From the course: Creating a Short Film: 11 Color Grading

Grading in REDCINE-X - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 11 Color Grading

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Grading in REDCINE-X

- With that setup stuff out of the way, finally, we're ready to now tackle the look or at least the beginning of our look into REDCINE-X. So to find this file, I'm in the exercise files, I'll go to the media folder and to our 3Ds. And it's the same scene here, the A10C-1622, and 28 is the one that we're looking for. So I can drag and drop this into the media, and then I can double-click this here to have this show up. Now, it's showing us this weird thing from the RMD, but I could go ahead and go change that if I want to, I can go over to the Look and click metadata, or I could find out where this is happening and it looks like there's a weird setting over here on the Lift. And so I can click on the metadata there, or I can just go and double-click and zero these out in order to get rid of that. Now, what we're going to be covering in this tutorial is the old way of doing things, the legacy workflow, and you can see that right here at the top. And this gives us a little bit more control, the new workflow is definitely better, but it doesn't allow you to have as much control over the individual settings. So I want to start here with the legacy, and then later on in this chapter we'll talk about the new IPP2 workflow. So the top here we have presets, we'll talk about those in the next tutorial. We also have a Look area where you can choose the Color Space and the Gamma curve, and again, if you're using a legacy workflow, this is where you want to start. You want to pick a color science and usually the later numbers are newer. So Red color four would be an upgrade. Basically, just a way of thinking about the color, the way that the software can think about the color. And also we can choose a Gamma Space. So Redgamma4 is newer. You can almost think of these as like Lutz, like we talked about earlier, and you can even see a big difference in the histogram here when we change that. So when we go back to... Well, now I can't go back to Redgamma2 because it's kind of old and antiquated, but if I say like red log film, for example, you can see that this definitely looks a lot more washed out, we're losing highlights and shadows. So we have a more washed out image in terms of both highlights and shadows. Take this to, Redgamma4 and it spreads out that histogram. We don't quite have crushed shadows nothing's pure black and nothing's pure white, but the histogram is a little bit more spread out. Now, it's interesting to me is that it feels like this is a warm tone image, but if I look at like what this area here, that should be white, you can see that there's a little bit more of a blue color cast. So we maybe might want to warm this up a little bit, and then now we can see that we have blue and red balanced a little bit better, but now we're lacking some green. So now I can bring that in and we have a little bit more of a balanced image, and I actually like the way that looks. So again, that's by adjusting the temperature or called Kelvin here in REDCINE-X, and also the tint. Also, another benefit to a red footage is that ISO has metadata. 800 is typically the native control, but I can fiddle with that if I want to a little bit more, I'm not going to in this case, the FLUT control is almost like a fine-tuned ISO, so you can see we made like a little tiny change here and it makes a really big adjustment. Whereas the FLUT control, you can be a little bit more subtle with that and make it a little bit more subtle changes. I'm going to take that back to zero for now. Now, we can adjust our shadow area here, like the shadows. We can also adjust something called DRX, which allows us to restore some of the data from highlights that are blown out, which is really, really cool. It's a very subtle effect that it's hard to see in the image, but if you have something that is blown out and you're getting kind of like a harder edge on something like her nose is almost blowing out here, sometimes raising the DRX value can soften that, which is really cool. And then we have some standard controls, saturation, contrast, brightness, exposure, and we get adjust individual values of the color channel and whatnot. And we also have a curve that we can play with, and this works like the curve. We'll talk about curves a little bit in more detail a little bit later on in this course. But I just kind of want to give you a basic overview of REDCINE-X and its controls. And there's also Lift Gamma Gain. Now, we'll see a lot of the same values in premiere when we look at Luma tree and we'll see it again in DaVinci Resolve, when we look at DaVinci Resolve. And we'll see these same controls, the temperature of the tint, saturation, contrast. So what's really cool about... And also same thing here too, with the Lift, Gavin and Gain. And so what's really cool about color grading is that once you learn how to do it, the tools are pretty much universal, they're the same in most applications. So you learn it one place and then you're good to go. You can color grade it in After Effects or Premiere or Resolve or Fusion or Nuke or whatever else you want. So Lift Gamma Gain refers to the shadows mid-tones and highlights respectively. And oftentimes when you're dealing with Lift Gamma Gain, you'll have four controls for each one. You'll have a master thing which will universally lower or raise all of the shadows mid-tones and highlights. And you'll also, well actually let me just take this back to zero here, but you'll also have access to each color channel as well, so that you can adjust the color channels as you see fit. And these color wheels do basically the same thing. So if you want dial in and add more red, you can do that by adjusting the red channel of the Lift, but you can also take the wheel here and move the shadows and Lift to red. Now, I don't like you using the wheels for this exact reason that you're seeing here because they are very course. So if I make a little tiny adjustment, it looks ridiculous when I'm seeing it here. So I prefer to adjust my colors in a different way, as we will look at, Say something like curves, for example, there's much more fine tune adjustments, so I really like using curves and also some of the other tools we'll be looking at. But that's essentially the overview here of what we've got going on in our image. So basically, what we've done here so far is we've just removed the color cast by increasing or changing the temperature and the tint a little bit. And we've also filled very little bit with some of these other settings like FLUT. And we've also talked about the Lift Gamma Gain and the Curve, just to know that they're here. In the next tutorial, we'll look at how to save Look presets as well as how to adjust the framing. And we'll talk about the metadata as well.

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