Question about matching shots in color grading.

[harmonica44]

Some of my shots are a bit more or less exposed than others. Such as wanting to change the aperture to a shallow DOF when switching from a master shot, to a close up. I tried resetting the ISO as best I could to get the same exposure to the new aperture setting, to match the previous shot.

However, not every shot matches in a scene, exposure wise. But how do I grade them too exactly? If I turn down the brightness, actors' hair becomes darker, even if the exposure now matches. Certain things like that become darker. If I turn down the contrast to get the hair brightness back, the image then becomes just as bright as before, and does not match. It seems I cannot get the image darker, without it bringing the darker parts too black, such as hair or clothes.

Any thoughts on how to bring down the brightness without it effecting the contrast? Thanks.

 

[GuerrillaAngel]

Here's a hint from an experienced editor: It is sometimes impossible to make everything match exactly so a third element is added to unite all the clips in the scene and fool the audience. It can be a tint, the introduction of a measure of grain, or other image manipulations . . .

 

[chilipie]

Brightness and contrast are very heavy-handed tools for grading. Because they affect the whole image, it can be difficult to adjust a shot with much finesse. There is certainly a time and a place to use them, but it's rare that differently lit shots can be matched with one universal adjustment.

Instead, try using your lift/gamma/gain or shadow/mid/highlight controls to adjust different areas of the image, e.g. use the gain or highlight control to bring down the brightest parts of the image without crushing the darkest shadows.

Perhaps if you posted some screenshots of two or three of the shots you're trying to match we could give you some more pointers.

 

[Will Vincent]

Using proper grading tools give a lot more control than the limited toolset built into NLEs and the like.

 

[WalterB]

You need to understand how grading works.
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Correction-Video-Second-Edition/dp/0240810783

Than you will see why brightness/contrast are the wrong tools.

Like said above: you need a tool that lets you manipulate highlights, midtones and shadows seperately.

But honestly, this is caused by changing your exposure during shooting, without knowing how to preserve exposure.
There must be an app in this list that can tell you what you ISO should be when you change your aperture:
http://appcrawlr.com/ios-apps/best-apps-aperture-and-shutter-speed
(I don't use them: my phone is dumb and my camera shows histrogram and zebras and the ones I rent show waveforms.)

 

[harmonica44]

Okay thanks. Unfortunately though, we want to meet a deadline for film festivals and will not have time to order and learn a new program. However I will order that program or something equivalent for my next project. It's just we already missed last years festival deadlines to improve the movie, but we do not want to miss another one, and have to set a deadline, in order to get it done, and move on to a bigger better project coming up.

I wanted to post screen shots, but the others will not let me upload to youtube yet, even though hardly anyone will really see it. But I think I found a possible solution and that is using 'curves'. If I pull the line down in curves from the top right, the image gets darker, without the dark areas being effected. The image does not look more faded by doing this... but I showed it to others and they say they cannot tell the difference unless they look at two shots, side by side.

So I will test it out on other TVs to see if it's the same, but it may be a possible solution. I will get a program like that for next time. I might have some time to order it now, and will see if someone I know can help with that, before the deadline. Thanks.

 

[WalterB]

How long is the short and how many shots? And when is the deadline?

BTW, when you read the book I suggested and get Colorista II (to name something) you can do simple grades in Premiere Pro next time.
Or see if Reolve lite can run on your computer.
But that's for the future.

 

[pictureplanet]

It is possible you just can't match it. There is surely a degree of subjectivity to color grading. Scopes help like hell, but you may perceive values differently based on the scene.

I usually start with exposure, move into contrast and then balance the shot. I make adjustments out from there depending on the desired look, or problem.

 

[harmonica44]

It's quite a few shots in one scene mainly. The due date is by September 1st.

I am color correcting in Premiere Pro. Is 'Exposure' the same thing as 'Equalize', in Premiere?

 

[Sweetie]

I found your problem...

I am color correcting in Premiere Pro

Actually, while you can fudge through it in PP, it's a bad choice.

 

[SixOhThree]

Unfortunately though, we want to meet a deadline for film festivals and will not have time to order and learn a new program.

DaVinci Resolve Lite is free to download and pretty powerful.

Harmonica44, I can tell you are hard working and dedicated to filmmaking. With all due respect though, do you ever think you're biting off more than you can chew? I'm a new user here but this seems to be a recurring thing every time I visit these boards. You ask a question and then ignore the advice you're given because of time constraints. I completely understand that you need to scramble during production but you're always scrambling.

I honestly mean no offense. I've been in a similar position where I needed to find shortcuts and ended up hating the final result of those shortcuts.

 

[Will Vincent]

this seems to be a recurring thing .... You ask a question and then ...

things go horribly wrong.



Welcome to an h44 thread.

 

[WalterB]

I found your problem...

Actually, while you can fudge through it in PP, it's a bad choice.

It's a bad choice when you're clueless and toolless.
With Colorista II I get pretty decent results in Premiere Pro.
But you need to know the basics and you need to know how to read scopes and waveforms.

