A few months ago I edited a story that had some problems.  Apparently the gain was turned up pretty high by accident on the camera.  As you watch the video you can see the noise in the story.  The gain being on so high effected the video in many ways as you’ll see.  I did my best to color correct this story.  I thought I would take you threw my process.

Our story for this post is One with the Sled.  It’s completely color corrected on my Youtube site.

I’ll put screen grabs here of sections of the story both color corrected and not to help to show you what I did.

The first shot of the package looked like this at [:00]

And here it is color corrected.

I’m not an expert color correcter.  I don’t have a monitor for color correction in my edit bay.  So a lot of this I’m ball-parking and using the scopes as best as I can.  So what did I do for this shot?  First off I dropped the Color Corrector filter (in Final Cut) on this clip.  The first thing I did then was use the eye dropper and found some white in the shot.  I choose the white on the snow sled closest to us where is says 686.  I didn’t mess with the Hue wheel at all.  Next I dropped down the whites to get the shot below 100%.  I turned on show excess luma in my viewer and canvas window to help me make sure shot the shots were broadcast safe.  Here what my filter looked like when I was done.

I still wasn’t satisfied with this so I added the RGB balance filter as well.  Here a screen grab of what I came up with for that filter

I saved both filters into my favorites bin and moved on.

Here the next shot in the package.

and it color corrected.

I copied and pasted the RGB balance filter and the color corrector from the previous shot.  Luckily all I had to do was bring down the whites just a bit to get it broadcast safe.  I add these two filters making only minor adjustments to all the shots until I got to the interview shot.  Here is the original version.

Just copying and pasting filter I get this

A little too blue for me.

First thing I do is re-white balance using the eye dropper.  That immediately got rid of some of the blue but many colors are flattened.  So I start messing with the RGB balance filter

Here is my final version

of the corrected shot.

Here is a screen grab of my RGB balance filter setting for this shot

I continue on making minor adjustments with these filters until I get to another difficult spot.  Take a look at this shot

I frankly messed with this shot till I was fed up.  Here is what I came up with

The combination of her off green jacket, the off red helmet, and the blue sky was a difficult set of colors to work around. I sacrificed the sky for a better Kellie.  The sky is a little too blue but quite frankly I was running out of time.

I used the same filter setting for these shots as well with only some minor tweaking.

Before

‘

and after

I got a bluer sky again.  But the color at the front of the image, the yellow and black of the snow mobile, are better.  Kellie colors also match the previous shots.

The RGB Balance filter really helped me bring back colors, especially blues and whites.

Here an original shot

Here it is just color corrected. it’s hard to see the difference between these two screen grabs but it’s there.

and here it is with the RGB Balance filter added.

Quite often during the color correction process I would fix the shot with color corrector.  Then, fix the shot more with RGB Balance.  Then, I would go back and tweak the color corrector filter.  I often jump back and forth between these filter until I was satisfied with the shot.

After I color corrected the entire story I nested the sequence

With the gain on so high there was a lot of noise in the video.  I used something called Temporal Noise Reduction from Nattress Big Bag of Tricks.  It’s a pretty affordable add on that comes in handy from time to time.

I learned a lot from editing this story.  I’m glad to pass it on to you.