Week 13: Final Submission.

The final assignment. What a project. What a failure.

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It took a lot of work. But a lot of that was under the hood and split over a lot of days. In total, I lost much sleep, with numbers of all nighters, late nights, and all day stints. There were issues as I upgraded my system from CS4 to CS6, transferring things, and then of course the general issues that After Effects loves to do.

This is a good example of what my scene looked like at the end, with everything simplified into separate compositions per scene for simple positioning and final effects. I had to do a lot of grouping to allow me to add effects on top of the effects already there, but in per scene context. In terms of workflow, this saved a lot of trouble.

The first three or four scenes only had post effects, with a stack of colour correction, some grain removal and sharpening and a slight vignette that was set to a soft light blending mode. I'm not a fan of the crude darkening that decreasing the opacity on a masked solid does. It doesn't create as nice blacks, but none of the other settings really stood out as effective. Whereas soft light is a very subtle effect that I like.

What I ended up noticing is that After Effects has a very crude handling of blacks and whites and that if I wanted to do things properly, I'd have to manually mask and overlay multiple layers of effects to get what I wanted.

This sounded like a pain and a mess. So I went with what you see there, which is carefully balanced blacks and whites, slightly underexposed and a clear, slightly yellowed desaturation. The reds were pulled back and the cyans pulled up a bit. It's a slightly uncomfortable effect, and that was the idea. To make the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable in the establishing shots.

The glowing ball in the pupils and the dilate was tricky. While the process of the effects themselves was simple, I had to track each eye's rotation and movement. This took about twenty tries before I got a track to stick to each. The tracking was done on separate copies of the footage, one for the left eye and one for the right. Then I froze the frames, and masked out each iris, then parented them to the null that the tracking data was applied to.

This immediately caused an offset and stretching of the iris, I have no idea why, but either way it was annoying to have to fix.

The dilate was a simple bulge effect on the masked pupil. The spinning glowy thing was the Thingymajig from Andrew Kramer with a mosaic, inverted edge detect, and glow. Mosaic is something I particularly like for its versatility as a vfx base, as you can do quite a lot with that.

It was also used in the final two shots where cheap lens flares can be scene if you pay attention. This was done by crunching the footage down to a few bright spots, mosaicing that, direction blurring that, then adding a mosaic, inverted edge detect, mosaic and glow. Then some final colour tweaks. The final effect once applied as a screen and with the opacity lowered ends up being a controllable dynamic lens flare.

The lens flare has been bumped up for illustration purposes. As you can see, it's not blinding or all over the place. Though the surfaces that have a bright enough colour value to be a part of the flare seem pretty arbitrary. This is easy to control in the curves and colour section of the effect though.

In scene 6 you can see a track run off briefly into the distance before vanishing. I'm still surprised I got a track on the table given how little variation in colour and how much movement there was. I had to manually track the last bit, but still... It only took about ten tries.

The effect was done using CC balls, mosaic, edge detect inverted (sounding familiar), and a bunch of other stacks to essentially get the effect you see there. I'm a big fan of generative effects as they save me time and trouble, rather than manually doing it. Though I did mask it manually, it's a tad erratic, but it's like it's trying to find a clear path. And I didn't have much footage to it in. The next scene was impossible to accurately track. I tried several times but gave up eventually. Too much movement out of the scene.

The final render was done in Blender. I really don't enjoy rendering glass. It takes a long time.

Anyway! That's the project. I'm sure there were a bunch of other effects I've missed. The button thingys are all after effects. No photoshop used. The game was footage from Borderlands. I had a friend do the camera work. So thanks goes out to him. It would've been complicated on my own.

Audio was me.

The track was Circuit Hell by smartpoetic on Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/111161

Week 12: FreddieW - VGHS

Video Game High School.

 

The epic series that everyone wished they'd made, but FreddieW and Co. actually went ahead and made. Showing off his skill at producing quality storylines, hilarious jokes and all round gamer comedy that couples itself with high quality special effects.

What's impressive about VGHS is how well it comes together. The effects aren't over blown, but they serve the movie well, perfectly suiting the gamer atmosphere and game based reality. And that's not to mention adding just the right amount of cheese, like a flying two personed rainbow cycle ridden by two bullies at the beginning of the movie.

This is one of those movies where the visual effects are an integral part of it. Instead of aiming for realism, there is a deliberate air of separation from reality. They augment the live footage so as to offset it from the mundane reality of non-game life. Granting the actors a larger than life vision when they're playing their games, but in the real life, fairly mundane.

