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ColorGHear [PART 2]
  • The old thread had grown too large so here's the new one.

    To access the old thread - go here: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1817/colorghear-toolkit-color-grading-system-for-ae/p1

    So as not to be misleading, ColorGHear is a system, and not so much a plug-in... a school of thought supported through the ColorGHear Toolkit -which is a set of MODULAR PRESETS for After Effects and ColorGHear Pro - which is a set of MODULAR LUTs for Davinci Resolve, FCP7, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Speedgrade, and is not what you'd consider a classical style plug-in.

    The toolkit isn't a collection of drag and drop "looks" like Magic Bullet. It is a series of nodes which contain a set of grading instructions or "macros" (a set of operations), specially designed to work with each other to speed up your workflow. Along with these nodes, comes a system of grading which replaces having to perform the minutia of individual corrections by hand. Learned through the online tutorials, this system will give you speedy and precise grades. It is this precision that prevents you from "bending" your images like with standard methods which is what allows me to get such drastic and dramatic grades from normally flimsy DSLR codecs.

    As a professional colorist, I noticed that because of the way the color channels in RGB video are tied together; that typical methods like the Color Balance tool, and the 3-way Color Corrector will actually bend an RGB image out of shape. So in order to maximize the full potential of any given image, I had to learn a method of grading that would avoid damaging the footage. I called this method "precision grading."

    I also noticed that in executing these precision grades, I was performing the same operations over and over. I began taking notes on what these operations were, and trying to determine if it were possible to create a set of interacting preset nodes that would save me time in having to repeatedly perform these operations.

    I soon discovered 37 distinct sets of operations that would serve to correctly grade any, and all footage. 6 of these macros cancel each other out, and only 1 of those 6 could be effectively used at any given time leaving me with 32 nodes - giving me 1,024 possible combinations. Over a thousand distinct grades. Over time, I added some other tools to the set which now sits at 74 nodes all of which are designed to be used in conjunction with the other nodes. (69, if you subtract the 5 canceling nodes) which brings the total to 4,761 distinct grades.

    The precision method I mention above is demonstrated here. Along with how the 3-way Color Corrector damages your footage.

    The power of ColorGHear is presented in the video demonstrations below.

    ColorGHear is available at http://www.ColorGHear.com

    (ColorGHear Pro not yet available to the public)

  • 568 Replies sorted by
  • I added a couple of new links to the film school section for referencing False Color image

    Screen Shot 2012-12-02 at 6.04.15 PM.png
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  • Thank you @Shian for all of your work and making life easy!

  • @TheRuggedAdventurer You are welcome. The vid looks amazing. Well done!

  • If you have any pages on the ColorGHear site bookmarked or fed into your RSS reader, recheck the link. I changed the addresses of a quite a few things last night to make it easier to track internally.

  • @TheRuggedAdventurer That's a really nice looking video you've got. Good job.

    @shian I have been a long time lurker of your threads and I'm impressed by how much you are able to get out of GH2 video. I'm only a dabbler but you've got me considering buying a light meter... How are the plans coming along for ColorGHear with other color correction software?

  • I have a barebones working version of the Davinci Resolve version prepping for January release. Once that's out of the way, a version for Premiere, and then back to making tons of tutorials.

  • Very cool. Looking forward to checkinh out the Premiere version

  • Sorry if wrong topic, didn't find any "general" after effects topic.

    When I import GH2 .MTS files to After Effects and place them to composition, AE cannot play them live. It's like it starts rendering them after pressing play-button. Why? I haven't added any effects / layers. Just set composition to 32bit mode.

    My computer is pretty powerful and in Sony Vegas everything runs smooth and nice.

  • AE doesn't play anything live. You have to create a ram preview. It's not an editor.

  • Quick grade in AE because DaVinci doesn't like my 3.5k stuff. Still so killer.

  • wow, that looks awesome!!!

  • Hey shian, quick question and sorry if this has been answered before. How do you use a grey card if your using a manual only lense on a gh2. It seems that for a grey card to be utilized correctly it needs to be adjusted for by the automatic exposure first then carried over to manual. But manual lenses do not have auto exposure available on gh2. Sorry if I skipped something somewhere.

  • Off to ColorGHear film school wit you, @spaceandtime http://www.colorghear.com/film-school

    Special Holiday pricing if you use the link at the beginning of the thread.

  • Looks good. Exporting to 3.5k resolution? Had heard some people talking about doing that for YouTube. Is that taking 1080P footage from GH2 and then upping the resolution? Curious if there are benefits as well as basic process.

  • Hey there

    check this out, it was all done with ColorGhear please comment, let me know about all the mistakes I made. any feedback is more then welcome.

  • The skin tones in homework time are green.... like... sickly green. I'd fix that. And the color just seems inconsistant. Like you just went crazy with presets... there's no through line to it. Just my opinion.

  • Thank you @Shian I'll try to fix that.

    @Shian when you said the color is inconsistent do you mean the 3 sketches or just Homework Time?

  • @matt_gh2 - it's due to shooting anamorphic. I don't really want to squish it vertically so I chose to extrapolate it horizontally. Holds up really nicely. The 1.8 squeeze of my morph multiplied by the sensor aspect of 1.78 gives me about 3.2:1 so a final horizontal resolution of 3456. The vertical remaining 1080p. With this res, youtube allows an "Original" option. Less compression. I assume you could upscale regular GH2 to 1.5k, maybe even 2k and get the original option as well.

  • @artiswar Yeah I remember discussion about less compression. Will test with YouTube uploading same video with/without upscaling. Would prefer using YouTube if I can get quality of image to surpass Vimeo. Vimeo can be slow for end user viewing video. Thanks.

  • By popular demand all 3 of my favorite patches are available for download. These are plug-n-play patches. Just download, unzip, load them onto your formatted card, switch to custom mode, hit the green "play" button, and "version up!"

    http://www.colorghear.com/gh2-hacks

  • Our first commercial colored with ColorGhear. Great stuff, well worth the investment.

  • looks great

  • Wow,colorghear+resolve and it's tracking feature would be amazing,thx shian also for making it affordable

  • It's coming in 2013. I have a working prototype right now, just dialing in a ton of things so that it is consistant across platforms.

  • Yay for Resolve version! I suspect that I've already figured out a few Resolve grading tricks, but it'll be nice to look at your GHears and compare what they do to what I'm doing in my grades. Now I ust need to get Resolve working on one of my machines :(

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