professional color grading tutorial - please help me - long story...

marcinzm wrote on 1/2/2020, 10:31 AM

Hello,

I have been watching many color grading video tutorials for Vegas Pro 17 and not only even for Vegas Pro to increase my color grading knowledge.

I know basics, but I have much more questions regarding to color grading theme which I don`t know how to do it.

Color grading is tough theme for me and I am seldom satsified with the effects I get that`s why I ask you for help.

My questions regarding to Color grading:

1) I have 4 video cameras: GoPro Hero 6,7,8, Sony FDR-AX100. In nearest future I plan to purchase also Sony A7 III. The last camera can handle SLOG3 and NLG3 flat color profiles. In GoPro Hero 6,7,8 I started to use protune settings and flat color profile. Sony FDR-AX100 doesn`t have flat color profile settings possibilities.

How can I make these 4-5 video cameras footage have the same colors on each of these video shots? I started to using SypderCheckr 24 color chart. I started to use 3D LUT Creator software and its grid settings feature match, but it often doesn`t satisify me, because sometimes color match is awful and I don`t know what I am doing wrong. I even often see color differences on each GoPro video after finish color matching in 3D LUT Creator and exporting LUT from this software and applying it to Vegas Pro 17.

Is it possible to match colors from different video cameras and different color profiles, different digitial matrix of each video cameras in Vegas Pro 17? Can you give me the best tutorial to do it or some valuable tips how you do it in Vegas Pro 17? Maybe there is some tutorial directly from Magix which tells how to do it properly. Maybe you can advise me some book (maybe even for Vegas Pro) which explain it to me better.

2) I have also question how to change colors based on some harmony type which is described in https://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator/
My question is...we have two opposite colors in first harmony type. I would like to change the colors in my videos and use these two colors. How can I know which color of my raw footage should be replaced to the colors from color harmony type from this web page to finally see these colors on my footage and be happy that my brain will be satisfy of these colors change and I will see and think that these video colors don`t bites? How should I use this color wheel from 1st harmony type to have the best match to my raw footage? Can you give me some tutorial which describes the way to use these harmony types on videos in Vegas Pro 17? How can I apply these colors to my footage in Vegas Pro 17?

3) How do you approach to skin tones in Vegas Pro 17? For example... I increase saturation of my GoPro flat footage. This saturation covers the whole video frames. Everytime I see that people skin tones are oversaturated and in the same time my other objects from the same video frame should be even more saturated than this. How do you decrease skin tones (but only from skin) after applying saturation and increase saturation from other objects of the same video frame in Vegas Pro 17?

4) How do you approach to skin tones correction when there is i.e. 10 people on the footage? Every person has different skin tones. How do you do skin correction in that case?

5) Do you create own LUT in color grading feature in Vegas Pro 17 for each video you make? Or maybe you use the same LUTs for most of your videos? Probably you can not use the same LUT when you record the videos in different buildings when there is different lighting.

Please help me
Thank you in advance for help and sorry for such a long post
Regards
Marcin

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 1/2/2020, 11:42 AM

1. That question is about color matching, not grading. Search:

Graide
Baumann
AAV Colorlab

2. The same universal color wheels and relationships are available and identical in Vegas, which uses decimal indexing. Learn the RGB Color Model like it is a second language. Practice and learn on many types of images. Think of it as learning to play an instrument. Here is an RGBcmy identification quiz to set your goal (center is reference). Hint: I would never pick exact opposites as theme centers unless going for shock-and-awe effect. Grading implies something a little more subtle to me.

3. Same as #2.

4. Same as #3.

5. I defer to better heads than mine on LUTS. Just learning.

RogerS wrote on 1/2/2020, 7:03 PM

I'd switch to the LeemIng LUT for matching and would follow the recommended settings closely. Avoid SLOG 3 in 8 bit cameras.

fr0sty wrote on 1/2/2020, 7:09 PM

To elaborate, Graide, etc. are plugins you can download to do color matching. Vegas has its own color matching tool as well, though it isn't as good. You may try using it as a starting point, however. To use it, go to effects, select color match, then capture the preview screen of the color source you want to use in the first panel, capture a preview screen sample of the video you want to match to the first video's color in the second panel, and it will show you the result on the bottom. There is a strength slider that you can use to adjust how much of the effect is applied.