Indeed, the VFX make a lot of reference to gaming. With debris and characters vanishing from the world soon after they die or hit the ground. Explosions are big and bombastic. Instead of blood spurts, fire and pieces of debris fall off characters when they're shot.

The colours are bright and clear, and in line with the slice of life style of the series, there is very little stylisation of any of the shots. Perhaps to grant a feeling of normal life to the viewers, rather than a stylisation of the world. This is, of course, deliberate, as care has been taken to allow for a proper amount of depth without pushing any of the elements strongly in any direction. Colours are quite clearly separated, allowing for easy viewing and decreasing the visual clutter; thus allowing viewers to focus on the action, rather than the backdrops.

Freddie Wong has never looked this good.

Week 11: FreddieW - Old School vs. New School

I could post almost any one of his videos. FreddieW is synonymous with youtube VFX. His videos have an excellent sense of humour and he frequently works with small time stars. High quality productions, the use of excellent VFX and a behind the scenes of most of his videos, mean that he is in many ways someone to aspire to as well as surpass.

This video and its behind the scenes show a lovely integration with live action footage and 3D effects, as well as the challenges associated with this.

Of particular note was the difficulty of shooting in public places. One is often asked to move on and apparently the team spent many hours running around the city being told to move out of places and not film. Of course as a video producer, Freddie was obligated to do as they asked.

Another was the usual difficulty of putting 3D footage into live scenes. One has to shoot multiple takes and hope that one of them works out well for the digital footage to be put on top, and any scenes with it in them need to be shot with that in mind. This becomes more problematic when the camera is interacting and zooming with an invisible object in 3D space. Especially rotating. It's time consuming to match 3D footage to camera rotation if you want to do it accurately.

The actual 3D models themselves, though well animated and excellently rendered, were hardly examples of difficult 3D modelling projects. Though certainly the number becomes a question of time.

This particular video also shows an excellent example of framing, where the Lara cosplayer was in a little box that made her look like she was in a spaceship, when in reality is was a duct pipe lookalike as revealed in the behind the scenes. The lighting and close scene compositing made all the difference.

Week 10: The Rock in the Road.

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A five year project by what appears to have been many many students was recently featured on CGsociety.

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/rock_in_the_road

The animated short, a small story about a boy trying to get around a rock in the road became a much larger project, causing many students to pick it up and put it down as a core team worked on it through most of time, even after their studies had been completed.

The animation looks like a slightly lesser quality pixar piece, with a few rendering issues and one shot where the apples in the cart go from yellow to red, then back again. But apart from a few technical hitches, the animation is extremely high quality and the storytelling as professional as can be.

What's impressive is that it was done entirely by students, even if the time frame was far longer than the usual a project of this scale would take. Though on student hours, that isn't surprising.

It shows, once again, the talent that a small group of dedicated individuals and time can show. It becomes even more impressive when they tell of how they built their own tools, a custom rigger and unified mesh system, and overcame a mountain of simulation and technical difficulties to put out the final animation.

As someone who is a generalist in 3D, I can see the quality of the final product, even though I may turn aside at some of the stylistic and artistic choices, some of these being technical, like the way V-Ray renders certain kinds of skin which I've never liked as I feel the clay look to be a cop out, and the overapplication of bloom in some shot; I cannot help but applaud them for the effort they put into something so large and to have pulled through after working for so many years. Sometimes the the technical process of creating these products is a long and tiresome one. In fact it often is. So it goes without saying that these people need all the pats on the back they can get.

Then there's the fact that they were featured by CGSociety, something will help the careers of those involved immensely.

Week 9: OFFF Lille 2012 Main Titles

A showcase of independant creativity, satire and what appears to be general fun while film making. OFF Lille is everything I wish I could create.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/53323000" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/53323000">OFFF Lille 2012 Main Titles</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/offf">OFFF, let&#039;s feed the future</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

The dev's clearly enjoy what they create, and the quality of the effects is impressive. OFF Lille takes a joy in satirising old action movies, Asian cinema and film in general. The overblown cinema noise and grain, heavy sepia wash and flattened depth manage to at once reminisce of films from days long gone and laugh at them.

The energetic initial titles and Multicolour logo reflect the old days when a presenter would announce the movie or studio loudly and Technicolour was a trademark used worldwide.

