Pleasantville effect in FCP or Color?
by Grace Fitzpatrick
on
Mar 31, 2008 at 5:20:43 pm
I have a tight deadline (May 10) for work, and I have to make a 3-5 minute video using the "Pleasantville" effect- essentially certain people/things in the shot have to be color in a black & white world. I have read up on doing the pleasantville effect in FCP, and have tried it, but the objects I'm trying to keep in color are not uniform so I have been making mattes and tracking them through the shot. Only problem is, you can see the edges of the mattes on the final image even if I feather them a little.
I wondered what the best way to do this effect is - I know in Color there's a way to do it but I'm worried about the time it will take and the learning curve since I don't really know Color.. Could someone out there suggest the best way to do this effect given my time constraints? Any tricks for making edges of mattes disappear?
Re: Pleasantville effect in FCP or Color? by Stuart Ferreyra on Mar 31, 2008 at 8:01:13 pm
Man, you are asking for a lot of vignetting and tracking - a time consuming task.
To be honest, I think the best way to attack this is to use Mocha to roto and track in AE. Then use the Color Finesse plug in for the color correction inside and outside the roto.
Pre-visulaization was key for Pleasantville. If you guys couldn't do that because of budget constrains or lack of resources your post production time is going to insanely increase to achieve the effect - if what you are looking for is perfection.
Either way, you are looking a lots of time.
Good Luck!
Re: Pleasantville effect in FCP or Color? by Stuart Ferreyra on Apr 1, 2008 at 2:20:54 pm
If you have someone in charge of art direction, that person should do the research to ease the post process. You can do simple stuff like picking certain colors tones for clothing, walls, make up and the use of more vibrant ones that would be easy to track or roto. Come up with your own method. It may not be exactly how Hollywood would do it, but if it's well planned and works for you, then it's great.
- i know it attempts to recreate the Sin City effect in After Effects, and you want Pleasantville but i don't think it would be too difficult to adapt some of Grants ideas to get the look you want....assuming you have After Effects of course.
Re: Pleasantville effect in FCP or Color? by Kevin Shaw on Apr 3, 2008 at 4:36:15 pm
Hi Grace
The secret to doing this on a budget is to apply color to keys (known as secondary correction) and shapes rather than doing a full roto.
There are two simple tricks you can use to make life easy.
1. While shooting include objects/clothes that are strongly saturated and have a unique color. The color is then easy to isolate and can be kept while everything else goes black and white, but it can also be easily modified. I did one job in which everyone wore blue makeup (which we changed to pink) but I do not recommend going that far (see trick 2). Fruit, t shirts denim, sky, grass etc can all be recovered this way, but separating sky and denim is not easy unless you take sure to frame them in such a way that a simple garbage matte will complete the isolation.
2. Instead of bringing back very specific items as they did in pleasantville create the effect but not the meaning by just looking for items within the frame that can be isolated using the secondary technique. This is the way it would be done in a music video that had not been specifically shot for this efeect.
Tracking a shape is an option to garbage matte a color isolation, and is quicker than frame by frame roto. However, last time I used color it was not that quick at doing keys and tracking shapes. Nevertheless it is effective. All color systems used professionally should have some way of grading based on color isolations and the heavyweight systems are often judged by how well and how quickly they can do this type of effect.
Happy Coloring
Kevin Shaw
(freelance colorist)
Kevin Shaw
freelance colorist, instructor and consultant
kevs@finalcolor.com www.finalcolor.com
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Re: Pleasantville effect in FCP or Color? by Grace Fitzpatrick on Apr 3, 2008 at 7:05:32 pm
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for this advice- I have been practicing what you talked about (garbage matting and keying, moving the garbage mattes frame by frame) in Final Cut- would you recommend doing that same thing in Color? I also don't know really know Color so there might be a bit of a learning curve. I just want to make sure I'm not missing an easy (if time-consuming) way to do this in Color because I'm more comfortable with Final Cut...hopefully that makes sense.
Re: Pleasantville effect in FCP or Color? by Kevin Shaw on Apr 3, 2008 at 8:46:59 pm
Hi Grace
If you put the material through color the tools are arranged in "rooms" The second room is called the secondary room and it is set up to do exactly what you want- color correction in a key, with a shape to garbage matte it if necessary.
It is probably quicker than fcp, since each key has an inside and an outside grade. In your case you just need to set outside saturation to 0, but you might want to slightly increase the contrast too. B/w material generally looks better with more contrast.
Give it a try and see what you think.
Best
Kevin
Kevin Shaw
freelance colorist, instructor and consultant
kevs@finalcolor.com www.finalcolor.com
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