As for LUTs, yes, they are very useful. For instance, you can use a LUT to promote a color grade from the event level to the track, media, or project level of effects. For example, I have shot some video with my Panasonic S1 (Highly recommended if you're in the market for a new cam) in VLOG. I grade it to the way I like, but Vegas' color grading system only works at the event level, clip by clip, I cannot grade an entire track or the whole project at once. So, I grade that clip how I like it, now I want all my clips on the track to look that way. So, I save a LUT. From there, I reset all my color grading that I did (because if I don't, the grade will still be there when I apply my LUT, so all settings will get multipled 2x), and then apply the LUT to the track effects using the Vegas LUT plugin. Now all the clips look like that first one did. You can then open the color grading panel on each subsequent clip and fine tune from there.

Also, once you come up with looks that you like, you can store them easily as LUTs and share them with your friends.

Here's a use case where it would come in handy. I film music festivals, though I usually do not edit what we film, the head of our crew does. I do, however, sometimes color the video and do vfx/motion graphics. So, instead of him having to send me a hard drive with all the video on it so I can grade the video, He can send me a nice high quality clip (prores or something like that) of each scene that is only a few seconds long, so the file sizes are really small and easy to send online. I then can color each of those clips on the other side of the country, and send him back a group of LUTs to apply to each scene that are small enough to send as e-mail attachments, and he can instantly apply my grade to his footage and render out the final cut.

RogerS wrote on 1/2/2020, 8:19 PM

Now that I'm at a computer I'll elaborate a bit more as well.

Paul Leeming did a lot of this work for you with the Leeming LUT, which helps bring camera colors back to the REC 709 video standard. It's what I recommend given the number of different cameras you have.

That said it's not magic and you can do a lot of this by hand with tools in Vegas. Chart matching software doesn't have a great reputation (even within Resolve, for example) and I wouldn't rely on it.

First, enable video scopes in Vegas (View/Window/Video Scopes) You need to match exposures while keeping in mind that a camera like the a7iii has far more dynamic range than a GoPro, so if you want them to be exact you'll end up increasing the a7iii's contrast at the expense of the tonal range it's capable of capturing. Your Spyderchecker chart's grayscale patches will help you match the contrast of these cameras- use the waveform in Vegas and crop in on just the B&W patches

You need to white balance here, too. Vegas has a white balance Fx that works. Check that the patches are neutral using the RGB parade to see if R=G=B. IF there are casts in the highlights or shadows, fix using color curves or possibly the 3 way color corrector.

The second issue is color- here a CMYRGB set of patches is useful. That seems to be the next color row on your chart. Crop in on just this and now use the vectorscope to see how close or far they are. You can use the secondary color corrector or NewBlue's "selective hue" Fx to select a narrow range of tones to fix. This is also how you fix your overall skin tones- not recommended to try to mask and fix 10 different people when overall color adjustments should get them to look realistic and attractive.

You can copy and paste effects between clips to save time and then just tweak colors if the light or white balance changed slightly. You can also do the same with LUTs as described above though you lose the ability to just adjust one Fx in the chain, such as white balance (you can add a white balance Fx before the LUT though).

marcinzm wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:08 AM

1. That question is about color matching, not grading. Search:

Graide

Baumann

AAV Colorlab

2. The same universal color wheels and relationships are available and identical in Vegas, which uses decimal indexing. Learn the RGB Color Model like it is a second language. Practice and learn on many types of images. Think of it as learning to play an instrument. Here is an RGBcmy identification quiz to set your goal (center is reference). Hint: I would never pick exact opposites as theme centers unless going for shock-and-awe effect. Grading implies something a little more subtle to me.

3. Same as #2.

4. Same as #3.

5. I defer to better heads than mine on LUTS. Just learning.

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Thank you MusicVd for your reply. I downloaded and installed Graide from this link: https://www.semw-software.com/en/colormatch/. At last it did the job. I would paste the video frames after applying Graide plugin to this post, but I have children show there and I don`t have parent`s acceptance to do so. But final effect is great. I am very impressed, because I didn`t even use color chart to match the colors, but the result was great. Every video camera shots are the same. I did also correction in shadows on GoPro7 shot.

I would like to know how this Graide color match or simply color matching works. What parameters color matching change? Hue/saturation or more? Can you explain it to me? Does every color change individually during color matching?

I was searching over Baumann and only found wikipedia explaination. Are there any Vegas Pro plugin which bases on Baumann theory? Or maybe it is AAV Colorlab?

Musicvid wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:11 AM

As far as I know the Baumann Color Match plugin is still available.