It only gets better from there. The majority of the film is shot with short takes, quick zooms and dramatic shots that make no attempts to hide the fact that they're being deliberately dramatic. Cheesy audio, confusing Asian villains that at once call up Hollywood cinema and the old Bond series evildoers, and a hero that hardly inspires confidence set the tone to an amused comedy. No attempts to explain the action on scene are made, nor is any character development done. But nonetheless, the sets, action, character customes and film angles constantly reference other cinema creations which those with any exposure at all will see.

Despite the deliberately crude construction, the camera work is slick and smooth, the actors get into their roles and the effects are very proffessionally done. The balance of dark colours and light is just right, the composition of each scene clear and well thought out, and the colour picking has been carefully chosen. Everything was deliberate, from the cheesy grease sound of the hero slicking his clearly not greasy hair to the overblown laughter of the villain who was clearly lipsyncing. 

That's what makes the video so enjoyable. It's carefully prepared by people who clearly enjoy what they do and want to have fun doing it.

Week 8 - Assessment Submission

Well, I've finally gotten around to submitting. It's taken a while, (A combination of sickness, unrelentingly busy life and work) and I can't say I'm all that happy with it. But I made a serious mistake trying to use the rotoscoping tool on camcorder footage.

Warning to all future vfx artists. Never. Ever. Use that with the camcorder footage. You will find yourself in hell.

But, me being the dogged person that I am, ran with it, and after what has to have been around five days of hardcore frame by frame rotoscoping, I got something that looked like a dogs breakfast.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience, and once I can get to the more functional parts of using after effects, things become a lot easier, the process of creating something that looks excessively kiddish entirely in after effects (with initial cutting in premiere) was a tricky one, but it seems to have worked.

The rotoscoping tool is quite powerful, regardless of my irritations, most of it's limitations revolve around edges where the colour differentiation was minimal. In a white black contrast situation it would run perfectly. It's intelligence is selective, sometimes it does what you wanted, other times it seems to do the exact opposite. Even in situations where the colour differentiation was minimal, different shades of black, for instance, it still ran like a champ, but required hand painting of the edges. Since I couldn't find a way to change the brush, this was a bit like wielding a sledgehammer for something a rapier would have been more appropriate for. I'm personally just happy I was able to rotoscope a hand mask. Holy **** that is a pain in the rear end. A combination of poor footage, movement, glare burnout, and poor pixel resolution, as well as a chugging program, meant that the process was a slow, and painful one. I went through many episodes and films while waiting for the tool to generate for each frame, I can tell you.

So. Things to learn for next time.

Greenscreen.

Greenscreen.

Greenscreen.


And ummm. Shoot in hi-def with a proper camera, anything with a proper lens. The hi-res footage, though slower to work with, allows one to work with a much higher information base, clearer footage, and a generally produces better results, faster. Additionally, colour shifting with footage like this is miles easier.

Youtube video here.

Week 7: Dubstep Guns

I'm not going to lie. I just like the VFX in this video. They're overblown, and CorridorDigital have worked with Red Giant in promotion stuff for a while, so this is easy stuff for them, and as a few other youtubers have proven, they can be replicated.

But who cares, it's bombastic, dubstep and laser guns. With cheesy characters and a hit squad called The Drop. The effects are very well integrated, flowing to the beat, with the camera jittering along with the dubstep music. The timing would have been difficult, and the footage was shot with the VFX in mind, which when doing anything digitally, is an important factor to keep in mind. Knowing what's going to be in the schene beforehand keeps you from needing to reshoot and allows for the best integration of the two.

The stylising of character introductions is a nice touch, with retro neon colour swipes putting the characters into dramatic pose make for an amusingly over dramatic entrance. Actually, all the characters are introduced individually, with one pair getting a Mortal Kombat style flames and axes entrance.

What's interesting is that this video spawned an inspired video, despite having no plot, correlation or really anything except bombastic special effects and clever shooting.

This was done by another youtube group, PVQvideo who, while having fairly overdone colour correction shoot an interesting story of combat, mind trips, and imagination all the the beat of dubstep and other electronic pieces. Obviously inspired by the music and taking the CorridorDigital effects a step further. Indeed, they reference their sires by putting a clip from Dubstep Guns in the video and using it to push the plot forward, however crudely.

Either way, once again the much hated music genre has spawned yet another colourful and amusing movie depiction. It's strange how something so hard and grungy could spawn so much colour. I guess that's human interpretation for you.

