good difference if we went to 75 which is quite a bit, it's going to
give you a real sharp look there.
I'm not sure if you guys can see that, let's see if I can get my eye right there.
If we turn it on, we can see that you can actually see the details in my eyes and so
forth.
So that's what I do.
Now if we go back into Premiere Pro, we're going to see that the changes took effect
and there it is.
Let's say we wanted to crop that or whatever, we go back into After Effects, click S for
scale.
I'm just showing you roughly, you don't want to scale this up much past the 1080 it already
is and let's just show you, see, there it is.
And everything looks all good.
So I just go back and forth from After Effects and maybe tidy up some stuff here and then
what I do is I add my sound effects down here to the clip after all my special effects
are done, after you add your killing robot from Mars and all that stuff on here, add
your special effects, get everything nice and good here and then what we do is we go
file, export media and I keep it in the same Cineform codec.
I never change it so I like to render out all of my work in the Cineform codec so that
I have a nice clean copy of that and then from there I can render it out using Adobe
encoder to YouTube, Vimeo, Blu-ray or whatever you're going to do.
So that's how I clean up and edit all my footage.
Okay so there you go, that was part two of the part two series.
If you haven't saw part one, please go see part one.
You should actually see part one first before you see part two, it'll make more sense to
you and please go to trinityfxmg.com because in the description of the series and actually
all the videos that I do, I always put links to the products that I use within the video
and a little more detail information on what we talked about today.
So this is Aaron Anderson with TFX TV, till next time.
