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Advice on using color corrector 3-way to adjust excess chroma & excess luma
I’m new at this, so hopefully this makes sense, or if there is a better way, I’d like to know. I’m using Final Cut Pro 7.
One of the steps I use in post production is to turn on ‘both’ under ‘View-Range Check’ which I believe tells me if the video is broadcast safe (green check mark) or not (yellow exclamation point). I saw a tutorial on this, and thought it would be a good thing to start doing on my videos.
If I have a exclamation point, I’ve been applying the ‘color corrector 3-way’ video filter to the clip, then bump down the levels on the whites until the green checkmark appears.
I shoot a lot of low light events where there is a small area, like a candle or a light on the wall that triggers the exclamation point. Should I still bump the white levels down in this situation to get the green checkmark? If I do, the rest of the frame which may already by kind of dark, gets even darker. Or is it ok to leave it be, and only be doing this when there is something like the sky or something taking up more of the frame that is too bright.
Just wondering what is widely acceptable.
Thanks for any advice.
-Nayr -
2 Replies
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If you after broadcast legals you’d better use another filter – broadcast safe which primary function is to clip excessive levels of white, black, and saturation.
Sony PMW-EX3, Canon Mark II 5D, FCS3 in Moscow
http://www.mokaeff.com -
You can do that, I often use it as a quick fix, but you could likely also be doing more with the controls in the 3-way color corrector as well. While bringing down the candle flame to 100 IRE on your waveform monitor is a good start, you could also probably raise up the dark mid-tones a little bit, and adjust the blacks. Then tweak the chroma overall.
If this video is for broadcasdt, the 100 IRE limit is holy. If this is just for home viewing or internet, some folks will give it a little lattitude to go over 100, if it is just the one little point source in the image.
The 3-way has powers many people never tap. You could use the little eyedropper tool to select just the candle flame, and have color and level correction apply only to the flame, for example. This may or may not require some masking, but that’s not hard to do. I had to change a woman’s shirt color one time using this method, it wasn’t hard at all.
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