Week 6 - The Third and The Seventh

If you call yourself a vfx artist and you haven't seen the Third and the Seventh...

Well... You should have. This is an exquisitely created and rendered film. Beautifully abstract and beautifully artful.

The Third and The Seventh

The film is digital. That is to say that it was rendered, and is not simply photography.

It could be called a form of visual masturbation. A way of saying, 'Hi, look at me. I'm amazing. Bow in awe.' And I have certainly accused people of doing exactly this. But in the case of this film, it is clear that the artist, Alex Roman, has a powerful understanding of the design principles underpinning his virtual construction, and an incredibly deep understanding of Art. From colour, to depth of field, space, framing, mood, atmosphere, balance and meaning. And I say meaning tentatively because one is not completely sure how much intended meaning there is in the film, and how much of a straight form and design work that is it.

The film is clearly a showcase of talent, and that talent is prodigious. This is something that can make even experienced CGI artists stare in awe and wonder and learn from. It is a film that can be analysed, broken down and examined in minute detail and it will hold up.

In some ways, this film is the very foundation of what design CGI is. Without the trappings and burdens of other areas, this is a pure art and design work. Immensely beautiful, and unmatched. Principles are not just applied, they are deeply understood. They are not used gratuitously to cover up ineptitude, bu they have been studied, understood, and used with great care.

I gush on about it, I fear, but the truth is, the only argument that can be mustered against a film like this is that it's entirely focused on iconic visual production. But that argument pales in the face of a reality that is inspirational and incredibly nuanced.  As the artist says:

"A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal."

The compositing breakdown can be found here: Compositing breakdown

Week 5 - Blender Compositing

This is a fairly new topic to the Blender community, though it's been done in the past, rarely have the tools available been sophisticated enough to composite live footage with digital footage as easily as it is now.

Now with the new features such as motion tracking and sweet core rendering improvements, one can finally use real footage and comp it with digital without enormous amounts of work.

The above video is a good example of the breakdown when using the blender program. The video is breakdown of the following one:

While the actual composite would need a bit more work as there is a bit of telltale saturation and contrast issues with different lighting in the scenes, that's easy to rectify. The salient point is that now there is a free alternative to the current industry heavyweights that has actually started to be useful for vfx work.

Blender has long been the underdog in the 3D world thanks to a pipeline that is somewhat difficult to integrate into a studio environment. While this is still an issue, the gap is rapidly closing as various studios start to stagnate between their nearly releases with nominally decent upgrades sometimes, and other times not so much. Sometimes even a reversion.

This is in stark contrast to Blender's constant and astounding rate of improvement. Features and versions are updated on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly basis. Thanks to a thriving open source community, this is one of the few examples of open source software actually working. Not only has it stayed lightweight and usable, but has continued to mature and develop features that, while rarely completely rivaling their purist counterparts (Nuke is obviously a better tracker and vfx program, Zbrush a far better sculpting program, and so on), it still holds up against the 3D modelling programs, and the recent render enhancements, simulation additions and other massive packages has allowed it to serve as a decent, understated option for those without thousands to shell out on mainstream packages and plugins.

A look at the blender gallery proves that the software is firmly capable of standing on it's own, but it's heartening to see that in an industry where some of the commercial counterparts aren't innovating, at least the little kid in the corner is not only innovating, but also catching up to it's big daddy's in leaps and bounds.

The question that remains is, what happens if the little kid grows up to be a legitimate contender for the throne?

Week 4 - An Interview from the Matte Painter in Star Trek

This post will be referencing this article:

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/star_trek_next_gen

In this CGSociety article, we get a short look into the process that the matte painter behind the Star Trek: Original Series remaster, Max Gabl. It's often interesting to hear the thoughts of the artists who are responsible for creating the scenery behind what we see in movies.

For those unfamiliar, a matte painting is essentially painted footage that is combined with the live footage. Matte paintings are frequently used and in particular in situations where shooting live is too difficult, expensive or actually impossible. While 3D renders are used a lot, matte painting has an advantage in terms of the time taken, and the pure ability to recreate. Especially in terms of terrain, where generators can sometimes create somewhat unexpected effects, and render times of any CGI can be very long.

In this case, the artist had a very quick turnaround, and discusses how he would create up to 3 planets in the course of a day, quickly brushing in 3 different layers of detail; the surface, clouds and atmosphere; using references from NASA images for realism. These paintings would then be projected or mapped onto a sphere and rendered in Cinema 4D.

