Re: pleantville effect

Just to add a way of getting a quick "Schindler's List" color effect in FCP:
1) Add a Color Corrector 3 way to your clip
2) Window>Arrange>Color Correction
3) Open the clip in the viewer and go to the Color Corrector 3 way tab
4) Click on the Secondary Color Correction "Limit Effect" by clicking on the small triangle at the left edge of the window
5) There are three icons on the right edge of the Limit Effect area: Select Color, View Final/Matte/Source, and Invert Select. Select the Select Color icon, so that the cursor turns into an eyedropper. Click on the area that you want to have it color highlighted. The cursor will change back to the previous cursor.
6) Drag the Saturation (Sat) control to the far left. Part (or all) of the area you just clicked on will go gray. This is what we want.
7) Click on the Select Color icon again, and hold down the Shift key and click in the color that you want also included in the selected region. More of your region should turn gray, allowing you to see areas that you haven't yet selected. Continue to do this step until either all the region you want is selected, or, if you still have some areas that still won't turn gray, then proceed to step 8).
8) Click on the View Final/Matte/Source to see the Matte you have created. Manually tweak the Limit Effect Saturation and Luma to expand the Matte to include all of the problematic areas you couldn't add to the selected color.
9) Click on the Invert Selection icon to desaturation everything but the region you have spent time selecting.
10) You will probably have to keyframe the Limit Effect to get the best results over the duration of a clip.

As Tom Meegan said, duplicate a clip on top of itself in a new video track, apply the Color Corrector 3 way to each, select differing areas for non-desaturation, then use garbage mattes or cropping to get them into the canvas frame at the same time.

Bill Lee
Notes: The trick is to desaturate the color you are selecting, thereby allowing you to see which colors you have selected, and which ones you have left to do. If you accidently click on a desaturated area when adding to the set of selected colors, then it's not going to affect the set of colors that you have selected. For some reason, you may get to a point where it won't add to the set of selected colors: it's at this stage you have to manually go in and tweak the controls to get those last few colors in the selected set.