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Final Cut Color Correction for Daylight film with Tungsten Lighting
Hey Guys,
I’m shooting a film in a couple weeks where I have to shoot Kodak 16MM (100 ISO) Daylight Color Reversal film indoors with tungsten lighting. Naturally this will make the footage orange, due to the tungsten lighting with daylight balanced film. Due to circumstances I can’t explain, I need to color correct the footage in final cut pro after its shot (I don’t have the option to use color conversion filters or gels on set). Does anyone who’s had experience with this or is good with the final cut color corrector know how to do this accurately? I’m pretty familiar enought with the corrector to play around with it and get a rough approximation of what it should look like, but I’m hoping theres a more methodical way I can just apply one correction to all the footage that would pretty accurately mimic the 80A filter. I know that professional telecine transfer houses can pretty much do this correction in a few seconds by pressing a button, so I’m pretty sure there’s an exact set of settings to get the correction right on – anyone know what it is?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Trevor Fernando
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16 Replies
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Trevor,
There is no ‘preset’ so to speak for this conversion as you’d want to set the levels differently for each shot. But, you should be able use the FCP color correcter to fix your problem and make it look OK.
Just apply a Color corrector, adjust it, click and copy the Color correcter in the filters section of that clip and paste it into either seperate clips on the timeline or all the bad clips in their bins. That way, any time you preview a clip before editing, it will have the CC already applied.
Why the heck did you do this to yourself!!! (OK, I had to say it)
Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Look around at this site:
https://www.powerretouche.com/White-balance_plugin_introduction.htm
I’ve used their Photoshop Wratten filter plug-in, and I know they have an
After Effects color correction plug-in. It’s possible that it will work with FCP,
or you can see what the RGB equivalent is and create a custom filter in FCP to apply
to your footage using the settings from the plug-in.
Ed -
Hey,
I didn’t want to make my post too long with why this has to happen but since you asked… Basically its a student project and we are required to shoot reversal 16mm for it. We want to shoot color and the only color reversal stock Kodak offers is 100 ISO daylight stock. Which means we’re locked into that slower, daylight film. We’re shooting inside a bar which doesn’t have any outside light coming in and being a bar, its fairly dark. The camera’s we’re using can only open up to a 2.5. So we’re going to have to throw as much light in there as we can and hope we can at least get up to a 2.8. If we throw an 80A filter on to convert for the tungsten lighting, we’ll lose a stop and a half, effectively reducing our film speed to something like 25 ISO. And if we used CTB gels on our lights instead of the filter on the camera, we’d lose intensity on our lights that we can’t afford to lose. So pretty much the only option I can see is to shoot it consistently that way and then correct it in one motion back to normal.
-Trevor
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Why not do a basic color correction pass when you go to telecine? Might cost more but would save you trouble in the long run.
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters -
I’m transferring the film at school. We have a basic machine that lets us do the transfer and brighten or darken a bit but we can’t color correct on it.
-Trevor
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Why not use the eye dropper in 3Way Color Corrector? Shoot a white card with the Tungsten filmand
digitize that with the rest of the footage, then go into color corrector and use the eye dropper on a
pure white source, and apply it to the white card tungsten footage. The rest of the footage should
correct to the pure white reference.
Ed -
While you are at it a Macbeth chart might be a good idea on your shoot.
Peter
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To test the eye dropper idea, I just played with some color reversal footage in final cut that I shot a couple weeks ago. Which eye dropper should I use? I tried to use the eye dropper on the “whites” dial of the 3-way corrector and selected a point of white on one of the actors t-shirts and it made the footage more orange…I tried it with the eye dropper on the lower portion of the corrector that isn’t attached to one of the 3 wheels and it just loaded the color i selected into the little box next to it. I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong or if I really need a pure white card or if this method doesn’t really work that accurately. Any ideas?
-Trevor
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I usually shoot a 10-step log grey scale chart on any scene I know I will need to correct when shooting video.Using a grey scale chart will allow you to use all three of the eye drop samples on each scene. It will be very fast and fairly easy to get a good rough color grade from your scenes without much trouble at all.
tom -
Tom’s got the idea of the century! I’ve had to do this a time or two myself.
Sometimes my camera guy doesn’t white balance the camera and I get green images or blue images. Thankfully, I found areas of the image that were supposed to be white and black. So I used the droppers to select these areas and the rest came right into balance! Beautiful!
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
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