Color

In your Final Cut Studio edit suite, you've already installed a piece of industrial-strength color grading software -- and better yet, it's integrated directly with your existing Final Cut workflow.  It's called Color.

Complex color corrections are no longer limited to high end post production houses. Color is an incredibly powerful piece of color correction software, designed for professional colorists, that allows you to create stunning color grades and effects. While Color is tightly integrated with Final Cut, it can also interpret EDLs from other editing environments, including Avid and Premiere.

Apple's Color is one of those software packages that's easier to learn in an applied context than in an abstract "book-learning" context.  This course will bring Color's abstract toolset to life in the specific ways that you anticipate using them.  It's a class and a skilled consultant all in one!

Length of Course: 1-2 Days  Most of our students who take this course already have a background in video, and those students are comfortable covering most of Color's toolset in a single day.  But this course is customized to your specific skills and needs: students who are newer to postproduction may wish to move more slowly through the core toolset and spend more time learning color and video theory.  Some more advanced students prefer to learn node-based Color FX trees in more depth, while others prefer to learn how Color handles film-resolution workflows.  Still others prefer to supply the instructor with some of the specific types of footage that they work with and spend part of the second day practicing the techniques specific to their studio's line of work. 

Cost:  Apple Color is a very specialized piece of software, and is best taught in a customized environment.  Therefore, we offer a flat-rate for this course.  We do not charge per person.  We primarily offer this course as an onsite training course. 

In our Apple Color course, you'll learn to:

• Understand scopes
• Diagnose and correct common color deficiencies in your footage
• Guarantee consistency between shots in a sequence
• Create moods
• Isolate and adjust specific features of your shot
• Simulate different times of day
• Relight scenes for corrective or creative purposes
  
• Draw your viewer's eye to specific parts of your image
• Simulate film stocks and processes, and
• Build sophisticated procedural effect trees.

To accomplish these techniques, you'll learn Color's core toolset:

• Primary color corrections use three-way color balance and contrast controls with individual shadow, midtone, and highlight controls
• Curve Controls allow for detailed color and luma channel adjustments
• Secondary color corrections isolate, refine, and selectively adjust portions of an image by combining powerful HSL keys and "vignettes" (shapes by any other name).
• Color FX are procedural, node-based filters that allow for sophisticated effects within the context of Color's high-fidelity toolset and color processing engine.
  
• Pan and Scan transforms actual images within Color's workflow
  
• Motion trackers allow you to automatically animate shapes, masks, and other effects
• Color's keyframe model allows you to manually animate just about anything in Color
  
• Color's broadcast legalizer competes favorably with high-dollar hardware legalizers
  
• Color integrates built-in support for physical control surfaces
  

Every Color course is customized to your needs and skill level, but our instructors have found this course outline to be an effective starting point: