Match Color – how and best way?

[Craig Howard]

Take a look at Color Matching in SpeedGrade.

Great little video tutorial on Adobe TV

Craig Howard
Shooter Film Company
Auckland
New Zealand

Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro Production Premium Suite
Windows 7-64 bit:Assus P6T Deluxe Mob, 24 GB BM SDI Decklink, . HD Workflows

[Ht Davis]

I have a multicam shoot, multiple angles, multiple clips. Speedgrade isn’t an option because I haven’t been able to get it to open.

Depending on what you’re actually trying to match, the fix changes. Speedgrade was great before, but it was extremely limited. I prefer AE. It has a multitude of methods for matching, whether it be luma\chroma, or masking and swapping. And, because photoshop can also handle video, you can use photoshop for single color replacement the same way you would for any photo, applying it to the entirety of a clip or set of video clips.

If luma\chroma is your problem, maybe you’re like me, and you shoot with many different models\brands of cameras on low budget projects and have to grade multiple angles. This method works when the two have some crossover (i.e. an object or area of high, low, and mid that matches). It works even better if there’s a scene where you have a balance card in the shot (you can shoot the card to balance a shot and use premiere, but if not, you can use similar objects and areas in AE).
——Fix:
Correct a main angle and render it. We will call this Color A. Now… …Line up your multi cam if you want, some wait until later and just use proxies with corrected color. The process is very much the same.
At this point, I’ll try to follow both, so… …For Premiere Line up your multcam, then select the clips you wish to correct, each in turn, and replace it with a comp. It will open in AE. You can make it into a new comp. You will do this for each clip you want to correct, but don’t worry it gets faster afterward. I suggest you just save the AE project, and do it for each one.
If you’re going the second route, open each full media in an AE project (this method allows you to use a single project file). For each video you want to correct, create a comp by right clicking and creating a comp from it. Save the project.
Now we get into the correction. With the first method, you’ll need to open each project, with the second, you will be able to just repeat the changes for each comp.
Import the already corrected video into the project, but leave it outside comps. Open the video in a panel, and drag it outside the other panels ( you want two panels open) On the video layer in a chosen comp, a video you wish to correct, add the Composition Color Matcher from the Composition wizard box, and open the video in the second panel (again, you want to see the corrected video and the uncorrected). Now look at the effect controls on the uncorrected video, and look at the Composite color matcher. It has two Luma\chroma settings. In the first one, you want the whites, grays, blacks (highlight, mids, and shadows) from your uncorrected video, so use the dropper to select those. In the second set of values, you want to select the same or similar areas from the corrected shot. One will be adjusted to match the other. You can render a proxy to use in Premiere, and afterward, you can render the full video for use in final production (I’ve gotten better quality from using full size files, but with better equipment, you’ll get similar results either way).