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