Monkeysee Filmmaker Editing Tips - Color Correction

David Rotan: Hi! I am David Rotan, video production manager for www.

monkeysee.

com. I am discussing the post production process and the deliverables needed for a MonkeySee video from our Filmmaker program. Now we will talk a little bit about color correcting.

You should really try to white balance your camera and make sure that you are getting good lighting and colors there, when you are actually shooting your video. But every now and then, even it happens to the best of us, we can't get it just right or there is little things we are not happy with, or the camera, it didn't look the same in the Viewfinder as it does, when we get it back into our editing program.

So one thing to do is whatever video editing program you are using, it should have a basic color correcting tool on it. Final Cut Pro definitely does. What I would do is go over to the Effects tab. I would go down to Video Filters and look for Color Correction. As we found it here and then Color Corrector 3-way is what I would like to use, but you have several options you can use here. You can just change the RGB Balance, if you want, but I would like to use this 3-way. I drag it into the clip and it appears up here in the viewer window. If you see the tab, it says Color Corrector 3-way. I click on that.

Now watching over here in this window in the canvas, I can manipulate the colors. I will drag this just to an extreme, just so you can see it. I will drag it up to red. Look how red that gets, way too red. But you get the idea, you can drag this around on the color wheel and just monitor it over here on your canvas, until you just find the colors thats best for it. You can also adjust the brightness and contrast. See that makes it really brighter. I can take it down to make it darker. Finally, you can adjust the saturation by dragging this line up and and really saturate the colors, that's way too much. You can drag that down as well. If you dragged it all the way down, it would be black and white.

Color Correcting would come in handy, if perhaps you were using two cameras to shoot your project, or even if you just had one camera, but your close-up shots, your insert shots that you shot later, the color temperature, the white balancing was off. The shots didn't match, when you got in here and you edited your program all together. Then you notice that all the close-ups look too blue. They just didn't match the wide shot. Well, that's where this would come in really handy. You can go back, drag your Color Corrector filter into all of the close-up shots, only on your timeline, just like I showed you here, only those select shots that needed it. Then try to balance it out to match the wide shot.

A real easy tip on using that is once you got it set for one, if its consistently the same problem with, let's say, all of the close-ups are too blue and they are the same level. They are about the same brightness and contrast and blueness, then all you would have to do is go up here. Once you set one clip and have that completely color balanced with the wide shots how you wanted it, you will come up here to the Filters, select it, highlight it and copy and paste essentially, which you do by hitting the Apple+C on a Mac.

Then you would go to the next shot that might be too blue or not match, double-click on that and paste it. With the Mac, its Apple+V and there it is. The exact same settings, the Color Corrector 3-way settings, that were on that other one, are now immediately applied without you having to do it to each and every clip and adjust the color correcting on every single clip. Just copy and paste after you fix it on one. So those were some tips on using the Color Corrector. Next we are going to talk about the naming convention.