What's interesting is that when he started on the series, it would take him 3 or 4 days to complete a single planet. Which is quite a considerable amount of time, but considering how a single episode could feature multiple planets for large number of shots, it was important to get a strong sense of realism and detail. The planets had to look just right, and he would liaison with the art director to ensure an absolute sense of quality. It's certainly impressive to see such an increase in speed and skill in what would have been a relatively short space of time.

Matte painters are frequently overlooked in discussions on a film outside of the effects industry. Their intense application of detail and frequent hand painted photorealism is impressive considering that they often knock out these immense paintings in the course of a day or three. In addition to this, they're often expected to be proficient in compositing in various programs, as well as 3D. Essentially meaning that they are not only very highly technically proficient, but also multi-talented across multiple disciplines and skill sets.

This frequently means that they know a lot of tricks and time savers to push high quality content out as quickly as possible. Like his process for backgrounds on a planet; where because the camera didn't move he was able to create them as 2D images with photoshop and the occasional 3D architecture render.

This is in contrast to his process for planets, which are animated and rendered in Cinema 4D. In addition to all this is the implicit rule in 3D.

'Don't make what you can fake.'

"For The Original Series, I usually created one high-resolution 2D image of every planet. We projected that 2D image onto a 3D sphere that was rotating, but only slightly, so as not to give away the fact that it was a 2D projection. For The Next Generation, you are looking at fully textured spheres that rotate quite a bit more, sometimes over 90 degrees, and that means much more surface has to be created."

Week 3 - Asian M/V Lonely

I spotted this music video a week or so ago in an asian restaurant while catching up with a friend. It really caught my eye, because of the really interesting use of visuals. I can't say the same of the quality of music, sadly.

What is immediately apparent is the way in which the video has been washed out. Indeed, this video is an incredibly well applied use of colour, because if you take a second look at it you'll notice that it shifts between a number of different colour effects. Rather than sticking to one set of hues, we actually see quite a broad application of effects.

Despite this broad use of effects, both the way it was shot, and the way that it moved between scenes and colour palettes made the effects seamless. Rather than being a jarring mishmash. Furthermore, it's important to note the subtlety. Quite often colour is used in really strong shades, whereas this was far more subtle. Noticeable, but really only because everything else was comparatively desaturated.

Much of the effects are in how the film was shot, with a lot of offscreen lights, expensive lenses, and excessive use of smoke machines. Indeed, the smoke that drifts across all the scenes helps blend the foreground and background together to not only create a more homogenous effect, but to also sell the twilight feeling of loneliness that's the central theme of the clip. Together these allow for a much broader sense of depth to the desaturation of the film and colours than what you'd get from straight grading of footage.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see how the video transfers from a pale, slightly pale orange/yellow tone  to a subtle green over white/grey. The shift is barely noticeable as the singers transition from the yellow skin tones to ghostly pale. After this they move out of the indoor scene to the outdoors road and without a pillar transition the colours are blended in over the course of a few seconds. You'll see them go from grey and white to mono greens, reds and skin tones. Indeed, there's an excellent separation of colours through much of the footage. Full colour washes are carefully applied and subtly applied.

Possibly to increase the apparent quality of the film, lens flares are applied lights, but selectively to the very bright ones. In all cases, these lens flares throw a particular shade of colour onto the footage, creating contrast and adding to the surreal footage.

Watch the footage and pay attention to when the singers pass a pillar, these are the transition sections of the film. Each singer is identified by a specific colour palette, related to her clothing, and while the blend is seamless, it is noticeable if you look for it.

See how much you can see in the footage, and what the editor allow to say in, and what they comped to work with the rest of the footage.

I'm certainly impressed with how much colour there is, despite the  deliberate washing out. That's largely the difference between the use of on set film effects and pure colour grading. The former gets a much deeper and richer balance of tones and colours, which the other is simply a way to control what you've already got.

Week 2 - Colour Correction Part 2

My Giddy aunties. Why are people so incompetent!?

Ok. So that's a tad over dramatic. Needless to say, After Effects is a perfectly effective and capable system for colour correction, there is absolutely no need to fork out hundreds for a plugin. It's quite clunky and not very user friendly (Sliders are far less intuitive than one of those colour circle thingys).

I started with this image that I rendered out in Terragen recently. I saved it as an OpenExr so I could take advantage of the extra information made available by the 32bit format. As you can see, it's fairly flat in terms of contrast and colour depth and so on. But there is quite a decent amount of colour variation. A good base to work from.

