Introduction to SpeedGrade

[♫Suspenseful music] [ADOBE TV][Presents][Colin Smith][in...] [Stupid Questions] [Male speaker] No stupid questions. [Static] [♫End music] Recently, Adobe has brought a new member of the family onboard-- IRIDAS: with their amazing tool, SpeedGrade. It's now part of the Adobe Tools. SpeedGrade is a full color grading and finishing tool--amazing tools. I'm going to be working with 3K ARRIRAW files, on a laptop--that's right. I said it--on a laptop. Now--normally you wouldn't be doing it, but that's my demo here today--one screen. But normally, you'll be working with 2 screens: with a full output on a second screen, and all the controls on your first screen. So we can easily do that. It works with SDI, calibrated SDI monitors-- or just a second DVI monitor that's out. So you can configure SpeedGrade in so many different ways. It's really up to you. So we're going to get started by talking about what the job is. So there's 2 kinds of grading. First of all, there's a technical grade. Let's say that this was one of the shots, and then the next shot was an over-the-shoulder shot. Well, to do that, you need to-- well, you need 1 camera, doing 2 shots. So we do all the shots this way; and then we move the camera behind me, and we're shooting again. Now, one of the jobs that you need to do is make sure that both of those cameras match color-- and when you do that, that's a technical grade. And that's something that is done on, Overall, your balancing whites and balancing blacks. The next one is a creative grade. So it's those 2 operations we need to do. We're going to first start with a technical grade, and we'll bring in some ARRIRAW footage. So here we are in SpeedGrade. The interface is very unique and very powerful, once you gravitate to it. On the upper left-hand side, I have my Tree button connected and it allows me to see all of my files that I'm loading in. And we can load in any number of files. It's amazing, all the different formats that we support, including DPX, RED; EDLs from programs like Premier Pro can load directly inside, Quicktime, OpenEXR--it's amazing. Open them up, and they're ready to go. So this view that we're looking at is called the Desktop View. If you press the "D" key, all by itself, it shows and hides the desktop. If you're working in a 2-monitor mode, it's less of an issue because you can leave your desktop up and jump to your controls, which is "K"; "K"and "D"--over here, all the time-- and your second display is the monitor called the View Port. On my side--because I'm only working with 1 display-- I'm going to double-click on this, and then I'll press the "D" key to get rid of that. So I'm now looking at my View Port and my Timeline down at the bottom. And if I just hit the space bar, I'm playing back native ARRIRAW 3K footage-- on a laptop. That's right. It's crazy! It's on the laptop, on an external USB2 drive. So I'll hit my "K" key and bring up my Grading Tools. And there are several different areas inside here. So first of all, you see the different control wheels that we have; and if you have control surfaces, SpeedGrade connects directly to those control surfaces. You can even use a regular mouse with a scroll wheel and-- a mouse. I mean, all you have to do is right-click inside one of these windows, and now you're focused in that particular window. Each one of these is actually 2 kinds of controls. If you see a regular controller, they actually have a trackball, and then they have a wheel around the outside of the trackball. The outside of the trackball is changing the luma-- the black and white portion of the image. The inside is changing the chroma-- the colored part of the image. Guess what your mouse does. Moving your mouse around is like moving the trackball, and changing the chroma of the image. Using the scroll wheel, I'm changing the outside, which is the luma of that. So, really easy to understand; it works with other devices if you have a stand alone trackball. Kensington makes a great little one that you can use. You basically right-click inside one of those, and then you have control. You'll also notice that down in the bottom, left and the bottom, right we get these little triangles. The other thing to notice is-- you see how the other controls stay dimmed? This is really smart. SpeedGrade likes to get out of the way. It likes to show you the information you need first, and the rest of it--only when you need it. So remember--I came in here and I was editing the Offset value. The other controls for Gamma and Gain are subdued--it doesn't mean that I can't use them, it just means I haven't touched them; I haven't changed anything. So I can easily see which ones I've edited; and if you click on these little triangles down at the bottom, you've reset that. It's a nice way to quickly reset what you last did. So we not