7D/5D color grading in FCPX

[Craig Seeman]

I highly recommend Color Grading Cetnral’s FREE FCPX grading tutorials. Nearly an hour and half of free training should get you going.
https://www.colorgradingcentral.com/tutorials/

And if you want to move on to more advanced features such as using curves you may want to buy their Color Finale plugin.

[Flora Lloyd]

Thanks Craig,

I downloaded Color Finale and it would constantly crash my machine. I’m working on a Macbook Pro with 16 gigs of ram.

[Craig Seeman]

Perhaps you’re not on Yosemite (10.11.x)?

You can use the color board and follow their tutorials for that in the meantime.

I believe their specs are in the FAQ
https://www.colorgradingcentral.com/support/

What are the minimum system requirements?
Apple Mac (2011+)
OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” officially supported
OpenCL 1.2 support. For a list of OpenCL 1.2 cards click here.
Final Cut Pro X 10.1 or later
4 GB of RAM

[Bill Davis]

Hi Flora.

One small issue is that nothing of significance in either of your two camera shots reads as neutral.

This is part of the reason for using a professional SLATE at the beginning of scenes – slates typically have dependable white color blocks that you can use to get a starting point for a color balance under the lighting each camera is exposed to.

A couple of “quick fix” possibilities is if you can find a shot where the talent’s face is in close up – and try to grab a white level off the whites of his eyes – or maybe his teeth – but It’s not at all as dependable since those can be “off white” as well – – (stuff like exposure to jaundice can yellow the whites of the eyes and early childhood exposure to some old style antibiotics can leave people with yellowed teeth – to name just two amongst a zillion other possiblities – but it’s at least a start.

If none of that is possible, you can call up your Vectorscope and take a reading off the “flesh tone” marker = (the diagonal line in the upper right quadrant) and look at whether it’s obviously skewed – but again, it’s MUCH harder without any pure content in the scene and without a white reference shot by both the cameras under the on-set conditions. Plus your set is all pretty warm in terms of the colors in play = and your talent looks like he skews a bit “ruddy” – which can take a bit of work to address in post.

This is kinda why the era of “everybody can shoot – everybody can produce” leads to so many post hassles.

What you’re facing would have been MUCH easier to correct if whoever shot this had a higher level of technical production competence and given you the tools IN the shot to provide you with a color balance baseline.

But it’s the world we live in.

Good luck.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Flora Lloyd]

I’m running Yosemite 10.10.5 and have the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB which says Open CL 1.1 support, but not 1.2, that could possibly be the crash issue? Could I run an external card to get around this?

[Flora Lloyd]

Thanks for the advice Bill, right now it’s a learning process for me with editing so any feedback is appreciated.

[Craig Seeman]

[Flora Lloyd] “NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB which says Open CL 1.1”

Cards and Open CL
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M says CL 1.2 so that should be fine.

See Color Finale keeps crashing FCP X. There are some things that can conflict with it so you should send them the crash log.
https://www.colorgradingcentral.com/support/

In the meantime you should watch their Free FCPX tutorial which just uses the built in color board.

[Bill Davis]

Just saw that I wrote the skin tone vector on a vector-scope is upper right when of course it’s upper left.
Momentary lapse of reason.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Tony West]

Flora, I think that the original shots looked a little orange to me on his skin tones.

In most cases there is a dominate color that puts the shot off. Sometimes it’s red or yellow, I will often go to the color board and drag the highlights over to that color and pull it down.

In this case I wanted to see what X would do on it’s own with a simple “color balance”

It did a pretty good.

To me, the X color balance left a bit of a blue tone that I took out by dragging a color correction filter on top and pulling that blue down a bit and a little less red.

I pulled a little of the saturation down a bit.

and brought down the blacks a little.

Once I got the WS where I wanted it I pasted the attributes to the TS. I’m sure others may have different techniques but that’s my 2 cents : )

[Flora Lloyd]

Thank you Tony, you’re input is very helpful! I will follow your suggestion above, this is where I got to yesterday with my correction, which probably is still a bit warm compared to yours.

I did something similar to your suggestion, but then also used the RT Color Balance which I found really easy to use. I find the color correction a little overwhelming because of the options available, and after watching the tutorials I have a much better understanding of what each scope is used for and how it can help in your correction process.