DaVinci Resolve Lite is free to download and pretty powerful.

Harmonica44, I can tell you are hard working and dedicated to filmmaking. With all due respect though, do you ever think you're biting off more than you can chew? I'm a new user here but this seems to be a recurring thing every time I visit these boards. You ask a question and then ignore the advice you're given because of time constraints. I completely understand that you need to scramble during production but you're always scrambling.

I honestly mean no offense. I've been in a similar position where I needed to find shortcuts and ended up hating the final result of those shortcuts.

Your insights serve you well...

H44 has been scrambling since 2011 when his first or second question was: is there a shortcut to become an established director...?

PS.
He first needs to findout whether or not Resolve will work on his computer.

 

[harmonica44]

Okay thanks. I will have a look at Da Vinci Resolve Lite. I know I am scrambling a lot, but I keep ending up being the guy who never gets anything done as pointed out on here before, and I need to learn to get things done faster. The people I have helped with on their projects get them done in only a few months, or less, and I need to learn to do that, otherwise they don't get done.

I need to learn to meet my own deadlines and meet goals. It's normal not to be satisfied though, I mean a lot of directors are never completely satisfied and wish they had done more, so I think it's just a normal feeling. However, others accept that and just decided to call their projects finished by a certain amount of time worked on it, so I need to do that to, and stop being such a perfectionist perhaps. It's good to make it as good as can be and keep on seeing what you can do, but it gives the cast and crew a bad impression when it takes a year to finish, and in the end people are still telling you, more could be done. It's good being told though, cause then you consider your options. I will get Resolve and see what I can do, in the meantime. Thanks for all the advice and help, I don't mean to ignore it. I want to do as much as I can, but I also do not want to be the guy who never gets anything done either. I have even been told by my fellow filmmakers I worked with on it, that if they left me in total charge of the movie, it would take years to get finished. They may have a point. But I will take the advice and try it out.

Thanks.

 

[WhiteOpus]

Harmonica44, I can tell you are hard working and dedicated to filmmaking. With all due respect though, do you ever think you're biting off more than you can chew? I'm a new user here but this seems to be a recurring thing every time I visit these boards. You ask a question and then ignore the advice you're given because of time constraints. I completely understand that you need to scramble during production but you're always scrambling.

I honestly mean no offense. I've been in a similar position where I needed to find shortcuts and ended up hating the final result of those shortcuts.

I agree with SixOh here...it seems like you take on too many projects with too little time to complete them successfully. You could make fifty shitty pizzas or one really great, memorable one.

As far as matching shots, I'm pretty new to color correcting & grading but I generally use the Fast Color Corrector on Premiere Pro (specifically the white balance eyedropper & shadow/midtone/highlight sliders) because it's fast (who would have thought?) and easy to use. I then use the RGB Curves to make sure color tones are matching up. Both the Fast Color Corrector and the RGB curves should always be used with the reference monitor (YC waveform for the FCC and RGB parade/Vectorscope for the RGB Curves) because you can't trust your eyes to get perfect color. Hope this helps!

 

[Sweetie]

It's a bad choice when you're clueless and toolless.
With Colorista II I get pretty decent results in Premiere Pro.
But you need to know the basics and you need to know how to read scopes and waveforms.

It's not the scopes or waveforms that are the issue with PP, it's the lack of color grading tools that exist within PP (like the node structure) that help you turn a clusterf*** of a job in PP into something easily manageable chunks in software like Resolve.

I need to learn to get things done faster.
I need to do that to, and stop being such a perfectionist perhaps.
if they left me in total charge of the movie, it would take years to get finished
it gives the cast and crew a bad impression when it takes a year to finish

I think I get where you're coming from. You need to step back and gain some perspective.

For most people (yeah ok, for me), color grading is hard to do. Cinematography is hard to do. Writing is hard to do. Editing is hard to do. Post sound is hard to do. Production sound is hard to do.... and so on..... Each of these disciplines takes a fair while to master and I've seen you bounce between them over the last year or so. While there is nothing wrong in learning each and every part of filmmaking, you do need to leave yourself enough time and resources to learn each subject. At the rate you bounce between each, at least from what I see, you barely gain even a cursory understanding of the topic before being pulled in another direction and then back again. It's a vicious circle.

You're at a point where your desire is larger than your ability. You want to do more and better work than you're capable of. That's actually a good thing, though you need to let your ability get there.

Last but not least. Who gives a horses a** how long it takes? It'll take as long as it takes. Over time as you get better at each task, your speed will improve. I think you also need to learn to say no. Filmmaking is collaborative. Meaning it takes multiple people doing a variety of tasks to get a finished film. You're letting people pull you in directions that don't suit you to due to your desire to be involved in more productions. Pick a path (preferably one that is in demand) and get good at that. After some time, you become the best at what you do. People will come to you.

