ColorGHear TOOLKIT- color grading SYSTEM for AE

shian

As for the workflow, there are really no rules, just guidelines, certain things work well in most situations. but basicly:

finish editing

move everything to AFX

Then for GHear order, just keep this rule of thumb in mind: reduce noise (if necessary), then correct for the DSLR factor(DSLR Fixit), and then grade.

I rarely key frame stuff when I'm grading, usually I don't have to. I think you're making it more complicated than it needs to be. Just dive in, you might make a few mistakes, but who cares, soon the whole thing will become familiar to you.

I'll see about doing a quick workflow overview tut. As for the b-day gift... a course might help answer your questions, but then again, it might not.

No_SuRReNDeR

Hey guys, I didnt grade this myself, the director and producer did; I am not envolved in the editing/post process at the moment....but here is a clip from True Story graded in gears...again...I was ONLY Dp/DOP all I did was point them to color ghear and Shian's tutorials... This was all shot with Aquamotion V2... Nostalgic -2 all . This chunk was mostly shot on the 20mm pancake(steady cam stuff) and a few old m42 lenses

I am not sure what settings he used to export from AE either.

Fyi lots of Pottymouth ..

matthere

@anyone I am on PC and using ghears to grade, in the tutorial on the Colorghear site Shian talks about exporting graded footage using DnxHD, I have CS5.5 but can find DNxHD as an render option.. even after installing the codec from Avid, are there other steps I may have missed out?

Thanks :)

Hallvalla

Are you selecting Quicktime and then DNxHD? You have to select QT first.

matthere

Thanks Hallvalla.. That will be the step that I'm missing :)

shian

try importing my output module settings downloadable from the "member download page". They will save you time. Tutorial #5

shian

@No_SuRReNDeR don't use embed link, just full youtube link from the share button> options roll out, and check "long link" and paste

matthere

Great.. very useful :)

No_SuRReNDeR

Oh...snap thx man -

shian

This is a special deals portal, which will change often, and without notice. Some days you will come here and find fantastic deals on ColorGHear products, and on other days you'll find no deals at all. We reserve the right to offer our products at our set price, and give discounts when we see fit. If you come here and see a price lower than what you paid for a product we will not offer any kind of rebate or refund. It's the beauty and wonder of chance at work.

http://colorghear.com/specials/

JamesAllenVisual

Well I am proud to say that I joined the awesome CGT club last night. Been checking in here every so often, looking at the awesome videos and truly interesting discussion on grading / film production but haven't got around to dabbling in any of it yet. With the special portal popping up on my Facebook feed last night I just couldn't resist joining. Looking forward to allocating some time to watching the brilliant tutorials and beginning to learn how to use AE. I'll be using Sony Vegas as my NLE and then grading in AE via an import using Automatic Duck (as recommended by Shian previously). Thanks again Shian for producing this fantastic piece of work..

shian

BTW I just wanted you all to know, that from now on all you CGT users will be referred to as "GHearHeads".

I might even get T-shirts made :)

itimjim

@shian LOL...in the UK a Gear Head is a rampant pot smoker....I like it! :-) The GHear that is!

shian

@itimjim In the states, a gear head is somebody who is either really knowledgable about musical or video equipment, or really into fixing cars or motorcycles.

duartix

Cheers @Shian!

If you don't mind me asking another workflow question, here goes...

Where do you do your technical pass? Do you do just WB on that? Do you also do some kind of basic auto levels? Or do you go creative immediately and straight into your gears?

I'm asking this because I'm finding that Finesse was a pretty good start for a few videos I graded (mostly pedestal, levels, contrast and contrast center), before I drop the gears on them. The thing is that after that, the gears don't pop like they do on your tutorials...

shian

@duartix If you are exposing correctly you shouldn't need to do all that. My tech grade consists of just matching and balancing my shots where needed. I don't worry much about the tech pass, cuz I know the GHears are gonna handle most everything I want to do, so I just do simple levels adjustment for exposure and color matching where needed, and GHear the rest. The Colorfist tutorial stuff with CF was just an extreme exposure scenario. CF is really only necessary when you need to fix poorly exposed shots.

I very rarely have to spend much time doing a tech pass on my own stuff. I white balance in cam, and expose using my handheld meter rather than trusting the camera. Most of my tech pass work is done on multi-cam shoots, and other peoples stuff who haven't learned to use a light meter, and still think the histogram is telling them the whole truth, or are just reading them wrong (meter and/or histogram). I have to fix their stuff a lot. Many people not coming from a 35mm background don't fully understand what their DSLR can and can't do well, and they either dont know to get around it, or aren't even aware that they are using it wrong. I shouldn't be surprised by this, but I am.

