Apple Final Cut Express HD - Manual (Page 828)

828 Part IX Effects
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
their flesh tones on tape look the same as in real life. Regardless of race, the hues of
human flesh tones, when recorded to videotape, fall along a fairly narrow range
(although the saturation and brightness vary). Final Cut Express HD 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 did in reality.
 Balance all the shots in a scene to match: Most edited programs incorporate footage
from a variety of sources, shot in multiple locations over the course of many days,
weeks, or months of production. Even with the most skilled lighting and camera
crews, differences in color and exposure are bound to occur, sometimes within clips
meant to be combined into a single scene. When edited together, these changes in
color and lighting can make individual shots stand out, so the editing appears to be
uneven. With careful color correction, all the different clips that make up a scene can
be balanced to match one another so that they all look as if they’re happening at the
same time and in the same place, with the same lighting.
 Correct errors in color balance and exposure: Accidents can happen in any shoot. For
example, you may have forgotten to white balance your video camera before
shooting an interview in an office lit with fluorescent lights, resulting in footage with
a greenish tinge. Final Cut Express HD color correction filters give you an exceptional
degree of control over the color balance and exposure of your clips, allowing you to
fix these kinds of mistakes. In many cases, such accidents can be minimized, if not
eliminated, through the careful application of color correction filters.