Star Wars Episode II: The Galaxy Divided (The Brash Cut) - CANCELLED — Page 13

brash_stryker said:

In regards to sound design, you seem to be the expert on it, judging from your edit. What do you use to mix your sound?

Sony Vegas

I use cubase when I want to add additional music or additional orchestral transition between two tracks

Well I've been trying to get my head around after effects, just tinkering around trying to get a feel for the program. Colour correction is so hard if, like me, you don't have an eye for what looks right.

Nevertheless I had a stab at colour correcting Boba's battle with Obi Wan (This is just meant as part of the initial colour grading of the whole film (hence why he still has a blue visor).

Ripplin said:

Of the three examples shown, I definitely like the second one best. Looks the most natural, I find.

That's handy then. No more work for me! :p

I'm still not convinced the correction looks right. Is there a green tint apparent there to anyone? I need people with an eye for this sort of thing (and possibly better monitors) to give feedback/suggestions. Angel? Ady?

I think there may be a (tiny) slight green tint.

I don't think it looks bad, but it does remind me of a way-less-crazy version of a few shots from the end of The Matrix: Revolutions.

I'm beginning to re-evaluate which method I'm going to use for my colour correction. A couple of the options available are Plugins for After Effects or Final Cut, however, seeing as I'm colour-grading the entire source video (at least for the parts I need) this seems a bit unnecessary when there are dedicated and professional applications at my disposal.
However, opinion on what's best seems to differ quite a bit. 

My options:

1. After Effects' standard colour correction tools - I did the above picture (not the red visor one) using its 'Color Balance' feature
2. Color Finesse Plugin (bundled with After Effects so I already own it)
3. Magic Bullet's Colorista Plugin for Final Cut or After Effects - Has had rave reviews.
4. Final Cut's integrated 3-way colour correcter - Something tells me it won't be as capable as the others.
5. Apple Color - The only dedicated and standalone option in my list (and I already own it)
   
   
   

 Anyone care to venture an opinion?

brash_stryker, I use Apple Motion for any videos I make, and the standard colouring that comes with it, I do have Magic Bullet but I still go back to Apple standard.

Have you thought of duplicating your layers and creating masks for them, ie: bottom layer has been recoloured with your overall new colour scheme, higher layer is a mask of Jangos blue part of his helmet recoloured rust.....it does require time spent keyframing.....but does look effective.

Maybe you've tried this?!

J

Any recolouring of Boba (I refuse to call him Jango anymore :p ) will only be done when I get to the more complex visual changes. I've seen quite a few tutorials on masking and it looks like it's very straightforward. It IS getting done, don't worry. :)

For my initial colour correction though, I'm just doing changes that can be done globally. Not specific details like armour, skies, etc.

And before I can do that, I need to decide on a program. I'm kinda leaning more towards Apple Color at the moment, and leaving After Effects for all the fine detail work that comes after the colour grading staqe.

However, I've heard Color can be quite an intimidating program to learn so we'll see how it goes I guess. I practically crapped my pants when I first opened up After Effects!

Yeah I opened Color........................... and closed it!

I do use AE....but I find Motion easier (I should get commission) although you have to keep on saving (when Motion crashes you can't recover anything, same as FC)

J

The main reason I'm planning on using After Effects rather than Motion is the wealth of information and tutorials there are for it.

One example is Lightsabers. I think I did a search for how to create Lightsabers in Motion but there were a few different methods and the results didn't look that great IMO (though there was a great tutorial on how to create them in Shake, which is now discontinued)

After Effects on the other hand has a wealth of tutorials on it, most notably the one on Videocopilot, where they're even nice enough to supply you with their own presets.

It's not just about the lightsabers though. There are other things I plan to try out, but have only found tutorials for how to do them in AE.

AE is the industry standard, it is better to get familiar with it.......but Motion is....its like my own limb.... I feel alien with AE....give Motion a go.

J

brash_stryker said:

Well I've been trying to get my head around after effects, just tinkering around trying to get a feel for the program. Colour correction is so hard if, like me, you don't have an eye for what looks right.

Nevertheless I had a stab at colour correcting Boba's battle with Obi Wan (This is just meant as part of the initial colour grading of the whole film (hence why he still has a blue visor).

A more radical colouring more akin to my old mockup below may be done at some point if possible (though it'd be a lot of masking work if I did it in the same way - altering the hue to get the orange sky also gave Obi Wan a Smurf's complexion, made his Lightsaber orange, and the laser bolts, fire and explosions blue.)

 

Color correction definitely looks a bit greenish/yellowish there. keep fiddling.

I like the 2nd one....nice job.

On a related note I was just wondering....in of all the star wars movies where we see these cases of scenes totally saturated with a blue hue or a red hue, was it originally just an artistic choice by LFL to have such scenes appear that way?

I wouldn't say it was orangeness that made the TF movies so damn awful ;)

Well if all goes to plan with my edit, the only examples of the Orange and Blue combo will be in the duel against Dooku. 2 Blue sabers vs an Orange one :)

^Oh no, I'm not falling for that one again. ;-)

I've had a play around with Apple Color, and whilst the interface isn't as horrendous as I'd feared, it does seem to have a fairly steep learning curve - even something as simple as importing a file - which should be pretty self explanatory, I had to google because this program does things differently to anything else I've used in the past. Also it appears to be full of features that I will never use in this edit anyway. I'm going to download a demo of Magic Bullet Colorista II and see how I get on with it. It seems a lot more intuitive and you can use it both in After Effects and in your editing program.

However, I'd still love to know other people's preferences. Adywan seems to have set a standard for color-correction, and whilst I know he uses After Effects for this, I don't know what he uses (standard AE, the included 'Color Finesse' plugin or something else?)

Well I've been testing out both Color and Colorista, and I've been very impressed with the 'Auto-balance' feature of both, where it automatically adjusts the colour balance based on how the whites should be.

Color figures it out itself, whereas Colorista gives you an eyedropper tool so you can select what parts should be white (clouds, trooper armour etc). I think I prefer the latter, as I doubt Color's method of guessing is infallable.

I'm not suggesting that this would be a totally effortless way of colour-correcting, but it certainly gives me a good starting point.

I've searched for a similar feature in vanilla After Effects, but have yet to find one.