technicolor!
by michele stocco
on
Jan 18, 2009 at 9:09:22 pm
hi guys, that's my first post so i hope i'm clear.
first of all just to say that this forum is one of the coolest and most useful things for postprod on the web!
so, i've already seen that the argument has been discussed, but i can't really find a good solution for my target. i'd like to find a way to color correct my footage (shot with the pana hvx-200) in a way that it looks like the technicolor, most precisely like this movie
using After Effects.
i saw the Aviator's method (http://www.aviatorvfx.com/index.php?cmd=frontendGallery&id=color), but i can't really achive a good result. i think i'm missing something. how do they do the matte of the singol colors, and finally how to they blend the 3 colors together another time (i tried different ways -screen, add, overlay etc.- but i can't really find a good one)? i used some plugins (magic bullet's colorista, three strip tehcnicolor plugin in FCP...), but they don't really help me.
any suggestion/help? someone did exactly the The Aviator method?
thanks a lot in advance guys!
Re: technicolor! by michele stocco on Jan 19, 2009 at 10:21:17 am
Thanks Chris! I didn't know this plug-in, it seems powerful, i'll try it later.
Yes, i googled technicolor, 3 strips, after fx etc. but still i can't really find a good solution. the point is (and i saw on this forum as well that other people had the same problem) that i'd like to "copy" the Aviator method, so that i could customize it, but i can't really get a good result.
i can't really do a good matte for each color and i don't know how to do it exactly. i don't really know how to divide the footage in the 3 singol colors, and from there to track the matte of each one.
any suggestion? maybe my problem is that i can't really divide the image in the 3 colors (i mean, i did it, but i don't know if it was the best way...).
any help would be appreciate!
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Jan 19, 2009 at 10:59:54 am
I haven't tested this yet from another post but if you read about how 3 stripe was originally made, you'll logically determine the right tweaking from the channel effects.
"Apply a Set Channel filter to isolate individual channels.
Three seperate instances of the footage stacked using lumanance set channel. i only allowed one for green, one for red, and one for blue. then i tweaked the green a little towards yellow, the red a little towards magenta, and blue a lot towards cyan and blend them back together with channels combine. then you compress the midtones. i was very pleased with my results."
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Jan 21, 2009 at 5:34:37 am
Just for fun, I programmed a virtual technicolor project that is fully modifiable and free to use. The blue comps in the other comps represent the process aviator used. Most sliders in blue opacity will change 100% of what you want. I compared it to this site for quality. I used set channels and compound arithemic in AE.
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Jan 25, 2009 at 9:23:20 pm
I made a John Wayne Western Technicolor/Sepia tone Preset project like the youtube you posted. It has a few secret color tricks inside. See if you can find them. Oh, and final output comp has a master hue/saturation level to mix skin tones into rock tones.
Re: technicolor! by michele stocco on Jan 26, 2009 at 9:06:59 am
hey Chris, actually i'm really busy with another project, so still i didn't try your system. I'll start again this video project in 2/3 days (i hope, it just seems that alla the works of one month is coming in these 2 days...), i'll let you know. thanks a lot for your info!
i'll try as soon as possible.
michele
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Jan 29, 2009 at 12:09:17 am
This is my latest update. It has a new must-have feature that is cumulative of the previous
features so ignore the older links. I made my AE project run exactly like Tiffen's 3-strip with a new thing called Smooth.
Each Precomp Red, Blue, and Green, has a Smart Blur individualized channel that can be smoothed
out, just like Tiffen's! It's used for delicate skies if there's sharp changes. The secret was
bluring the saturation, not the alpha.
If you use multiple smart blurs, you can even create shallow depths of field automatically! If
you use fast blur instead of smart blur, you can create an effect like lightbrights.
Each precomp also has a hue slider so you can create an infinite ammount of looks on the color
wheel. Warm or cold, etc. Relative channel strengths are set by blue opacity layers in each red,
green, or blue comp.
The final output comp is where I have the "Tint with fill color layer" temporarily unchecked. If
you use it, you should enable "Blend Colors using 1.0 Gamma" in Project settings and slightly
reduce master saturation in final output comp so it is burned in nicely. If not tinting, leave
blend colors off.
I have color finesse for boosting basic shadow level. It will still work without CF, use curves
or w/e. I impressed myself as it works and looks perfectly.
download technicolor smooth.aep here
------------
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1V26M0YW
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Jan 30, 2009 at 4:03:16 am
1. Improved Auto Look for grass color emulation in 3 strip colors.
2. You can create better tritone from b/w footage than AE's tritone.
3. If your footage is low quality, 16bpc might actually look better than 32bpc, depending on the noise
4. If you have banding: example- in the sky, you can setup smart-blur blue channel only and set threshhold to remove blockiness.
Re: technicolor! by michele stocco on Feb 25, 2009 at 5:03:59 pm
hey there,
i've been busy lately so i didn't really find the time to take a deep look into your technicolor project Chris.
Today i started to work on it. so cool man! your system is awesome! actually i'm starting to work on it with my footage, and it seems i need to desaturate everything a little bit, and try to work on the singol compositions.
there are few things (i.e. the arithmetic comp effect in the combine green into magenta and the combine red and blue comps) that i can't really understand, but i'll try to figure it out.
all this work is great but it makes a little bit of noise (with 16 bit or 32 bit projects as well). i mean, my footage doesn't have the best HD quality but still, i worked with the P2 and i have 960x720 HD footages. i think i must level some of the effects you used.
but it's incredible how near goes the color of the skin to the rock's one (that practicaly was the effect i was loooking for).
i didn't think about doing "two times" the 3 single colors extracting process. it seems definitly the best way to isolate them and in a way you can manage better each single one. the only thing it seems to me it doesn't really work are the blurs effects, but maybe it's just 'cause i didn't really work on that. anyway even without the blur it works perfectly!
thanks Chris!
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Feb 25, 2009 at 9:23:14 pm
You can replace the compound arithmetic with mode transfer screen so you won't be limited by 8 bit effects. Disable the effect and enable visible both layers with red set to screen and blue to normal. same for magenta.
If you're not using high saturation, you won't need 2 blue comps in each red, green and 2 adjust layer4's, just one of each. They were just so that chroma got boosted up enough so that really high sat's didn't get blocky. This will also keep footage from getting too noisy/dark so it has to be boosted back up again so much.
The blurs were meant to just smooth out blocky squares from dv footage, not actually change shutter. You can tweak their tolerance.
1. It should be more replace footage friendly and preserve the gain of the original
while adding saturation and color effects.
2. I converted all the effects from 8 to 32bpc so there should be less artifacts.
3. I added a 35mm color contrast preset and a chroma darken in the
clipping protection comp. Chroma darken can help hide artifacts in high sat pics. Set it to zero
to undarken if needed.
4. Shadow master gain in clipping and final output comp set brightness
5. Top layer of precomps still set smart sat. blurs.
Re: technicolor! by Chris Wright on Apr 15, 2009 at 10:25:54 pm
Here is the newest version. It has a brown multiplier effect for matching film skin tones from 0-100% brown while retaining all the other colors. Still has Tint for color washing.
It's a 32bpc AE CS3 technicolor 3 strip project that has simple wheels that change the temperature of each rgb channel too.
