Feature: Page (1) of 2 - 07/18/07

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Color correction can make or break a movie. It?s as important as having good sound. Having the right color can set the moods you are trying to convey to your viewers. Golden tones can help make things more cheerful. Bleach bypass made Saving Private Ryan look extremely authentic. My movie, Fiesta Grand, had a nice look in its raw format but I really wanted it to make an impression. But how do you color correct? This was something I fooled around with but never got too involved on prior films. Luckily we are in an age where powerful tools are at our disposal. No longer does the independent filmmaker have to dream about using the DaVinci. Let the rebellion begin!

Let me preface this by saying I did all my color correcting in Adobe After Effects. It has enhanced my movies on many occasions. It is my go to application for color correction tasks.

Getting prepared
You can jump into your favorite NLE and start the trial and error process but why should you? Attain some knowledge by reading books on the subject. Two really great books that I highly recommend and refer to constantly are Adobe After Effects: Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen and The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap by Stu Maschwitz. With these in your arsenal you will be virtually unstoppable. Both authors also keep well updated blogs and will answer your questions too. These two are powerful mentors to the community.

First things first
Since I edited my movie in Premiere Pro 2 as part of the Adobe Production Studio, getting the project into After Effects is easy. In After Effects go to File > Import > ?your project.prproj?. This will take you to a dialogue window asking if you want to select a sequence. Use the drop down to find a particular sequence or select them all. Also you can choose to import with or without audio.

Make sure you set your project to 16- or 32-bit. This will give you a lot more control over your colors.

Hey where are my transitions?
 Although After Effects wonderfully imports your entire timeline flawlessly, it does not import your transitions. What it does, however, is make a placeholder solid where the transition occurs. This is a big help. All I had to do since I was using cross dissolves was to set two opacity keyframes where the transition occurred and set one at 0% and the other at 100%. When I rendered the transitions everything worked great.

It?s also good to note that After Effects won?t import any text you may have done in Premiere Pro. No problem. Once again I received placeholders where I had any text.

Pre-Comp for the win!
Do yourself a favor and separate your scenes into several pre-comps. This will be a huge help when you want to go back and make changes to certain areas of your film. It?s just good housekeeping to do this. After rendering out my master I found one frame of black that somehow I overlooked. Rather than pull my hair out I simply went into the comp for that area, did the fix and rendered that part out. I then went into Premiere and overlayed the fix on the timeline.

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