Do you guys use color curves?

Yes. A huge part of delivering a professional looking video is correcting the color, contrast, brightness, etc. in post-production. I would say that very rarely does the image captured on the sensor of a video camera wind up in the finished film without undergoing some form of post-production color correction.
 
every clip? so you don't apply the color curve when your all done with editing?

You really can't. Exposure may need tweeking, different cameras have different needs as to what they bring to the table, white balance corrections may be necessary.

When that's all done (with my workflow) , color grading is done, but color correction is made as uniform as possible as you go, clip by clip, with color wheels while making sure you are within broadcast limits.

I'm far from an expert, so take that with the explanation.
 
Every single clip or photo usually needs some correction. Some may require just a tiny bit of tweaking while you can spend hours on others.

And as Vader said, you usually have to do each clip separately as each will have their own requirements.

Applying something to the whole finished movie will give you the same relative variance between each clips as when they hadn't been touched.
 
OP... I do both SHOT by SHOT correction, to bring each shot to the same relative quality, brightness, etc. After that, I do a a final pass of curves for LOOKs across the top of all the clips.

here is my work flow.

Edit -> Finish and lock edit -> shot by shot color correcting -> color for look and feel of entire film.

to elaborate, the first pass is NOT to tweak the look, I don't crush blacks or anything like that, I just even things up so that all the shots look about the same, maybe a little bland. If there is something like a blow out for the shot, etc I can mask the area and "spot" treat problems, but never pushing it to a particular look.

Once Im done with that, Ill add a new curve over the TOP of ALL the clips, this is where the magic happens and the look and feel is enhanced, it helps to make all the clips look like "part of the same thing" there is a certain amount of going back to the original clips and tweaking the curves for them, but not a lot.

Hope this helps
 
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Wheatgrinder just explained it all :)

But to anwser the question: I hardly use color curves (I should experiment on that!), but I use color wheels and sometimes luma curves.
 
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