5 June 2009
Coloring my film “Black Site”
Posted by admin under: Black Site; Filmmaking; Final Cut Pro; Indiependent Film; Movie; Video; post production .
In April, when I finished a decent cut of the film, I started working on coming up with a look for the movie. So I send the FCP time-line over to Apple’s Color. This is after backing the time-line. What this means, if you have in your time-line, video clips speed up / slowed down or AFTER EFFECTS / Motion composites of two or three layers of video, Color doens’t know how to show them correctly. You have to export them in FCP, bring them back in, so they are on one layer, i.e Baking them. I’m not sure if you can nest them and then send it to Color. See more on baking here.
In Color, I spend a few weeks coming up with some looks and then did a massive render of the film. When I say massive, I mean just that, it took 2 weeks to render out 95 minutes of film. I left the computer on all that time. Once Color finished doing it’s thing, I went back in and tried to SEND TO FCP. Try is the operative word because and this is something I didn’t know. Color doesn’t “roundtrip” a time-line that’s more then 20 minutes or so. There’s no official reason but if you’re going to work with Color you have to break the movie up, too. Here’s more on it here and here.
So what did I do after losing a few weeks (4), well not sure if I drank first or smoked but I’m sure both of the vises where involved. After a day or two, I was going to go back in but my producer on the film managed to get two colleagues of his, at FINAL FRAME NYC to help us out. I sat down with them told them what specific look, I wanted and they did an amazing job. Check for yourselves below:
Here’s two clips of the film.
BEFORE
AFTER
As you can see, they made the orange prison outfits stand out, while making the other elements in a tan (monochrome) look. The crazy thing is they did this in FCP only and not Color.