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Color Correction in Symphony
I have recently moved from doing color correction in Final Cut to doing color correction in Symphony at work and was wondering if anyone could help me transition to an effective, quick workflow for correcting my sequences on this new platform.
One thing that I appreciate about Final Cut (and Photoshop too for that matter) is that color correction is applied via filters and that provides an easy understanding of the order in which operations are applied to my clips. On the Symphony are there any rules governing the order in which different corrections are applied? In dealing specifically with legalizing luminance values I would like to use the gain and setup controls (or preferably the curves panel) to set individual white and black levels for each clip, and then find a Symphony equivalent to the Broadcast safe filter in Final Cut to stack on top of the individual color corrections to reign in any stray pixels. What is the best way to do this? If I simply activate the clip low and clip high to 16 and 235 (or use the levels or curves panel to the same effect) will that do the trick or would it apply the clip before the gain and setup corrections and thus potentially clip far too much? Would it work better to perform individual corrections in source mode and then use clip controls, levels, or curves in program mode?
On an unrelated note, when adjusting gain and setup, everyone I know does so at the master panel where adjusting either parameter affects the entire spectrum of luminance values. Is there anything to be, uh, gained by adjusting your gain settings in the highlights panel to prevent your adjustment from affecting your black levels and your setup in the shadows panel to not affect your white levels?
Any guidance you can offer is much appreciated,
NYCR
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1 Reply
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The specific order of how the color correction operators are applied is specified somewhere in the small color correction manual that comes with symphony.
To set your white and black point you can use setup and gain. To reign in stray values you can set up a downstream clip which is accesible outside of CC module, somewhere in settings (I think under “video”).
Regarding the use of highlight range vs. master range, you can adjust highlights only to bring highlights down. The thing to remember is that you are manipulating only the higher range as specified by the three range curves. If you pull highlights down too low you will start seeing (un)wanted results.
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