Edit: Learn to Delegate. Learn the love the phrase. "I love hard work.... I can sit back and watch it for hours"

 

[harmonica44]

Okay thanks. I have put out adds asking for colorists and sound designers and editors and what not, but have not gotten any responses. Plenty of people have responded to the add wanting to act or do camera work, but I tell them that the movie has already been shot. No one is responding who wants to do post production jobs and it's been months.

So if cast and crew keep asking when is it going to be done, should I just say it will be done when it's done, and leave it at that? Or will this maintain a poor relationship with them? I want to keep my relationship with them, a good one, so that they will want to work with me again on something else, but I do not feel that they will want to, if it takes me months or over a year to finish a project. It just gives them a bad impression, like 'this guy takes forever, he doesn't know what he's doing'.

 

[WhiteOpus]

It just gives them a bad impression, like 'this guy takes forever, he doesn't know what he's doing'.

it sounds like the people you're working with don't have much of a clue either. It might be a good idea to let them know WHY it's taking so long, other than because you can't find the professionals you need to do post work. I'd also make sure that the rest of the cast/crew knows, BEFORE any shooting or pre-production starts, that you are only able to play one role in the production in order to get the best results (instead of being spread too thin to make ANY of the work shine). If I were trying to maintain the relationship, one of the first things on my mind would be to explain to them that they were unprepared from the start which makes for a pretty rocky path throughout the entire production. I'd mention that it isn't anyone's fault but that communication and preparation needs to be rock solid before even starting shooting next time. You can't polish a turd, sometimes you just have to move on.

 

[harmonica44]

Well I did tell them that, but then they make comparisons like how it takes other producers of their own projects much faster.

Aside from not being able to polish a turd, that is exactly why I feel like moving on, but now I am told to learn new color grading software first, and take as long as it takes. Well in PP, using curves, I have gotten almost all the color to match good enough. Not 100% but enough that you will have to look hard to see the difference, Accept for the mastershot, which just looks too bright, and lit differently, so I will keep working at that and get new software. Does each shot need to match exactly? Like what if the contrast in the eyes or in the hair is a little darker from one shot to the next, will people notice if it's only a little?

I was going to get magic bullet in the future though, but is Da Vinci resolve better? Well after this project, I have one more coming up, and it's the biggest one yet, but after that, perhaps I will tell everyone that I am taking time off to learn all the software of post before starting up again and will be unavailable.

For the next project, I would like to shoot it so that all the shots match in camera, rather than trying to make them match in post. So let's say you want to shoot a master shot at f8, but then you want to shoot close ups at f2.8. You would have to change the ISO, but the problem is is that you don't have near as many stops of ISO compared to aperture. Like for the aperture, you can adjust it little by little, but when you go from 200 ISO to 400, it's much a bigger leap. How do you make it so the ISO can compensate accurately to match instead of having to pick the closest leap, which is still not spot on accurate to match?

 

[WalterB]

Well I did tell them that, but then they make comparisons like how it takes other producers of their own projects much faster.

Aside from not being able to polish a turd, that is exactly why I feel like moving on, but now I am told to learn new color grading software first, and take as long as it takes. Well in PP, using curves, I have gotten almost all the color to match good enough. Not 100% but enough that you will have to look hard to see the difference, Accept for the mastershot, which just looks too bright, and lit differently, so I will keep working at that and get new software. Does each shot need to match exactly? Like what if the contrast in the eyes or in the hair is a little darker from one shot to the next, will people notice if it's only a little?

I was going to get magic bullet in the future though, but is Da Vinci resolve better? Well after this project, I have one more coming up, and it's the biggest one yet, but after that, perhaps I will tell everyone that I am taking time off to learn all the software of post before starting up again and will be unavailable.

For the next project, I would like to shoot it so that all the shots match in camera, rather than trying to make them match in post. So let's say you want to shoot a master shot at f8, but then you want to shoot close ups at f2.8. You would have to change the ISO, but the problem is is that you don't have near as many stops of ISO compared to aperture. Like for the aperture, you can adjust it little by little, but when you go from 200 ISO to 400, it's much a bigger leap. How do you make it so the ISO can compensate accurately to match instead of having to pick the closest leap, which is still not spot on accurate to match?

My suggestion was to finish this and then learn new software.
BTW, what are the specs of your computer?
Because you can only learn software if it can run on your computer.
Magic Bullet Looks is really to complicated to colorgrade. Colorista II is easier to use for that porposed

As far as f-stops and ISO:
does your camera go 100-200-400-800-1600 ISO?
In that case you can go from f8 to f4 and devide you ISO by 2.
I posted a webpage with different apps to help you calculate such things.
I case ISO values are 100-125-160-200-320-400-500-640-800- etc you can use some help to calculate.

The other producers finish faster because of one or more of the following reasons:
- they don't need to fix mistakes
- they know how to fix mistakes
- they make less mistakes
- they don't care about the mistakes
- they don't flood a forum to find a solution for the mistakes
- have enough help to fix the mistakes