Just about anyone can master the very basics of video editing. But what distinguishes the amateurs from the pros is in the fine details: the timing of transitions, appropriate use of effects, and attention to the look of the footage. And part of making sure your footage looks good is the color balance.
When the color balance in your footage is off, color correction is a tool that needs to be in every video editor's skill set. But achieving good color results in your edited production starts well before entering the editing bay.
It all begins back when the video is captured. One of the key steps in ensuring that your footage will look correct is white balancing the camera for the environment the video is being captured in.
WHITE BALANCE
The human eye is far more sensitive to color than any video camera, and the human brain can naturally compensate when it's looking at objects under different lighting conditions. Incandescent lighting (also referred to as tungsten for the metal the filament is made from) contains far less blue than daylight, making objects look more yellow than they really are. But when you're in a room at night, your brain understands this, and when you look at a white object in the room, your brain sees it as white—not yellow. Video cameras, however, need to be told what the color white is in the environment you're shooting in for the footage to look correct. You've probably seen photos taken inside where the picture looks very yellow. This is because the camera thought (or was told) that it was shooting in daylight instead of under tungsten light.
Before you start shooting your video, you need to zoom in on a white balance card (a thick, bright-white piece of paper will work), and use the camera's controls to tell the camera that what it's looking at right now is the color white. Make sure the white card is in the light you will be shooting your subject in, not off to the side or so close to the camera that the lights are not reflecting off it. The camera can then correctly interpret the rest of the colors in the room.
This gets you a good way towards correctly captured footage, but there's something else you can do to assist in post-production to get the colors looking just right. Starting your shoot by capturing a few frames of a color chart can be helpful in post-production to fine-tune your colors. The X-Rite ColorChecker Passport is a nice color chart that was originally designed for photographers, and has lots of color chips in it for reference. But the aspect of this product that's nice for videographers is the gray scale area on the card, showing gradations from white through black. This will let you adjust highlight tones, mid-range tones and shadow tones separately in post-production. Additionally, it also has squares that add a little blue to the tone, and some that have a little more yellow-orange. If you color-correct based on these squares it will give you a color balance slightly warmer or cooler.
ENVIRONMENT
Another key to obtaining good color in your finished project is to do your editing in an environment designed for editing. The room should not be too bright or too dark—medium to medium-dim levels of room light are best. The ambient light of the room should not be brighter than your monitor.
The colors that your eye sees around your video monitors can also affect your overall perception of color. Don't have your monitor sitting on a yellow or green desk or in front of a bright red or blue wall. A neutral color such as a medium grey is good, and won't skew your color perception.
MONITORS AND OTHER EQUIPMENT
Ideally, a professional-grade video monitor should be used for viewing your video. Consumer-grade equipment is less likely to represent colors accurately, and using a consumer-grade interface (such as HDMI) can also introduce problems—HDMI devices may do their own dynamic “tweaking” of the video signal to alter it to what it thinks is best. DVI, component or HD-SDI connection will be less problematic. Professional-grade monitors can run into the thousands, but there are some available that may get you suitable results without the extreme costs. NEC sells the NEPA231WBK LCD monitor intended for situations where color rendering is more critical, and costs just over $500.
Once your environment is set up, the next step is calibrating your monitors. There are several good color-calibration devices available for a modest amount of money—the Pantone Huey Pro has given both of us good results, and relies less on the user to make judgment calls based on what they believe they are seeing. The device measures the output of the monitor directly and does the calibration automatically. Other makes and models are available—bhphotovideo.com and adorama.com are online retailers catering to the professional photographer and media producer, offering a good selection for you to pick from. And both let users review what they've purchased, helping you to pick products that will work best for you.
EDITING TOOLS
Once you've adjusted the camera to shoot the best footage possible, set up your environment for the best editing results, and calibrated your monitors to render colors as accurately as they are able, you are now ready to get the best results when color correcting your footage.
All professional video editing applications come with options for correcting the color of video clips. If your editor doesn't have one, you're not using a professional tool, and it's time to upgrade.
