Lessons

Lesson Info

Reframing and Color Grading

This is the big upside to using four k like that but uh sorry josh that's kind of all over the place I have this on a handheld rig and I'm running backwards through the forest, which was a little scary uh so I knew it wasn't going to come out one hundred percent but I knew we were shooting that four came delivering at ten eighty, so I knew I had a lovely way to fix this and post we're gonna fix it right now, but I'm going to start a little and you see, we're at fifty eight right now because this is for kay and we're working in ten eighty so I'm just gonna go through we created the key frame by hitting these stopwatches we're just gonna go through and reframe as we go to get more of a stable shot. Well, we'll be able to see a foreign after school and that hat this is how I was able at the end of this shot to get it so locked on todd's faces he's running towards the camera even though I'm running backwards as fast as I can whoops you got these little arrows here which will take you to th...

e last key frame next key frame just super helpful, okay that's good, we'll probably see a little bouncing around the frame we're gonna have to tweak it a little more than likely and you would go in here, and you would ease a little bit, so it wasn't so jittery at times, you know, okay, so here's the before and after. So at the beginning, you see, we got a little bit of that jenner we would correct that, but the rest of it, you could see, were pretty locked on his face where otherwise we're just all of in a place. Now, the great thing about reframing and post is right here we have sort of, ah, loose, medium close up, and we could always without any loss of detail whatsoever grab that close up that we weren't able to get because we ran out of time just by punching in because we're four k and we're editing intensity as best part about shooting for kay and editing ten eighty to me, if you this is what size the frame actually is, and this is you know what we're editing in. So you have a lot of leeway. No questions on that, right? Resemble good, so we could talk about stabilizing your shots for adobe inn the frog. I wanted a very stable feel, very smooth movements throughout, but we didn't really have time to get gibbs or a movie or anything that would money to get a movie or time to get jib, set it up and go through the shot so we ended up with some stuff that looks like this not really the tone that we're looking for, uh only through that full screen, so you can really see it bouncing around a little bit kind of killing the vibe that we're we're looking for looking very handheld, almost like we're in a action movie now, but what's great about adobe premiere is they now have warp stabilizer built in, so I'm just gonna grab this drop this on and it's going to start analyzing my footage so it'll stable out all that shaking, scale it up for me, switch all the positioning for me and why well, that's doing that one, then move on to this one as well and these are mohr ah more of the raw shots so you could see how much work we did to them in post stark adding that rainbow coming off her back and I was and things but look at this one that was probably my favorite example bouncing around like crazy, not looking too great for that on there and this you can see we did a sky replacement on that shot obviously was super blown out, we had no more time, we had to get the shot looked terrible, and I did, in fact say we'll have to fix it in post, but why don't we grab those so we can do a before and after? I'm just dragging, dropping the plugging on see, we got with this one that's that is good to go so we can now come in there and we could start tweaking everything maybe dio and advanced analysis which we won't cause that's gonna take a lot longer if it's doing a little bit of jitter you can take that down the smoothness maybe toe like forty to clean that up a little bit now we gotta muchmore fluid shot that's fitting in with the tone that we want the walking shot pretty much looks like we're almost on a dolly which is insane let's do before and after on that guy yeah, I have work stabilizer on both. Okay, before and after that's crazy. Okay. And try these days before it's ridiculous frigging technology. I love it. Uh, any questions? Warp stabilization? That's super easy, right? Yeah. Yeah. And this is all pretty straightforward. But this may be a question for stark. I'm noticing a little bit in the warp stabilisers sometimes there's like kind of that hes a little bit, but I think comes from the stabilization. Why does it appear that way that's coming from motion blur yeah, so we're getting a little bit of motion blur so as it's stabilizing since in reality, it's doing this, even with the reframing you're going get that. So you're doing this and you're getting a little bit of that motion blur happening from the camera moving when you do the warp state stabilisation instead of it. In reality, doing this now, it's staying right there, but the emotional are still happening. But it may be a way to shoot. Smartest like tio. Sorry. Hi. Higher, higher shutter. Exactly. Right we did. You could watch an episode. Laser guns. I think on we've purposefully used warp stabilizer to make something that just look really weird. The world flopping around him. So I actually moved around too much toe, actually mess with the warp stabilisers. Put that on there and it just that's crazy things. Yeah. To your surroundings. Yeah, and the motion blur to just make everything walkie because he's about to throw up so you can actually use it to your advantage to write. So color grading. Not a thing. I do it because I have to, but we can really quick go through what is usually sort of my process of doing it, I use matt used magic bullet looks and the reason I use that is because they offer a lot of tools in there to really sort of help you dial it in when you're not a colorist and you are working on your own you khun still tweak your image to get what you're looking for right now? I already have a great on here, so we'll just look at what it's doing before and after we shot and log so you can see how flat that's looking even all the leaves that are happening we're not having a ton of detail there, but we throw on the grade and all of a sudden everything's popping out at