Correction tools in Final Cut

[Zulkifli Yusof]

Hi all

I've just recently shot a short on 16mm and last wednesday had it telecine'd. Now I believe the editor is busy syncing and doing up a first assembly. After telecine, I've been wondering about a few things:

- I had the colourist letterbox the film before dumping to the d-beta master. If my editor does further colour manipulation in FCP, would the black bars be affected as well?

- I shot a scene on 2 different nights and on 2 different film stocks and one of the shots is 1 stop over than the rest. I forgot to mention that to the colourist during telecine. What can my editor do to match the exposure in FCP?

Thanks

[Glenn Chan]

- I had the colourist letterbox the film before dumping to the d-beta master. If my editor does further colour manipulation in FCP, would the black bars be affected as well?

Yes. Color correction would affect the black bars. This isn't a big deal as long as you're not doing unsharp mask or blurs/diffusion effects. If you're doing normal color correction, you might raise the level of the black bars but you can simply crop them out, giving you black again.

You can copy + paste the cropping attributes to other clips to save some time. Right-click a clip, copy. Right-click another clip, paste event attributes. Choose crop.

- I shot a scene on 2 different nights and on 2 different film stocks and one of the shots is 1 stop over than the rest. I forgot to mention that to the colourist during telecine. What can my editor do to match the exposure in FCP?

You can apply the 3-way color corrector. Under the 3 big color wheels are sliders.
The one to the right controls luma level/gain (kind of like white level), the middle controls luma gamma / midtone. You can play around with those two sliders to see what they do.

You'll likely need to touch the "saturation" slider to compensate for the shift in color. The math behind FCP's color corrector is a little silly in that you have to do that (that's my opinion).