While there may be several color correction options to pick from; the one that gives you the most flexibility and the best results is the three-way color corrector. This lets you adjust the colors in three brightness bands—shadow, mid-tones, and highlights.
The three-way color corrector will present you with three color wheels, and typically each has two eyedroppers located near it. One eyedropper will cause the wheel to add more of the color you select; the other eye dropper is subtractive, and reduces that color in the image. For color correction, you'll want to use the subtractive dropper.
If you used a color chart like one mentioned above, set your scrub line or play head to the part of the footage showing the chart. Select the subtractive dropper for the highlight band, and click on the white square in the chart. The colors for the highlight band will now be adjusted so that this square is truly white.
Next, select the subtractive dropper from the mid-tone band adjuster, and click on a medium-grey square on the chart. And likewise, do the same for the shadow band with a black square.
If you didn't have a color chart to shoot at the start of your clip, do the same thing as if you had a chart, but you'll need to find objects in your footage that you know to be white, grey and black. If you can't find any, you will need to simply adjust each band manually based on what you see. If your monitor hasn't been color-balanced, or represents colors poorly, this is going to be difficult—thus the importance of having an appropriate monitor that's been calibrated.
Once you've completed this task, you know you have footage that's color corrected to a “neutral” setting. However, this may not give you the artistic effect you desire. This is where your creativity comes in. If this is a romantic candle-lit dinner scene, you don't want a neutral look—you want to have more yellow-orange tint to give it that candle-lit look. If you shot a color card like the X-Rite card mentioned earlier, you can color-balance based on the squares that will result in a warmer look. Or, you can tweak each adjustment level manually by skewing the mids and highs toward the yellow/orange part of the color wheel until you get the color appearance you desire. The color correction settings can usually be copy-and-pasted from one clip to another, so you only need to do the correction once for a particular scene. Some editors, like Sony Vegas, let you apply video effects to an entire track, enabling you to color-correct all your footage with one effect application.
All footage can improve with color correction—even the most perfect in-camera white-balanced shots can use some help. Experiment by going back to a previous project and use the color-correction techniques described above to tweak a few shots you thought looked good. You'll be surprised at the results. Plus, your on-camera talent will always appreciate you making them look warmer and friendlier, with a healthy color in their cheeks, and not merely neutral.
THE NEXT LEVEL
If you want even better color correction, you can step up to the tools that the professional color correctors use. Yes, there are people that do nothing but color correction for a living. And they use tools designed specifically for color correction, and those tools are often not cheap. If you're producing a one-off video for Sunday morning announcements, it would be overkill. However, if your church is led to produce feature-length movies as outreach and evangelism tools, more attention to color correction might be up your alley.
Blackmagic Design's Davinci Resolve is a widely used system that ranges in price from a “lite” version as a free download to a full version with a hardware control surface for $30,000. Or if you feel like the color corrector built into your Non-Linear Editing System (NLE) isn't quite up to snuff, you can buy a plug-in compatible with your NLE to augment your options. Mood from Yanobox just introduced a plug-in for Apple Final Cut, Motion and Adobe After Effects, providing another color-correcting option. Many other companies sell color correcting tools and plug-ins—it's just a matter of finding what works best for you. Inquiring on forums such as creativecow.net to learn what works for other users of your editing software is often very helpful.
The Internet is full of free tutorials and examples of color correcting footage or creating a “look” for your production. Watch these videos, even if it's not for your software. Learn what the colorists look for and how they make changes to create the image they are after. Doing so will train your eyes to detect the subtleties of colors in a shot. Use this new knowledge to make your productions better.
Remember, color correction is something that all footage can benefit from—it's not just to correct footage when you forget to white balance at the shoot. Tweaking the colors a little can help you get just the right look for the mood you're trying to achieve with a particular clip— warming up a scene for a comfortable, relaxing look, or cooling it down to make it a little more intense or energetic. Getting color correction into your toolbox makes you a more professional video editor, and brings your productions to the next level.
