COLOR CORRECTION?

This is what I look at when I edit :)

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE COLOR BABY
..is the sky really that color....

So it's another 2:13am late night blog and I have just wrapped up a good two hour video editing session on my computer. That means I edited a wedding ceremony, checked to make sure all the sound levels were perfect, and made the color of my presentation...believable.

If you've read my biography on my website, you probably know by now that I am an ex-Hollywood screenwriter turned wedding guru. If you didn't know that...now you know. (And according to G.I.JOE, knowing is half the battle!) Because of my artistic history, this turns me into somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to my craft...or in this case, crafts.

If everything goes according to plan, it takes me roughly about 3 days to complete a wedding video presentation. It takes me roughly 1 day to edit the ceremony and to color correct it, 2 to piece together all the b-roll sequences to the ceremony, and the last day is spend rendering the completed piece to DVD or Bluray. One of the questions I often get asked by professionals and clients concerns the equipment that I use for my weddings because the footage looks awesome.

In all honesty, I use the highest grade prosumer camera there is out there on the market. The quality is quite good, but once it's color corrected, it really gets nice.

Here are some examples of how footage on my cameras look like with and without color correction.

Raw HD footage...plain and boring.

Adding color, the right colors, make all the difference doesn't it...

There are not many professionals in the wedding or movie industry that know how to color correct footage correctly. In fact, color correction in the movie industry is an entire industry within itself. Luckily, I am probably the exception to the rule as I can turn almost any footage into gold. By just hanging around the right people in California, I learned through observation and osmosis how to restore color in film footage utilizing a program called Avid Symphony. In the past 5 years, the tools in Avid Symphony had trickled down to Avid's editing line, Media Composer, a program I use religiously to edit. Now I can turn dull HD footage, into some real pieces of work that look as though they were shot on a 200k camera.

One rule though applies to when performing any type of edit, especially when it comes to video or film editing. Story is king, everything else comes second. This means that the story actually affects how I edit, including how I color correct. When the mood of the wedding gets warmer, I always add a little more red, pinks and yellows, to subtly enhance that "love" feeling. This of course goes unnoticed, and is recognized more by your subconscious than anything else. After all, editing, technically, is a subtle invisible art. If you do it correctly, no one notices you did a great job.

Every "cut" is color corrected, and color matched to the other active cameras. How many cuts are their in a wedding video? Too many to count! Let's just say the process of color correcting is rather tedious.

Talking about cutting, or editing, this too also an art that you've probably heard of when it comes to video. I'll talk about this art form in my next upcoming articles. Hope I didn't bore you!


Steven Young
The Wedding Guy