Color Correction

The tool/filter you will use most is "Color Corrector". Start there. You probably won't need anything else, unless you have very specific requirements.

For a bright flash of light, I'd just slice the clip twice to create a slip that is 1-2 frames long, then use brightness/contrast under the image control tab to just brighten it a bunch. If you need the flash to fade in and out, then you'll want to use keyframes. If you want to fade in and out and not use keyframes, then skip the slicing thing on the base layer; copy the clip up one layer (hold down the option key, drag the clip up one layer and release the option key BEFORE releasing the mouse) ... then slice away everything in the new layer except the flashing part, with enough frames to fade in and out. Now, apply the brightness+contrast to the short clip and add a cross fade at the beginning and end of the short clip, setting the duration of the cross fades to just a few frames for a fast fade in/out.

For the slicing and dicing part, you'll use the razor blade (click in the timeline and hit "b" for blade), make your cuts, then hit "a" to get your pointer back, click on the unneeded parts and use Apple-X (cut) to remove them, so they don't shift anything on your timeline.

I hope I explained all of this well enough. I suck at the explanation part.

Doug

Some of the colour correction filters let you tweak whites, blacks, and mids. You can adjust each with a pallet of colours and a sliding bar for the amount of each. It's very fun to fiddle around with it to get the desired effect.


My friend and I colour corrected our first feature film using Final Cut filters. We didn't use any extra programs. It is a little stylized, but we got the effect we wanted. The only problem we have enountered from colour correcting in Final Cut Pro is pixelation and sometimes the colours bleed when exported.

Hope this helps

I started writing a bit about this, but actually it's the kind of thing you need to see rather than be told about so

Anyway... Red Giant do a great tutorial for their plugin Colorista... which also explains the basics of color correction at the same time

This is it

In the viewer window there is a little ilm strip icon and with the letter A on it, click on it. Use the drop down menu and scroll to Matte and then select color. It defaults to grey, so in the viewer under control tab, click on the color swatch and a color selector will come up. Take the slider up to white. There you go you have as many frames of white as you need. Cut it into your sequence.

Then you can put it on another layer and add dissolves to it for a gradual run up to white or you can use the opacity setting on it like any other clip to achieve the same effect.