[Mike Imam]

Thanks – will definitely try the loose mask technique first. I also thought of a possible editorial solution, but it’s not elegant. Feels like I’m crowbarring it in – something I’m sure anyone who’s done editing feels at some point. I’ll see how the masking goes and use my editorial as a fallback…

[Mike Imam]

Wow, not the best news, but I certainly appreciate the help from both of you.

Walter, I thought of the masking solution but wanted to see if there was a way to avoid laboriously keying out the background. Looks like I may be forced to do that as it’s it’s the only way to ensure the levels match perfectly – unfortunately I’m not a pro with color correction and it’s quite a complex endeavor, so I’ll have to dig into the skill set I’m equipped with.

Thanks for the support! If anyone thinks of any clever solutions in the interim please let me know.

Best,
Mike

[Mike Imam]

Walter, Dave – thanks for the tips. Some feedback:

– I tried both Color Stabilizer and Color Finesse but neither seem to be doing the trick.

– Walter, as per your suggestion, here are the two stills:

The goal here is to get frame 1 to look like frame 2.

As you’ll see in the pics, the shot is on a tripod and is static (no panning or camera movement whatsoever), which is why I feel like there could be a simple solution. It hard to see as there is heavy jpeg compression on the images, but a lot of the detail that is present in frame 2 is lost in frame 1 because my shutter speed was lower in the first frame. This is all very evident in HD and the difference is much more dramatic than it appears to be above.

One thought: since the background does not move and outside of a balloon there is very little movement in the shot, is there a way to simply “grab” the color/contrast/exposure values from frame 2 and apply them to frame 1? I.e. I’m looking for a way to copy and paste said values. There must be a way to do this, no? I’m not locked to After Effects as I also have Photoshop and Final Cut Pro in my workflow, but not sure if either of those would help at all (never mind that this is an AE board).

Any additional suggestions?

Thanks again!
Mike

[Mike Imam]

Awesome – thanks for all the help!

[Mike Imam]

Thanks Dave – appreciate the help. I failed to mention that this is an animated music video, so it wasn’t using shot footage at all (did 100% of the animation in AE itself using Illustrator graphics). In this case, I assume the 4:2:2 chroma subsampling is done by default once I export? Could you briefly explain what exactly this is, so I’ll understand it better once I do export from shot footage? I use my Canon T2i as a primary camera, so should I not be converting these to ProRes for RTE in Final Cut (bit off topic) as I’ll lose this information?

My audio sample rate should be 48kHz, wich is fine (it’s an option).

Thanks for the tip on MP3s in AE. I find my workflow to be easier when I don’t have to export my music videos from AE then export again from Final Cut, so I’ll often just throw my audio track in AE itself.