Note that examples will be illustrative of effects. And not really meant to be particularly strong aesthetically.

The first thing I noticed was that the exposure tool didn't work properly, thanks to the way After Effects interprets this kind of imagery. I checked a bit on OpenExr documentation, and someone mentioned EXtractoR. So I tested, and it did the job.

I actually blew the colours right down for this. The cloud arch had some nasty exposure issues.

Anyway, there isn't much point going through every detail, so here's a few pointers I've gotten from experimentation.

If you want a wash like colour correction, use Tritone and check Blend With Original. You get to pick the highlight, midtone and shadow colours and the blend makes it look less obvious. It's easy and quick. Note however, Tritone isn't particularly effective for all but a few general effects, you really want to use it to control the overall colour set, and layer on more effects.

For those who want a bit more control over their footage Gamma/Pedestal/Gain is an extremely powerful base to work with. As it essentially allows you to control those three effects per colour channel. Need to bump up the red? Drop the other two, add more contrast? Fiddle with the gain and gamma. In the end though, you can only work with what's there...

Other options for controlling colour levels include the Levels (individual controls), Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Colour.

The next and last point of call is a really powerful one, and that's the Change Colour tool. Which is dangerous if you use it too much, but it essentially does exactly what it says, changes whichever colour you want into another one. Don't like that nasty blue? No problem, use the eye dropper and pick it out, then get to work.
If you want to select multiple colours, you will need multiple layers of this, and be sure to fiddle with matching softness if you get nasty borders between colours.

To illustrate, I made the sun green. But I do not advise doing this quite so aggressively unless you want people to laugh at you, a lot.

Or you may want to reconsider your editing package...

Blender may be more usable, but unfortunately, at 1080p resolution, it'll be slower, especially when you start computing frame by frame. So don't go hopping over just yet peeps.

Till next time folks. 

Daniel Shawyer - Week 1 - Colour Grading PT1

This first week I didn't want to do anything particularly stressful. Something easy, something familiar, but necessary.

Colour Correction, or Colour Grading, depending on who you ask.

Turns out it's surprisingly more complicated in After Effects than I expected. I've done similar effects in software like Photoshop and Blender, and it's far simpler it seems.

What's irritating is that it's like when I looked up procedural rain to see if there was anything better than motion blurred rain. Turns out the most advanced tutorial for that was painted rain. The rest used motion blurring. Which is a poor and unrealistic effect.

So I took a few hours to create my own rain procedural editing. I never got around to doing the tutorial as it involved layer channels, heightmaps, noise, lens blur and a bunch of other layered effects that take a while to explain. It ended up looking suitably epic though.

Anyway, back on topic. After going through explanations of processes and the like, I really cannot find any systems that are satisfactory. Most people seem to be satisfied with a brief, crude vignette, + hue/hue saturation shift. Which is silly.

The following videos illustrate how this works:

This guy actually discusses some nice subtle techniques like tinting and vibrancy controls. he has a bit more of a refined process to his correction strategies, which was nice to see.


The other tutorials told you to grab a $400+ plugin to use instead. This is also silly, because After Effects is a massive editing suite and honestly should not require an external plugin to do something like colour grading.

The most popular plugin was Magic Bullet by Red Giant Software, who do a number of high quality video production plugins. The following video illustrates this:

Indeed, it seems to me that After Effects has missed a massive section of usability in it's toolset with regards to this. To take an example, Blender, a free and open source 3D rendering program has a better set of tools for colour grading and effects than After Effects does. Blender's compositing node system allows one to quickly and easy string together layers of effects that allow for massive control quickly. I'll find a screenshot comparing the two systems sometime next week when I spend a load of hours creating my own colour grading system.

Because the current system is absolutely, mind the British, bollocks.

I couldn't find any discussions on creating a clear high colour contrast effect you might see in a Korean or Japanese music video. Where the majority of the scenery is pale and the clothing and people are relatively high colour. Or where you have the reverse of this, the environments are high colour, as well as the clothing, but skin is pale and clear. This is due to cultural differences that I don't have time to discuss. An example of this can be seen in the recent Gangnam Style music video (even if part of the effect is from the camera's themselves.):

Noteably, though, Color Finesse seems to be a very powerful tool. It will be interesting to see what can be done with that. 

Part 2 next week. I'll create a few workflows and see if I can create a general colour grading system that allows one to control the various intricacies easily.

Testing

This is just a test