you so let's just go one by one what's happening here first thing up is curves, so curve adjustment, which you're messing with over here, you can see the contrast highlights mid tones and shadows and you're just adjusting those the preference so you come overto like tools and you bring in your curves and you start messing with it to sort of start balancing your image mid tones or like the gain of the image. Obviously, the mid tones it's exactly what sounds like highlights. I'll bring that up to make these leaves pop just a touch, but you don't want to bring it up too much to where you're blowing out your image shadows will bring that down a touch, balance it with the mid tones more shadow, more overall contrast and that's pretty much what I'm doing. I'm going through and messing with everything, finding the look I want, because, again, I'm not a colorist. I don't have a set thing that I'm gonna come in here, and I know for sure I'm gonna do exactly that. This image is going to look exactly like that. I wish somebody would have talked to me like that a few years ago because they're just so uncommon about color grading my stuff, and I get really frustrated because you're not. It really is a science doing this stuff it's insane what these guys do, all the power windows and when they really get in and pull things out of the color it's nuts. Ah lot of us aren't that, but we don't have a colors to work with because that could be pretty pricey, but getting in there and just, you know, toying with things, moving things around, seeing what they're doing and adjusting it to taste is perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with that, we move over to pop. This is basically like a gn sharpened mask, if you know what that is, it's, a former sharpening that's sharpening up the contrast that's just making everything. Sort of stand out a little bit more, making the edges of all that. Those contrast, he points a little sharper light flex I like a lot. You can't really see it that well here, so let me jack it up and show you what it's doing it sort of blooming out those shadow areas of sort of filling him in, taking the contrast down, I like to add a little bit of this because it feels a little filmic to me. A lot of times and film, you're not getting like a deep, deep, deep black, you usually are getting that from digital cameras, so I like tio, you know, flatten that out a little bit because it just feels more filming to me again. That's taste vignettes I always put on a very rare when I'm not using a vignette, it just brings the image together, it softens the edges. You can also use it to really punctuate what you're wanting your audience to look at so we could bring it in, maybe just on her actor shape it to fit him really well. If everything else is distracting, pump it up a touch and you're using it to guide your audience, says I, where you wanted three way color, we gotta shadows mid tones and highlights, so we're adding color to those areas in the shadows. Like most people do in pushing a little bit of blue to cool up those shadow areas, usually sometimes you'll push in the opposite again to taste it's the style it's what you're looking for is this a hot desert sort of scene which will probably push some red into those shadows something like this where I'm wanting it to feel more cool taking maybe just a touch of warmth into the mid tones same here I got color range the big difference between color range for me is you know, if you come to the shadows and you punch blue and for the color range it's ah it's messing with a lot of messing with a much larger range of things, but if you come into color range and you start adding that in its sort of dialing it into, uh, more of a finite area so it's just hitting really those shadow points I'm tweaking both just little tweaks as you can see as you go you're doing little tweaks after little tweaks and what's happening here is each one is affecting the image after the last, which is something you have to keep in mind so this right here is not affecting our image when we started right here this is affecting our image after the curves after the pop after life like so this is affecting our image where it is now bleach bypass? If you know what that is, it's, when they would actually you soak the film in a solution. What is the solution? That they saw the film? And you remember, actually, it might actually be bleach. I don't really remember what it wass way did it in film school, and I can't remember what it was now, but basically it's sucks a saturation out. It helps the contrast, so we're simulating that sort of look and then range saturation. I like using this because you are controlling the saturation for the highlights, the mid tones and the shadows so you can adjust all those independently. I'll just reset it and in the shadows, you could see you could just adjust it there, she would crank it up, see what it's doing, and then decide what you want it to dio I'll bring it down, see what the mid tones air doing, uh, with saturation, bring that into where you're looking for it. I don't think the highlights probably doing much of anything, and but then we end on our final look there, let's actually grade, I think I put it that's great, one of things we did, and so the proximity I had to go pretty far with that great, that was a really heavy grade that I ended up with because we didn't have lights were running guns so there was a lot of corrections to do it took a long time to do but what I'm wanting usually two d'oh is just sweeten I got it all in camera and I'm just going to sweeten pretty happy with this sort of party of five image that's happening here I got two people that knew that reference it sounded like so again we'll just toss on magic bullet and you don't have magic bullet uh you know there's a three roid color corrector there's curves there's everything inside of stark has a question free color ista because the three damn free calories so it's it's basically have it there you go so red giant has calorie stuff for free hillary says awesome has most of the stuff that we're doing in here, but instead of using the pop you'll just use on sharpened mask or sharpening depending on what you want so you can find all the same ideas inside the tools that you already have in whatever editor you're using it's just