7:45 so true. I loved this parallel. Videography and photography as an art is capturing a cross section of reality and not reality itself. It’s a magic trick and the actual reality behind it would spoil it entirely.
I think it was on some Skillshare Class about photography, when a teacher there said: "If you want to unterstand luminance and brightness, you have to start working with black/white images. Your video shows this very clear :)
Interesting! I don’t know a lot of people who do it. When adjusting exposure and contrast, I find colours too distracting, so this is just personal preference. But I’d argue it makes it easier, too!
Amazing. You have completely retaught everything I thought I knew about color grading video. I am a photographer first hand and am just getting into videography and looking around in RU-vid I’ve never really understood the seemingly over complicated workflows with cst’s, rec 709, log, luts, etc. Editing footage never felt the same as editing images. Your videos have really cleared up everything and I finally feel like I can color grade my videos like my photos.
Fantastic video! Instant sub. I love that you are highlighting the importance of the creative intent behind colouring. I think that since colour management is such a rabbit hole of technical information that it's easy to get hyper-focused on the science behind it, but we need to remember that it's also a form of art.
I just wanted to let you know that your videos completely changed the way I color my footage. I’ve been working in Final Cut Pro for 8 years now, But after watching your videos, I finally figured out the signal chain hierarchy trick, and it made my C300 Mark III footage look 10 times better! Thanks a million man 🙏❤️ Your videos on color grading in final cut pro is the best and most useful info I have seen from a channel about color grading 👏
You're a very good teacher, providing relatively complex information in a structured and clear presentation, together with rules and recaps of what has been learnt. And all in a second language!
another valuable information as always! I am guilty to color grading by the values and sometimes I find myself spending so much time fixing things that don't really need fixing. Your approach of working first with luma only to adjust the tone of the scene is such a breath of fresh air to me. Thank you very much!
There seems to be a fear of contrast these days. We can shoot 15 stops and apparently nobody wants to get rid of any of that. Rec709 was never meant to see 15 stops. The s curve is too extreme in a lot of modern cases. I have personally started to have a resurgence of shooting standard camera profiles for this very reason. Or at the least using it as a basis of comparison a bit more when shooting log. Those standard profiles look the way they do for a reason. It’s a realistic level of contrast and brightness. Ironically when people talk about the film look a lot of film stocks were a baked in contrasty look. Film stocks in the 80’s which is the golden age of a lot of film for many of us had about 8 stops. Yet it still looks like film to all of us today. Flat is not a film look. More modern film stocks can have a lot more range today but they do not sacrifice contrast. This is why HDR is so important and yet Hollywood has warped its purpose because of their fear of changing and how bad HDR is handled in a theater. HDR allows us to keep a lot more range like 12 stops and keep the normal looking contrast. There is this misconception that HDR should be dark and used more like a EDR format to extend range. So it might still be 12 stops but all of that is packed in a very small portion of what HDR can handle and all in the shadows. HDR is designed to go up to 10,000 nits for a reason however. Because in real life brightness can be bright. Looking into the sun is bright. Having a cop shine a flashlight in your face at night is bright. We feel that brightness in real life. HDR to me means if a camera can capture 12 stops we don’t need to make it flat to keep those 12 stops. We can see those 12 stops as normal contrast. It’s like shooting standard profile in a camera without those easily clipped highlights. Sadly I think a lot of people miss out on that potential of HDR. I agree that we need to get back to emphasizing the look and feel and not making sure we don’t throw any of those yummy 15 stops we captured away. It’s neat we can capture so much range today but it can also be a curse. A curse that makes us afraid to throw anything away. Myself included at times. We have all been taught for decades that clipping is naughty.
in the final result you can clip HL or Shadows and that is ok, having the advantage of capturing more than you will use is key for manipulating the images in post (and yes do not clip your highlights), in HDR as you say the goal is always to get more contrast. as for SDR the goal is to keep things fairly contrasted with the output of only 100nits.
As a creator trying to better his color grading and editing in Final cut pro. I just want to say THANK YOU, and keep them coming. I really enjoy these longer videos.
Thankm you sooo much for doing this!! it is these Essentials, that most of the "filmakers" lag. Basic stuff i want to understand in order to know what i want to achieve rather than just guessing! maybe it is because im german, but i like to deeply understand the things im trying to learn and you helf a ton! keep up the good work :)
I think this is a really great video for many reasons. I tend to look at luminance ( or luma ) from the perspective of black level being darkness and any thing above the black level is shadow. I also think of the term exposure in the aspect of dark being black and raising the exposure is adding light which actually gets brighter with stops ( twice the light ) so when you mentioned the camera exposure, and the whole waveform getting brighter - I honestly think that it is more intuitive to see the brightness come as you would see a dimmer on a light. The point being that the black ( total lack of light ) if the light doesn't hit that, it will still be black - adding light exposes the shadow - or in the case of your video there in the one shot the detail ( texture ) of the dark rocks and the guys hair. This is why my advice to people is to set the black and then lock off the middle grey ( the exposure ) and if you want to have a crushed look - push the greys down to the black level which will give less contrast between dark grey and light grey- which gives you a cleaner crushed look and will always pass QC. But everything you did makes sense and is great info for people. Just commenting so people actually be aware that texture in shadows and texture in whites are there from the contrast of luma just above black and just below pure whites. I see people lowering offsets and losing detail - if black is black - pushing it down doesn't make it blacker. The suggestion to look at film grabs and such is a great suggestion and I concur completely. Great job Eric
Thank you! Log footage offers a lot of freedom, though, one needs to know how to work with it properly. Many people fear contrast because they think they need to keep all of the dynamic range.
Love to see other creators using Final Cut for coloring. Your workflow seems very similar to the workflow I've developed over the years. I've also experimented with where to put certain looks or LUTS. If you put them before the main transformation, you get some really interesting results!
Great video, Eric! I used to approach brightness adjustments in a very technical way, but you’ve shown me that *intentionally leaving out details* in highlights or shadows can be a powerful choice when editing in Final Cut Pro. Thanks for that insight! Quick question: it looks like you're using a *trackball device* -what model is it? I'm looking for a way to quickly adjust brightness, shadows, and similar settings per clip directly on the FCP timeline, and that device seems like a great tool for it.
Great stuff as always, educational, not just a how to. Do you prefer color wheels over curves? If so, In what instance do you use the curves? Curves, density, and check layer have been my go too on the last few projects.
Mein neuer Lieblingslehrer schlägt wieder zu… man hätte ich dich vor 8 Jahren oder so schon gebraucht 🙈 Starkes Video und was zum testen, da freue ich mich. Danke!!
Starting with the global wheel allows me to get a feel for the relationship of the tonal values in the scene. If I started with the Gain/Highlights, I'd already alter the relationship.
When I’m photographing, I meter for what I want to retain in the highlights or shadows, and let the rest fall where it may. Similarly, with video in low light, I switch to normal instead of log - grey and noisy retained shadow detail is no use to me. People always yammer on about how many stops the human eye can see, but the other component of this is how your brain processes this information - step into the light from a cave and your mind does gymnastics to accommodate.
