Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 1337)

This chapter covers the following:
• Why Color Correct Your Footage? (p. 1337)
• Color Correction Starts During Your Shoot (p. 1339)
• Managing Color During Post-Production (p. 1340)
• The Final Cut Pro Color Correction Process (p. 1342)
In any post-production workflow, color correction is generally one of the last steps in
finishing an edited program. Final Cut Pro color correction tools give you precise control
over the look of every clip in your project by letting you adjust the color balance, black
levels, midtone levels, and white levels of individual clips.
Why Color Correct Your Footage?
There are a number of reasons why you may want to color correct your footage:
• Make sure that key elements in your program look the way they should: Every scene of
your program has key elements that are the main focus of the viewer. In a narrative or
documentary video, the focus is probably on the people in the shot. In a commercial,
the key element is probably a product shot, such as the label of a bottle or the color
of a car. Regardless of what these key elements are, chances are you or your audience
will have certain expectations of what they should look like. You can use color correction
to make the colors reproduced by video match what was originally shot.
With people shots, one of the guiding principles of color correction is to make sure
that flesh tones on tape look the same as in real life. Regardless of race, the hues of
human flesh tones, when recorded to videotape and measured on a vectorscope, fall
along a fairly narrow range (although the saturation and brightness vary). Final Cut Pro
color correction tools allow you to make whatever adjustments are necessary to ensure
that the flesh tones of people in your final edited piece look the way they do in reality.
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About Color Correction 79