a matter of taking the ideas and applying them. The other thing that's really great about this is you can start somewhere so you can go through all these presets that they have especially if your brand new degrading say we like this look and then we could start building on top of that but again, this is pretty close to what I'm wanting, so I'm just going to toss on curves, and I'm just messing with everything to see exactly what I'm affecting doubt. The highlights are going to do very much and here's here's something. This happens a lot, so pushing the highlights too far and it's just doing really nasty things to the skin. I want to keep that smooth, but maybe bring it up to just make it pop just a little little bit, just making your pop, josh okay, so it's a little very, very subtle change, but you can see we're adding that contrast into the image or bring out the skin tones a little bit and maybe say, this is a female character and we're wanting to smooth everything out. We can add in cosmo, which is basically just finding the skin areas that looks weird, but you, khun, you confined the skin areas and it's just it's going to soften them. Can I see that that's obviously way too far, so I'm going to take that way down, fabio. So it's just moving out's kind of doing what you would do with a soft box or book light like we're showing in camera, so if we wanted to really smooth this out if it was an actress that we're trying to make super beautiful or whatever you would start with trying to get a camel is something like a book light and then move to something like this can gonna add arvin yet just way too much to start with I usually try to keep mine around the twenty area super subtle but really bringing everything in they usually jack everything up like crazy when I'm first creating to see exactly what it's doing instead of doing and little increments to start with and not fully seeing it really taking it is far as I can and seeing what the color is and then deciding what I want that color to be finding it and then taking it all the way down and then working it in cool I believe the highlights where they're at I'm an end with a little bit of saturation because the skin is a little too orange I'm going to bring that down bring that down just a touch, okay, but that's a really basic grade we took it too is as faras we wanted in frames all we were doing was tweaking and at the end and we have a really cheesy looking uh romantic scene we're seeing his love interest for the first time hey, speaking of so what color grading again, I'm not a colorist, but I do great all my stuff and you know you could do that too it's not that difficult it's a matter of just going in and doing things to taste start tweaking things little by little start with your contrast to start working out from there and then once you have your grade walk away, leave it for like a day or two come back and look at it hate it more than anything ever and then start tweaking I'm sure you know the great we just did I'll look at it tomorrow and be like I showed that that is the worst so proximity went through like three versions because once you leave you're just looking out for so long you're not seeing it how you should you got to step away I just come back same thing for the edit when you're editing as well you got to step away and come back and see what you have also another thing with editing eyes show it the fresh eyes there's this really weird thing that happens when you can watch the edit and think it's the greatest thing ever but then once you bring somebody in who hasn't seen it on day, watch it, you start cringing at moments that you didn't notice before so having fresh eyes come in when did they give you an opinion or not? Eyes really valuable? Did you have a okay, uh, lance miller wanted to know if you suggest using the automatic image stabilizer and premier like the one they have in final cut yeah, I use it all the time. That's what we were just using so yeah, but I I don't often leave it as is you put it in, you see what it's doing like it was a bit much on all the shots that we used it on so I would get in there and tweak it it's out of fifty I'll usually take it down to more like a twenty five thirty range, and then you'll want to do the the analyzing, you know, taking it a bit further, that would just take too long, really? How about dialling and start tweaking it until you get what you want, all right, zachary gardens, he said, what would be your process when co editing with another person ensuring you both agree on specific edits, edits and the film's output me personally, I would not coed it. I can't release that much control over what I'm doing, I'm not so I just started co writing and that was difficult for me and only really worked out because south warily, who I've been writing with it's, like we share a brain it's ridiculous eso it works really well. We have the exact same taste, but co editing I don't really see him because with editing there's so much finding it that's happening, I could see maybe passing scenes off if we were in a crazy deadline. But when I've done my own film again, that's the third writing phase on I don't really see myself co editing in that way. One more from pukey casella yes, who says let's say you filmed in ten a p and your composition isn't any p yes or no for scaling up the video? Uh, you can take it a little bit if you have to. I would only do it as an absolute last resort, but depending on the camera that you're using, if you're using something like a c one hundred two, three hundred epic anything like that, they have a lot more information in the image. So you do have a little bit of leeway to play with film riot episodes. We should have shown that when we cut into close ups, when I'm doing my standups, we have the wide shot, and then we cut in tighter that's that's just scaling up the image, we usually take it about what one twenty five um you start getting beyond that, and it doesn't work anymore. It starts getting ugly, but that's with a solid camera. When we used to use thie five d doing the same thing, you could tell it wasn't looking so hot when you started pushing it too far. So something like the sea one hundred could go a little further up into the one twenty ish range, something like a five d. You're only gonna get about one ten out of