only have the wheels, but if we look over here, we can click on Sliders-- so we've got complete control for Sliders, for each one of these. Or, for the fans who love their numbers, we've got numbers. You can either click in here and type a number or click and drag, up and down, inside there. It's kind of like the scrubbies we have inside After Effects and Photoshop right now, where you click in a number, and you get the Left and Right Arrows and the hand. It's just an Up and Down that we've got inside there. So that's the way the basic controls work inside here. But I'm going to reset all of that and talk more about the job that we need to do. So we've brought in some ARRIRAW, and I'm going to hit Control+Home to zoom out so we can see this. Now, you're probably looking at this, going: Wow--that's not a very good view. But if you come from Hollywood, and you look at that--that is what you want. You do not want to be shooting in a super dynamic way. I mean--even if I'm shooting on my Canon 5D Mark II, I use a cena style to make everything completely flat-- because if you blow up the highlights or crush the shadows when you're actually shooting, you've got nowhere to go. You want a flat look. That's what we've got here. So we need to do 2 steps here. First of all, we can go down here into our Looks and you can see that we ship with a number of different Looks. Here's the Alexa Raw 2 Rec709. So if I click on this--Wow! Now it pops. I haven't graded the file, I've just set it up to display what a proper rec709 is or a P3. So these are the kind of settings that a typical color grader will start with. Use that--now we're on an even scale. Now we need to go in and start working on these. This Looks area that came up--you'll notice a little "X" over here, and I can click on it and just get out of the way. A lot of these little interface pieces will pop up and down; and you can remove them, and get them out of the way. As I mentioned, the "K" key is going to hide our Grading controls. If we need them, we can zoom in. Of course, if we've got a second monitor, it's going to be completely different. So the "K" key, the "D" key for our desktop, Control+Home to zoom inside. Over on the right-hand side, we've got some great little waveforms in here; and I can actually click on those, and pop those out. So let's say that I want to drag my histogram over here-- and these are fully scalable and live, if I carefully click on the corner of that and then drag this waveform over here. So again, this is a single monitor kind of view that we've got going on. And they're live; they will play back, as I'm playing them back. Very easy to understand. Okay. So before we actually get into the grading, we don't normally grade directly on the file-- and that's really what I've done, at this point. So I'm going to reset this, and apply that look and show you that we should be adding a grading layer-- and that's this button, right here. So when I drag this on top of it, I'm going to be grading on a separate layer. Now you'll see me here, working on a single file-- and this is really an introduction to SpeedGrade. This is not going to be--I mean, we could spend all day on the amazing things that SpeedGrade will do. But I just want to touch on the fact that when we're working with things like EDLs, and we're dealing with thousands of clips, SpeedGrade can easily conform all of that stuff-- instantly--into multiple formats. So right in the middle of working in ARRIRAW, I could easily convert and conform all of these to ProRes or DPX-- so depending on what people need, in and out of SpeedGrade. I just clicked on this one button and added one color correction layer on top. Well, I'm not about to do this if I have 10,000 of them. So if I click on this one, it actually makes one for every single track. And the way that you have to think about this is you've got grading for each clip, and there's a really good chance that a lot of that is similar. So we've got keys--from the "1" key to the "9" key, you can apply the previous grade. So if I click on a clip--and the previous one, I like the grading-- push the "1" key and it drops that and copies that grading. Remember, everything is nondestructive, completely live and editable inside here. Okay. Let's get back to our job. So I've added our setting to the Overall Setting to make sure that we are set up correctly, to begin with. And now, I'm going to come in and start working on my technical grade. You'll see over on the left-hand side, I can edit the Overall Settings: Highlights, Midtone, Shadows-- and you can reset the current panel you're working on--or all. I can also be working on Stereo 3D files, down over here, by clicking on this if I happen to have some Stereo 3D files. I don't, though--so let's just keep moving on. Okay. So first of all, we need to work with our Black