Did you search this forum??

You will need to ask the third party plugin developers how their algorithms work. They are not made by Magix.

marcinzm wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:11 AM

I'd switch to the LeemIng LUT for matching and would follow the recommended settings closely. Avoid SLOG 3 in 8 bit cameras.

I was watching SLOG3 and NLG3 comparision videos and they recommend using NLG3 in A7III. Are there any exceptions of using NLG3 in Sony A7III? In which case SLOG3 is better to use?

marcinzm wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:19 AM

To elaborate, Graide, etc. are plugins you can download to do color matching. Vegas has its own color matching tool as well, though it isn't as good. You may try using it as a starting point, however. To use it, go to effects, select color match, then capture the preview screen of the color source you want to use in the first panel, capture a preview screen sample of the video you want to match to the first video's color in the second panel, and it will show you the result on the bottom. There is a strength slider that you can use to adjust how much of the effect is applied.

As for LUTs, yes, they are very useful. For instance, you can use a LUT to promote a color grade from the event level to the track, media, or project level of effects. For example, I have shot some video with my Panasonic S1 (Highly recommended if you're in the market for a new cam) in VLOG. I grade it to the way I like, but Vegas' color grading system only works at the event level, clip by clip, I cannot grade an entire track or the whole project at once. So, I grade that clip how I like it, now I want all my clips on the track to look that way. So, I save a LUT. From there, I reset all my color grading that I did (because if I don't, the grade will still be there when I apply my LUT, so all settings will get multipled 2x), and then apply the LUT to the track effects using the Vegas LUT plugin. Now all the clips look like that first one did. You can then open the color grading panel on each subsequent clip and fine tune from there.

Also, once you come up with looks that you like, you can store them easily as LUTs and share them with your friends.

Here's a use case where it would come in handy. I film music festivals, though I usually do not edit what we film, the head of our crew does. I do, however, sometimes color the video and do vfx/motion graphics. So, instead of him having to send me a hard drive with all the video on it so I can grade the video, He can send me a nice high quality clip (prores or something like that) of each scene that is only a few seconds long, so the file sizes are really small and easy to send online. I then can color each of those clips on the other side of the country, and send him back a group of LUTs to apply to each scene that are small enough to send as e-mail attachments, and he can instantly apply my grade to his footage and render out the final cut.

Thank you for your explanaition. I did the same so far, but I was not satisfied of my own color grading applications. So far I did in the same way of many youtube video tutorials and color charts use. Color matching with Graide plugin did the work I wanted to. I know that LUT exporting is great feature in Color grading tool in Vegas Pro 17, but maybe in the future I will do better color grading and I will use it more often. I have to increase my knowledge of color grading. If you have any good video tutorials please share it. I will really apprieciate it. Thank you.

RogerS wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:32 AM

I'd switch to the LeemIng LUT for matching and would follow the recommended settings closely. Avoid SLOG 3 in 8 bit cameras.

I was watching SLOG3 and NLG3 comparision videos and they recommend using NLG3 in A7III. Are there any exceptions of using NLG3 in Sony A7III? In which case SLOG3 is better to use?

Watching YouTube experts is the first mistake. Seriously though, SLOG 3 is not the best profile to use with the A7III or any other 8-bit Sony camera. The only reason to use it is to match footage from professional cameras shot with SLOG 3. The problem is the extreme compression risks banding and other color artifacts.

What's a better option? S-LOG 2. HLG. Cine 2/cine. Creative Style (neutral). These are presented in decreasing order of dynamic range. Dynamic range isn't everything, though, ease of exposure and resilience to breaking down from further corrections. Personally I use Cine 2 with the a6500, a6600 and Sony RX100IV as it's easy to work with and has enough dynamic range.

marcinzm wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:39 AM

I have just found such link: http://www.fbmn-software.com/en/color-match.html

Is it this plugin? I was watching video in this page and it should be good for me.

vkmast wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:49 AM

As far as I know the Baumann Color Match plugin is still available.

Did you search this forum??

You will need to ask the third party plugin developers how their algorithms work. They are not made by Magix.

The link here still seems to work: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/multicam-color-fx--91983/#ca549352

edit: it's the same @marcinzm

Musicvid wrote on 1/3/2020, 7:56 AM

I have just found such link: http://www.fbmn-software.com/en/color-match.html

Is it this plugin? I was watching video in this page and it should be good for me.

Yes.