Hello everybody! Im in the deep pits of color grading! I started filming a couple of month ago and when I start something I get all eaten up by it, obsessed some would say! Now I got to the grading part, I realize its really important! I also realize its nothing you get really good at over the night. What I wonder is if you guys and girls have any tips, videos, reading.....anything that will help me understand instead of just guessing and pulling levers in Premiere 5.5 pro. Thanks for all help!
Quick tip... Balance your shadows, highlights, and midtones first... In that order... Match all of your clips so they match. Don't worry about a creative look first. Just get all the clips consistent. Make sure you use your waveform monitor and vectorscope to make sure the colors are broadcast safe. Then go back and do the creative work...
I'm reading the "Color Correction Handbook" (http://www.amazon.com/Color-Correction-Handbook-Professional-Techniques/dp/0321713117/) these days and after having read half of it I can say it helped me very much to understand things better. So if you like reading maybe you should take a look at this book. And the next book - "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction" - is booked at our university library for me so I'm checking it out soon.
Not exactly an educational source but... IIRC, there's a great featurette in Se7en (the 2-disc set) that goes through the whole world of the Colorist. It's a long time since I watched it, but it was a real eye-opener.
Yeh are there any good proper tutorials or atricles on line, that really explains the process ? right now i just fiddle with the colours until it sort of looks kind of cool but im not really doing it right or learing much from it, most of the youtube tutorials online consist of other people doing this same thing to footage from there Call of duty idiot games. anything out there from professionals, its a different field but on that creative cow website there was a really good step by step video tutorial explaining how to use blender (it was still over my head) but somthing like that out there? thanks by the way i use sony vegas pro 9 as my editing software
Hey Johnny glad to see the film making bug has caught you! I was in a very similar position a couple years ago and people just said "watch tutorials..." In the process of figuring all this out I found an awesome page that summarizes a bunch of color-grading techniques. Check it out! http://thevfinder.com/?p=259
