Don't be confused by the title of this post. Color correction is not an easy process and takes a lot of knowledge about what is happening on a pixel to pixel basis, as well as knowing how the eye perceives light. But, that being said, it is easy to correct some basic color problems in your video. The biggest problem with video projects, especially at our end of the broadcast spectrum, is improper white balance. The second biggest problem, as I see it, is incorrect use of the iris. Not enough people use the neutral density filters on the cameras that have them, and many cameras don't even have them. So people close down the iris to 9.6 or 11 or even 16, thinking they are taking care of the overblown whites, not realizing that they are also destroying the contrast and saturation of their video.

To correct these problems, before encoding for playback, you can use the Color Corrector 3-way in FCP. (Using COlor as an Application is awesome, and if you get a chance to learn about color correction at a professional level, Color is an amazing application, but for simple corrections we'll use the 3-way corrector.)

Don't concern yourself with the COlor Corrector in Final CUt Pro. If you have Final Cut Express, you don't have the 3-way corrector, and are limited as to your color correction abilities. Sorry...

The Color Corrector filter is only bundled with FCP because of old projects that you may have finished before the 3-way was created. But there is no advantage to using the Color Corrector. So use the 3-way if you got it.

click here for movie
Watch the movie.

The reason for this post was because I saw a local PSA on VPT last night and it was so washed out and bland that it stood out like a sore thumb from the other shows on the station. It would have been so easy to fix the image before playing it out. Literally, it would have added about two minutes for the correction and maybe ten minutes to the output time.

Keep in mind that this is a clip by clip process. You can't make an adjustment to a finished film; the shots change. So this may be something to teach your members to do before giving you a finished product.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you cannot judge the look of the color on your computer monitor. The contrast is higher on your monitor and the color saturation is also higher. So you need to be able to view this on either a color critical monitor, whether it be LCD or CRT, or you need at least a television hooked up to your FCP machine, via a media converter or a camera, to see the corrected image... correctly...