Currently working on a tutorial about this for the film school. I won't have the site re-design done yet, but the first 2 or 3 tutorials for the film school should be up as early as next week. In them I'll talk a lot about exposure zones and why its better to get it right in cam, than try to move the image into the proper zone in post.

pvjames

@Shian: I was wondering, do you have advice/opinion on how to make video look more 'HDR'? There are some videos of incredible TimeLapse HDR using individual RAW files i wish i could emulate for video. One way that might work is importing a video clip into CS6 Photoshop and applying HDR filters then render out back into a NLE. What do you think?

shian

@magnus387 would be the one to talk to. He's done it with this video.

And I'm guessing it took quite a lot of masking and processing. I did something similar years ago, and it was quite a chore.

Mark_the_Harp

@shian Your upcoming stuff on exposure sounds really useful - looking forward to it. As I explore more I realise how few of my shots are REALLY correctly exposed - by which I mean that when I experiment with correction, I hardly need to do any. I can see it makes sense to get it as right as possible when capturing, and I'm really interested in exactly what decisions you make at each step of the way - when exposing and lighting - and how it impacts on stuff further down the line.

I've not really got into ColorGHears yet, but I've found it difficult to learn from some of the videos because if I want to know something specific, I'm faced with 20 mins or so of stuff (which I know is all good, of course) but not exactly where in the video I'm going to find it. Other people (like @stonebat's stuff above) have done wonderful things with ColorGHears, so maybe it's just me, but I'm also new to AE and was hoping this would help me. Just feel really daunted when I see a tutorial is 50 minutes and when I hear, like I did on one video, "Oh no, that's a bug..." it sort of irritates me because it sounds "unedited".

Maybe I'm using the tutorials wrongly. What I've done is to fire them up and then follow what you do, in my own version of AE, and then pause your video and go back and forth between them. If this is how you intended the tutorials to be used, it would be great to have a bit of text describing each section with some links to the different points within the video (which you can do in Vimeo - in your description alongside the video just type in 2:23 or whatever time, and vimeo will create a link to that point in the video when you click on the figures). As a user, it would make it so much easier to experiment on my own and then I could find the appropriate bits in your videos to see how you do it. That suits my personal learning style (ie, decide on a specific technique, see an example of how you did it, try it out for myself on my own footage, review the result, learn from you what would make it better, etc...). Classic learning cycle stuff really. So having links to different points in the video would really help me learn (as in, remember and be able to apply) in bite-sized chunks.

However I also appreciate that's a huge amount of work - and hell, it's an amazing education for the price!

duartix

@Shian: Thanks for the context. It's very useful. I'll be following the next tutorials closely.

@Mark_the_Harp: Excellent point about the notes. Could serve as a summary and a reference at the same time.

matthere

I wonder if a forum on the site might be useful? I am just starting out on the editing/CC journey and as such have quite a few (probably quite basic) questions.

MarkV

@Mark_the_Harp You raised interesting point about the reference notes and links! That could be really helpful!

I'll contact @shian and I will offer him a help here with the links and descriptions... I bet he have ton of other things to do.

shian

A forum is coming. (Truthfully, one already exists, but I tested it, and the way the site's theme formatted it, it was awful. Impossible to read - gray text on an olive background. So I will launch the forum with the new site theme and design)

The links thing won't work on these vids, as you'll notice they only play within the ColorGHear site - by design. If you try to open them outside the site, vimeo will deny you access.

Maybe someone with free time can make those timecode notes, and I'll create a tutorial notes thread in the new forum, as a sort of CGT wiki to help you out.

sanzadez

@shain Your tutorials are the best. Every time I think i have a slight handle on color Ghear, you throw out another tutorial and teach me something completely new, opening up so many more options. The film stock tutorial was great. If I remember to when I get home today, I will post up a couple before and afters of a few quick tests I did after seeing the tutorial. Thanks a lot for the time/effort you put in to these tutorials, and can't wait for the film school videos.

@Mark_the_Harp Same here. The exposure tutorial will be a big help. It wasn't until color Ghear that I started to realize how few of my shots were properly exposed. I'm sure shain's tutorial on it will shed some light and help out.

sanzadez

I was able to access my computer from work, so here are a couple grabs. Note: these are not final. Just a quick test I did with some footage. When it was shot the White balance wasn't properly set so the originals are very warm.

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