control. So I'm editing this on the grade, not on the actual clip. So the Offset is our Black controls. And I'm going to right-click inside here, and I can start to move this up, move this down, and crush this any way I want-- and you can watch the waveforms, there. Notice that as the waveforms move, they're uniform. So when you're working with Offset, you're not changing-- when I'm changing the luma, you're not changing the differences of the colors. Everything is moving, relative to that space. Okay. The same thing over here, with Gain. When I'm in Gain, it is moving the Whites-- and you'll see that all of them move Up or Down. It's only when we start getting into things like Gamma, do we start to work with those differently. So if I start to move my trackball around and maybe warm this up a little bit, I can edit it that way. We also have a couple of Sliders in here and the Temperature one is perfect. I mean, you can get the same settings from the Temperature slider by using the trackball on the Gamma. It's just, you have to be talented and you have to work and move this at a 45 degree angle. Or you just come up here and move this Slider. You're essentially doing the same thing. It's just a little bit easier. The other thing you'll notice if you're coming from an Adobe world, is how small the movements are in all of these controls. And that's what color graders want. I mean--normally, if I'm in Photoshop, I've got sliders that I can move, and make giant changes. The tiniest little movements in here are caused by big movements on the trackball. All you have to do is add the Shift key to this, and you can make some larger movements. So very easy to set up and start working. Again, we can reset all of our panel. You can also press the Period key, on the numeric keypad. There's many controls that just will not work easily on a small keyboard-- on a laptop--so you want a full size keyboard. I'm just pressing the Period key, which is on the numeric keypad on the right, and I can see the very last change that I made, on and off. If I hold down the Zero key, this is the complete change, from the time I brought the file in to what we're looking at right now. So we would normally go in here and I can already see that I've got-- my highlights are probably not the whitest in here so I would normally go in here and try to remove them. So cool those highlights down a little bit-- and again, watching all of my waveforms to make sure that looks good. Okay. I'm not going to admit that I'm a color grader. No one's going to hire me as a colorist anytime soon. I'll write the music for your feature, but the color grading's going to go to someone else. All right. So imagine I just did my technical grade, and everything's great. Now we want to get creative. So if we go back to our Creative Custom section over here, on the right-hand side-- and right now, we have our Base grade-- and when I click on the Plus button, I can open up my Shaders, and a real common one is this Bleach Bypass Look. And when I call that up, you can see--we get this blown-out, crushed blacks, silvery kind of look-- really common, used today. Well, what's cool is not only do we get a Look, but down here we have an Opacity slider. This is crazy--here's a Look, but let's put less of the Overall Look on it, just by dragging the slider down. That is crazy. And all of this will allow me to play, with that color grade on. On a laptop, 3K media. The playback inside SpeedGrade-- I mean, it's called SpeedGrade for a reason. It is just fantastic. Works with acclerated cards, so we could be running this with some high powered GPU cards from NVIDIA, and it just rocks and rolls. Okay. So next up: I want to talk about working with a Mask. So if I click in here--and you can see, we've got Mask controls. These are our Advanced controls. The simple controls just show you the Mask, and the more advanced controls can show you the Overall falloff of the Mask and things of that sort. We've got different kinds of Masks in here. This is just a regular Circular Mask. This is a Square Mask, and this is Vignette Mask-- and you can see, we get an outside control of the Vignette. So when we've added our Mask, and overall--look at this-- you can see, each time I'm touching on something inside here, I get these little red dots. It's telling me, easily, where I've made changes in here. Remember, you could be making changes to the Light value of the Highlights, just in one little point. And if you're not aware or remembered that, you could just look at the dots. The other thing that blew me away about SpeedGrade is the fact that at no point, are you going to inverse anything. And what that simply means is it's really easy when you're using a curve, and you add another curve on something and the curves are kind of fighting each other-- for you to add problems. And anyone