Which Editing package do you use?

[Stephan]

if you could PM me, or post here...

Pls share the discussion, I love color correction!

About doing special looks without MB Looks, I'd suggest reading that excellent book by Steve Hullfish: The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction. He first does a recap of basic CC skills (like using the scopes, adjusting contrast distribution, matching shots), then interviews a series of professional colorists (who do it for films and TV), and they explain how they would personally grade this or that shot in order to give a certain look / mood / atmosphere.

He's not focusing about any tool (although using FCP or Avid a lot), rather giving skills that you can leverage with just about any tool. And most importantly as I found, the changes done are sometimes so subtle that this book is essentially about training your eyes to see what it is that you like or dislike, and want to change in a shot.

Much more time-consuming than Magic Bullet's canned effects, though.

[Guy Bruner]

Hi Doughie. Yeah I've been busy for a while now over at my site. But, it looks like you guys got a nice new site to take care of the SHDVI mavens.

I have some suggestions for color grading. First, turn on 32 bit color in Vegas. If at all possible, transcode the event video that you are grading into a non-compressed intermediate like HUFFYUV, Lagarith, or Cineform. This will give you the highest quality and most detail to work with while grading. Also, the clip will not degrade nearly as much as you render it out. I also recommend doing this if you are doing green screen work. You can pull a better key with uncompressed video. I tend to use scripting tools to establish the look I want...Magic Bullet, Ultimate S...because they have been tweaked by pros and I hate reinventing the wheel. When I have a quick and dirty, like crushing the whites and blacks to give a film look, I use Color Curves FX and put in a nice lazy S on the line until my eye is satisfied. If you are going to keep it on the computer, this is usually enough. If you are going out to DVD or Bluray for playback on a TV/HDTV, you'll need to preview it on a monitor before finalizing the disk.