Video Look

[Mike Clasby]

While not the look you want, Filip Vandueren’s tutorial, “Using Curves to Simulate bleach Bypass”, should with tweaking of the individual r,g,b histograms let you get exactly what you want.

https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/vandueren_filip/color_timing/index.html

[Filip Vandueren]

Have you allready shot your footage?

It was probably shot with a polarizing filter in front of the lens:
This is normally advised against, because when you pan the camera, you get dark areas that move through the sky.
You see that happening in the panos.

There’s also some additional masks to create a vignette look.

I think it will be very hard to achieve this effect without top quality footage to start with.
I also would keep the levels in check. Because if you have white areas that are over-exposed, you’ll never get them toned down in post.

You can try the method in my tutorial, but experiment with different transfer modes. I used screen, but using Multiply or Hard Light can give you a whole nother look.

if you have some footage, can you post a link of a fragment or just a still ?

[Chris Smith]

This is a standard tool used all the time in film transfer called “Power Windows” all commercials and music videos use them for subtle effect that you don’t directly notice, but a lot of the times (like in this Yamaha spot) they are used dramatically for sky darkening. A power window is a feathered shape that gives the DaVinci another layer of color correction within that shape. In final transfer, we will often use up to 15 power windows in one shot!

So I have created simple power window nodes in Shake, but in AE, it’ll need a little more work.

What a power window truly does is give you additional color correction control whithin a shape so here’s how it would be done in AE:

Have your base footage layer. Color correct it however you wish. Since AE doesn’t have any “good” color correction tools for video internally let’s just say it’s “Curves” that did all the tweaking.

Now to make it true Davinci power windows, we would need an AE tool called “Compound Curves” which would only have the curves effect work on where we gave it a mask (like SHake has on every node!). But it don’t. So we will have to be inconvenienced a bit and copy the footage layer with the curves on it. In the Duplicate (Which should be on the top layer) Create a feathered mask shape. Let’s make it the mask that will “Protect” the color correction you have. So if it is a shot of a guy on a dirt bike, draw an oval around the guy. Now feather the mask heavily (like 100 or so). But you will not see a change because you have masked something over a copy of itself.

Now for the magic. Go back to the bottom layer (your original) and go into the curves and drop the RGB gamma and crush in the blacks a little. Viola! Your sky and surrounding area just darkened. But better yet you have full control. Use the same curves to tweak it’s color or do whatever you wish.

In this scenario we had to copy the color correction and modify it to see a change. However in a real DaVinci or in the Shake node, all you have to do on the second layer of correction is just offset what you want different from zero (no correction). Where as here we are offsetting from the full correction.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com