Pleasantville effect

[Brendan Gibbons]

There is an option inside the colour board to choose a colour selection with an eyedropper.

For instance you could choose the item you wanted to keep with the eyedropper.

Hit the right pointing arrow to enter colour board.

Now at the bottom of the screen choose “outside mask”.

Now go to the Saturation tab at the top, and bring the left had global saturation slider all the way to the bottom.

Hopefully now you will see you chosen item in colour and everything else black and white.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Brendan

[Mykolas Gudelis]

Thank you Brendan,

It does help! How accurate it works its another question of which I am not too concerned here but wanted to know if in principle the “old” FCP technique was applicable (and how) to “X”. Now I see it does.

Thank you very much!

[Brendan Gibbons]

Couple of shortcut keys you may find helpful…

Hold down Option to remove from colour selection

Hold down shift to add to colour selection.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Mykolas Gudelis]

Thats cool! Thanks a lot. Adding to my list of FCPX shortcuts:)

[Don Smith]

Great tip. Thank you.

Thinking further.. Can you use the Image Mask (instead of the eyedropper) and apply a Gaussian Blur outside or inside the mask? I’ve tried this method and it’s clearly not The Way. I’m clearly missing a step.

While I’ve got your eye let me thank you and the others here for this forum. It’s just terrific. It’s here that I also picked up the trick of creating the new Text object in Motion 5 to use as an Adjustment Layer in FCPX. Wow. I even figured out how to make the Adjustment Layer contain different looks. It takes a process a little different from Auditioning video clips, but it’s easily done.

With all the talk of switching, I booted Premiere Pro yesterday (I own the latest Adobe Suite that includes it) and while it’s surely a good workhorse, I’m now spoiled by the power I see in FCPX. Same with Avid. A good workhorse but no Secretariat and I speak from years of experience on Avid.

NewsVideo.com

[Brendan Gibbons]

No, you are not missing a step…By using the shape mask inside the color parameter of the video inspector, as you have gathered, only allows you to control the color correction that you apply in the color board.

You can try duplicating you clip in timeline, and stack it on top.

Apply the effect called “mask” from the keying category to the top layer.

Adjust the bottom clip by maybe adding a blur filter and darkening the color if required.

Now by going back to your top layer, you can adjust the “mask” effect, by adjusting the “roundness” and “feather” parameters to taste.

Remember if you drag a slider (eg roundness) all the way to what appears the maximum value, you can always go way further by dragging right on the numerical value to increase further.

Cheers,

Brendan