Color 101: An Introduction to Color

Objectives

This two day hands-on course will familiarise students with Apple's masterful new colour grading and finishing software. Start with the basics of colour balancing and correction, and move on to the fine points of secondary grading, including scene matching, using vignettes to isolate and track regions, creating advanced colour effects and "looks," skin tone adjustments, adjusting the composition and framing of a shot, and much more.


Pre-requisites:

Basic knowledge of the Macintosh OS. Level One Final Cut Pro End User certification is preferred. Ideally, students will have attended a Final Cut Pro 101, 200 or 250 course.


Course Includes:

A comprehensive set of reference notes covering course topics, follow-up telephone support and, for training on Transmedia premises, lunch and refreshments.


Course Outline


Working with the Color Interface


Setting Up Your Computer, Setting Up a Project, Understanding the Eight Rooms: Colour's Task-Based Workflow, Navigating Your Sequence, Exploring the Setup Room, Applying Basic Grades, Viewing Your Images, Performing Secondary Grades, Employing Colour FX, Applying Final Touches, Panning and Scanning, Utilising Still Stores, Correcting the Sequence and Introducing the Render Queue Room





Basic Grading


Exploring the Primary Room, Using the Auto Balance Control,Grading with Colour/Curves, and Understanding Additional Controls





Basic Secondary Grading


Three Types of Secondaries, Performing Key-Based Secondaries, Keying with HSL Qualifiers, Performing Vignette-Based Secondaries, Creating a Look, and Secondary Curves





Advanced Secondary Grading


Using Multiple Secondaries, Combining a Key and a Vignette,Using Multiple Keys, Creating Custom Mask Shapes, Combining Vignettes, and Incorporating Curve Effects





Grade Management


Managing Grades on a Single Shot, Switching Between Grades, Adding and Deleting Grades, Duplicating a Grade, Setting the Beauty Grade, Saving Corrections and Grades, Deleting Saved Corrections, Organising Corrections,Saving Secondary Corrections, Saving Grades, Moving Grades from Clip to Clip, Dragging Individual Corrections, Grouping Shots, Applying Grades to Groups, and Working with Multiple Grades






Colour Effects


Using the Colour Effects Room, Applying Nodes, Building Colour Effects, Controlling Node Order, Monitoring Inactive Nodes, Adding Nodes to Existing Trees, Saving and Reapplying Effects as Presets, Modifying an Applied Preset, and Working with Preset Colour Effect





Common Recipes


Black Hawk Down/Mogadishu Look, CSI Miami Look, Schindler's List Look, Flashback Look, Saturated Sunrise Look, and Skin Diffusion and Beauty Tricks





Keyframing Effects


Animating Effects in Colour,Manipulating/Navigating/Deleting Keyframes, Keyframing Other Rooms, Changing Interpolation Settings, Animating User Shapes, Adding Intermediary Keyframes, and Keyframing Colour Effects





Recomposing and Tracking


Using the Geometry Room, Recomposing Shots, Animating Pan and Scan Effects, Applying Tracking Data to Corrections, Offsetting the Vignette, and Manual Tracking





Primary Out and Rendering


Global Changes and Final Tweaks, Modifying and Replacing Primary Out Room Settings, Creating a Stylised Look for a Finished Project, Applying Stylised Primary Out Corrections to Grouped Clips, Manually Controlling Broadcast-Safe Output, Adjusting Black Levels, Limiting the Range of Black Level Adjustments, Manually Adjusting White, Black and Chroma Levels , Rendering Colour Projects, Adding Clips to the Render Queue, Rendering Shots and Sending to Final Cut Pro, and Using Colour's Archive Feature