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Colour Correction & Grading on a Mac

E

eforegg

Hi

We are in the process of completing a short film (roughly 12 min).

It was shot on canon XH-A1 at 1080i and it's being edited in FCP, captured in ProRES, .

We are at the stage of correcting a couple of shots for exposure and also thinking about grading. We're predominately using a mac book pro to finish off - 2.33 core2duo with 3 gig ram.

What would be the best tools to use? We've tried color (as we have FCS), which was our first choice but receive the error "graphics card isn't sufficient to render files at this size" I think the colour corrector in FCP seems to introduce too much noise (or maybe I dont use it properly, thats always a possibility).

I know we're probably pushing our hard ware to the extreme of it's capabilities however can anyone recommend other avenues or plug ins to use? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

regards

john
 
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Really anything you need to do should be possible with the built in CC tools of Final Cut. If you're trying to brighten underexposed footage you're always going to get noise, darkening overexposed footage could yield the same results.

If your exposure levels are way out of whack, and you can't do any reshoots, you're probably just going to have to find a happy medium and live with it not being perfect, because over or under exposed footage will always be missing picture data with a digital format, it's the nature of the beast.

Your best bet is to get all the shots of a given scene as closely matched as you can, then go back after you've matched all the shots that make up each scene to other shots of that scene and apply an overall look to the piece.
 
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Twiddle with travelling Luma mattes (Extra layer of the footage pushed way too bright with super extreme contrast used as a matte to limit a color correction effect. You can then blur with more control or do whatever effects you want to the matte to get the results you're looking for.
 
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Thanks for the tips guys. I'll persevere with the FCP CC tools, so where that takes us.

No doubt I'll post the results in the viewing room at some point in the future
 
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