Color Grading Presentation

I participate in a monthly conference call of church media and motion graphic designers, and the organizer asked me to do a presentation on color grading for this past call. I recorded my screencast and lined it up with the audio from the call, all for your viewing pleasure! A couple of things to keep in mind when you watch this video:

  1. This is aimed at motion graphic artists, so it’s really just the basics, nothing too in depth.
  2. I’m not that great a public speaker, and was a little nervous about giving this presentation, so cut me some slack if I misspoke or said something that wasn’t totally correct…
  3. I was also trying to cram in a ton of information into a relatively short amount of time, so please forgive the breakneck speed and “30,000 ft. view” of color grading.

Hope you enjoyed that! I think my next Colorist Tip is going to cover control surfaces, and will probably come sometime next week…

6 Comments
  • Reply KevinB

    06/10/2011, 4:20 pm

    Aaron, thanks for sharing your presentation. I would be curious to know your workflow for dealing with FCPs clamping of superwhite luma values in Colorista II (or any FXPlug). I tend to normalize my shots using FCPs three way color correcter first, then add Colorista II almost like a secondary.

    Thanks again.

    • Reply Aaron Williams

      06/11/2011, 6:31 pm

      honestly, i don’t usually worry about it. typically, if i’m using colorista then i’m in a hurry, so i just make it look as good as i can in the time i have. at my job i often have 1-2 day turnaround times for pre-prod, shooting, *and* post, so time is a huge factor.

      if i have time to worry about superwhites, then i’m probably coloring in Color anyway. also, the vast majority of the footage i work with is from a 5D, so it doesn’t really record superwhite anyway.

  • Reply Jesse Koepke

    07/01/2011, 8:01 pm

    Thanks for posting this video, Aaron! It’s super helpful to see you walk through the process and give the basic steps. I’m currently editing a documentary, and we’re just about to head into the color correction stage using Colorista 2, so it’s cool to see it in action before we dive in.

  • Reply Matthew Scott

    07/29/2011, 9:39 am

    Hey Aron,

    Thanks for sharing that vid, it was great! I really enjoyed your workflow tips and explanations of why you first balance, then add a look and then refine with keys, etc.

    Thanks again,

    Matt

  • Reply Mark F

    02/12/2014, 3:35 pm

    Thank you for this!

Write a comment to Mark F Cancel Comment