knows--inside Photoshop, that if you're stacking Adjustment layers, there's limits to what you do and you have to be careful, before the images are falling apart. None of that occurs in SpeedGrade. SpeedGrade, you can be putting Looks upon Looks, and making color corrections on it. At no point, does it break down; it will just retain your image-- everything, in complete 32-bit floating point. All right. So we added a Mask. Now let's go over to our Overall and we'll click on Outside of the Mask, and we'll just start turning that down. I'm going to do it quite a bit, just so you can see the results. So I'll go back to my Mask and show you--there is my Mask. So, I love this widget control, inside here. There are so many things you can do to it--so for the first thing, you'll notice that I have 4 points for each one of those outside paths in here. I can actually click on one of those, and move that separate or I can select 2 or 3 of these and be doing things like changing its position, moving that around. If you just want to use the widget control itself, clicking in the center moves it around, dragging this arrow drags it out, dragging this arrow drags it up. These skew either way. This will grow the outside selection, and this will grow the inside selection, right? So I can take that Vignette all the way out to the edge. And this Mask is still live, so I can be changing what's inside the Mask. I can change what's outside the Mask so we can darken that down completely, take the Saturation down, overall. So let's go in and change that, drag that Saturation down very easily. So no limit to the amount of controls that we can add on top of here, and keep doing a lot of great grading. All right. So next up is: How do we get this out? So lots of ways, as I mentioned, to edit our files in here and we need to be able to render those out. Oh--the other thing I should tell you is that down in the bottom right, inside here-- our Screen Layout-- we can change the Screen Layout so we can have multiple screens up. We can have 2 playheads. So right here, I'm going to hold down my Control key-- and you notice that I have 2 playheads so inside my Screen Layout, I can set up a Split View inside here. So I'm looking at the beginning and the end of that clip and we can easily start to grade that way. You can have up to 9 playheads. That's right--9 playheads. That means 9 different layers, playing back at any one time. And be grading between these: A and B in them, checking them. It's just fantastic. And if I click and drag up in the top, inside here, you can see, I get controls underneath my mouse and get a reading inside there-- very easy to understand what's going on. And I get my waveform, my histogram--easy to look at and control that way. Now, as you're working on these files, you can also be saving grades. So let me go back to just one view inside here; and if we go back to our Looks and we create a certain Look, this button up here or Control+P, and we can save each one of these Looks. So there's my Look, saved right there-- and I can click on that; I can save as many as I want. So if I wanted to show someone Before and After, a more warmer version, a more steely gray version-- you could save all of those different Looks down there; call them up and share them very easily. In fact, these Looks are universally distributed 3D lookup tables that you can now distribute to someone else. We can import them and apply them very easily. All right. Let's talk about Rendering Out. So when it comes to Rendering Out, we can Render Out--of course--to any location, to any File name that we want and we can use a lot of different ways to Rename these files . If we need to add things like Padding inside here, we can Output as 10-bit, as DPX. We can Output in lots of different formats. You name it. We can also add a Calibration lookup table while we're going out to this. We can also burn-in Time code. And if we're going out to something that isn't 16x9-- so we can change to Proxies here-- we can also change the Aspect ratio. And if we're changing the Aspect ratio, we have the options here of either cropping or adding letterbox bars to this; and then when we're ready, we hit Go and it outputs, right from there. So lots of keyboard shortcuts to remember, but they'll get you going really fast inside SpeedGrade. This is the newest family member at Adobe and we're really excited to have IRIDAS and the IRIDAS family here at Adobe. We think SpeedGrade is a fantastic addition to Production Premium in our video workspace. And I believe that this shows the commitment that Adobe has for this market. So let's get our color grading on, and looking good. [Presenter/Music] [Colin Smith][♫music] [Executive Producer][Bob Donlon] [Producer][Karl Miller] [Director/VFX][Kush Amerasinghe] [Post-Production/DP][Erik Espera] [ADOBE® TV Productions]