CINEMA GRADE VS COLOR FINALE HOW TO
CINEMA GRADE VS COLOR FINALE PROFESSIONAL
CINEMA GRADE VS COLOR FINALE FREE

Given what happened at the end of this year’s Oscar night, I thought it would be fun to use these two terrific films. I’m going to take the opening musical number from Damien Chazelle’s La La Land and match it to the opening of this year’s best picture winner Moonlight. I decided to use two Oscar-winning movies to perform my little experiment.

CINEMA GRADE VS COLOR FINALE HOW TO

That’s what you’re going to learn how to do today. High-end colorists get paid well (and for good reason) to craft a “look” from scratch to match a particular film, but for beginners, it’s often more effective to find a piece of reference material with a look you like and then try to match your film to that look. I’ll cover some additional details in the article.

CINEMA GRADE VS COLOR FINALE FREE

Feel free to jump right to that if you like. So this will be a great exploration for those of you who want to expand your color grading skills, but are afraid to take that leap.Īt the end of this article is a short video tutorial using FCPX to do this trick.

I know just enough to be dangerous and to make my work look the way I want.

CINEMA GRADE VS COLOR FINALE PROFESSIONAL

You don’t need to be a professional colorist, or even an experienced user of color grading tools, to do this trick. And it’s something that cannot be done just with preset LUTs.īefore we get started you should know that I am NOT a professional colorist (nor do I play one on TV), and that’s kinda the point. Whether we’re building a stylized look based on a reference image or just trying to get different cameras to cut together, matching two shots is an essential tool of the colorist. This exercise will illustrate one of the foundational concepts of color-correction: shot matching. Of course, a huge amount of the look of a film is created with art direction, lighting, and cinematography, but the color grade is also a powerful tool. Have you ever seen a cool photo, or better yet, a film or video, and thought to yourself, “I wish I could color my films to look like that?” Well, for the most part, you can.

The purpose of this piece is to show you some color grading basics which will give you more flexibility to creating any look you want, with or without using LUTs. These are pre-designed “looks” for your video that automatically adjust color, luminance, curves, etc., to help you arrive at a look you want. I would be remiss not to mention the use of LUTs and “Looks.” Many of you (like me) will most likely start your color grading session applying some sort of LUT (Lookup Table). And today I want to show you a quick and dirty technique for color grading your film and video, and along the way, you’ll become more accustomed to the color grading tools already at your disposal. Well, first I want to assure you that basic color grading does not have to be as daunting as it seems. What is a “jack of all trades” and “wearer of many hats” to do when one of those “hats” doesn’t fit quite right? Luckily, with today’s tools, you don’t need a sweet suite like this to color grade your work (but hey, if you can afford it, knock yourself out!)īut what if you’re like me, a lone producer (or perhaps, part of a small team of a boutique studio) and the work you do doesn’t really have any budget allocated for a dedicated colorist. The ARRI Media color grading suite (photo © Arri CC BY-SA). Large corporate clients, production companies, and Hollywood studios can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on color correction and grading (also called color timing in the feature world). It’s such an important aspect of the filmmaking and video production process, that there are huge post houses dedicated just to this task. Yet, it’s one art form that if mastered, could play one of the most significant roles in truly setting your work apart. Quite possibly one of the most intimidating disciplines for any filmmaker or video producer to tackle is color grading.

Cinema grade vs color finale