The response so far on my upcoming book has been wonderful, so I wanted to give you more than a tease of what's to come. I'm working on my last chapter right now (!), and it's all about mastering or onlining your film. It probably won't surprise you that I advocate doing this in After Effects rather than your NLE software. The power and control AE offers is just too much to ignore. But for all that power, there's one big piece of the puzzle missing, and that's a simple, elegant, telecine-style color-correction tool for coloring or grading your movie.
Enter Rebel CC. Although not as awesome as a real plug-in, this Animation Preset uses color swatches to drive a Levels effect using rather deep expressions.
You start by eyedropering your blacks, whites, and grays to optimize the image. These steps are optional—you can do them or not, or you can do only one or two of them if you don't need to do all three. The eyedropper method is a nice fast way to perform the first stage in color grading: grading for consistency.
You perform the next step, grading for look, by using the color picker as a makeshift color wheel. Not as fast or interactive as one might like, but the control is there. You can set colors for shadows, midtones, and highlights, and you can even recover color information that may have gotten lost when you sampled your black and white points.
But why read about Rebel CC when you can watch about it? I made this quick video to show it off:
Music: Colour in My Mind by The Youngbloods
(Updated 061022 1:00pm PST to fix a compatibility bug)
8 comments:
Thanks for posting! Seems like the book will be a must-buy even for those of us who've never had to composite muzzle-flashes and flying gun cartridges. :-)
How's the new Blogger functionality working for you? I haven't gotten mine switched yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the tagging possibility.
Hi Jonas!
Yes, the dirty little secret of the Rebel's Guide is that it will be very useful to that small minority of people whose film's aren't action oriented. :)
The beta blogger features seem pretty cool. I had been thinking of switching to wordpress and hosting ProLost myself, but the truth is, I'm just not a web guy. I like a more drag-and-drop experience.
Could have used your LUT skills today, trying to help a colleague look at some 2K DPX sequences in AE7. They had done some CC after scanning, so perhaps that's why I couldn't get your "Linear in AE7" tricks to work out, either being almost totally dark or washed out...
This color management sure's tricky (said with a Texas accent, since I just finished watching Brokeback Mountain.)
I am so looking forward to this book, that once I get it, I shall recite passages from it five times a day while I kneel and bow my head towards Hollywood.
Ok, maybe I won't go that far. But I am really looking forward to it. I hope there's a chapter on green screen because I have yet to see a comprehensive introduction/explanation of everything involved in green screen [at least for beginners] anywhere.
Hi faithful,
Not a whole chapter but a section of the effects chapter fo sho!
Hi faithful,
Don't want to steal Stu'sshow, but I just posted a quite long post about tips and tricks for shooting green/blue screen. Perhaps you can use that as a starting point?
-- Jonas
Thank you very much for the Plugin! Extremely effective tool for color corrections!
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