Sweetening image

[Jon Zanone]

Are you talking about using PShop to rotoscope (coloring/adjusting each individual frame of the scene) or a general lightening / darkening of the scene? You can certainly rotoscope clips using PShop from the Avid.

Jon

“So you want to throw out the old you – but the old you is old enough to know it won’t make it better”
Del Amitri – “Make it Better”

[Carlos E. martinez]

I am aware of the many things you can do using Color Correction in Avid. But you can’t single out specific areas you want to work on.

Please do not take my words literally, in the sense that Photoshop is the name of the tool you can use in FCP to do that (he may be wrong on that), but it seems a fact that you can do such a fine correction.

For instance I have some faces that are a bit dark, but to brighten them up I will wash out some already sunny areas.

On another case I have a stage with some very bright lights in the background which would be great to darken down in order to correct the foreground, which is darker. If I could single out a thin horizontal area for the lights, I could do a lot on the rest.

[Tae]

You can do this in Avid. Duplicate the clip, throw an animatte on the top one over the area you want. Soften the edges, lighten the clip and BOOM, there you go.

I’ll say I think it’s a much better feature in avid, because FCP’s garbage mattes are exactly that, garbage. It’s one of the things that keeps me from switching.

[Carlos E. martinez]

Now we are talking.

Please forgive my probably primary questions:

1) How do you duplicate the clip?

2) How do I proceed to make the animatte?

My guess is this procedure works better when the camera is static, or the borders might be visible.

Is there a way to make a graduated area, like on a sky or clearer area?

[Don Logan]

1) How do you duplicate the clip? a: CTRL D to dupe, CTRL Y or U will give you a second layer of video, can’t remeber which, one is video the other audio. patch V1 to V2.

2) How do I proceed to make the animatte? a: paste duped clip on second video layer an apply animate effect. Select the area you wish to change by using any number of animate tools. Then color correct.

My guess is this procedure works better when the camera is static, or the borders might be visible a: static = less work indeed.

[Fred Williams]

You are probably referring to secondary color correction and no, Avid Xpress Pro HD do not have secondary color correction but the higher end Avids do.

[David Braswell]

Since the original poster mentioned Express Pro, I should point out that it doesn’t have Animatte. (at least my XPro HD doesn’t) Another road to take maight be to create a high contrast matte in Photoshop and gradiate or blur the edges to soften the transition from original to corrected footage.