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[CS6]
Here are a couple of tips and tricks
for using Adobe SpeedGrade CS6.
Let's start with some of the things that you can do on the desktop.
So for one thing, if I have to really just go through a lot of material
and really just see it,
you might actually really just really scroll down here
but I'd just like to get an overview
and there are a couple of ways to get you there.
So the one thing you could obviously do
is just really scroll down here and come down with a thumbnail size,
but I actually want to see a bit more of that
and then, at the same time--
right now, as I'm now conforming, I don't need any of the tools down here.
So you can really just push TAB or, alternatively, "P"--
whichever you prefer--and you can really just close out of everything
that's not the desktop, but still see the timeline,
so you can start adding material here.
And then you can even go further up in the thumbnail size.
The other thing that I really like is that
I don't want to actually see anything but footage right now,
as I'm really just starting to build
Grades for material that hasn't even been sent to Editorial yet.
So what I can do here in the pull-down
for selecting specific files for being viewed on the desktop--
I, for example, can just say: Give me everything in RAW files.
You will see that everything else that was in the folders that I'm looking at
is now just really gone and not in my way anymore.
And then it comes down to just seeing ARRI and R3D files.
Now as a matter of fact, if you already know
that you only want to see the RED files here,
you can use the same methodology,
really just to say show me the RED files
or, eventually, you can also just use the wildcards, if you prefer,
and then this is going to give me the Alexa RAW files
that I have on my desktop here--
and just really come back here and put in an asterisk to go back
or select All View--whichever preference you have.
So let me show you another thing that's quite handy,
which is working with multiple resolutions alongside one timeline.
So I'm going to use here a shot from an ARRI Alexa, which is a 3K--
and this is a 4K from a RED Epoch--
and on the timeline, this is what's going to happen:
If I go from the first shot, which is the 3K,
to the second shot--from the RED--
you're going to see that, actually, the image is now breathing--
it's going up and down in size, and that's not necessarily nice to look at.
For grading, it's just in the way because I'm not interested
in the differences in resolution, at this point in time.
So here's what I can do: I'll bring back all the tools here, just by clicking "P".
And there's something here in the Timeline tab--
if you go to the View section, you've got the Screen Layout tool here.
And you can do a number of cool things with it
but the thing that is really best here is that I can keep with--
alongside everything in the timeline,
and it's really not just limited to two shots.
So whatever is on the timeline, we're actually going to
Up Res to the maximum resolution--
so the highest resolution shot
is becoming the standard for everything else.
So you don't need to worry about still seeing pristine quality.
That's all cool, but you don't really need to
then just zoom in, zoom out for each shot.
And again, this can go just really across the board for resolution
so you can mix SD, HD--what have you.
I'm not saying it's reasonable, but sometimes you have to
and it's cool that you can just really quickly mix that.
This is also reflected in the Output engine.
So let's take a look at the Render Output,
which is another quick tip for you.
You've got the opportunity, on Output, to say
you want everything to look as 1080p
and then it actually doesn't matter what's your source resolution.
If, in this pull-down, you choose a specific resolution,
SpeedGrade is actually going to scale all your material
to that specific output resolution.
So you can make it work just for Preview,
and it's a real-time scaling process for Preview
and it's a really high quality process on output--
on either Up or Down scaling or even identifying
which algorithm to use for either one of them,
as there are obviously advantages going either direction.
And SpeedGrade's going to make an intelligent call,
to really produce great quality for you.
So let's have a look at another thing that I find to be quite handy.
And, in this case, let's close out of the desktop--
bring up all our tools
and--you know--sometimes, I just wonder what kind of quality I'm getting here.
If it's a RAW file, that's never quite doubtful.
But let's look at something that's been transcoded already.
So I've got some of the same shots here,
transcoded to QuickTime,
in that folder over here.
And, ideally--let's just quickly find
pretty much the one we already had on the timeline,
which I believe should be this one here.
So, for one thing, that's already downscaled to HD.
That's certainly isn't a big of a deal,
but let's see something to the technical quality of the picture.
Sometimes you're actually asked to do things with the picture
that you just can't do because the quality isn't there,
in terms of what kind of Bit Depth is there,
what kind of granularity or even artifacts in the compression.
So the Sculpts actually look quite all right--
rather similar to what we've seen before, so this is certainly a good transcoding.
In the first place, it's not killing the Bit Depth.
But here is an interesting tool for you:
If you go yet again into the View section of the application
and just look for the Channel View,
it's got lots of options for various purposes
and the people who are coming more from the compositing world
will actually be familiar with most of them and what to do with them.
I'd just like to point out one particular view here,
which is the HSB Composite.
And this is really interesting, and--
really, let me just take this to a Full Screen Preview.
You can actually now see--yep--
we preserved the Bit Depth
but there are some compression artifacts in this picture--
in particular, if I just let this play on the Moving Picture.
And I'm not saying good or bad.
It's just I want to be able to qualify, before I even go into the grading,
if this is actually a good transcoding of the material--
if I'm working with something that is transcoded--for whatever reason.
For example, because it's an Effects shot--
so I want to get the best quality in here and see what I'm able to do with it.
Doing secondary keying on this kind of material, for example,
is already sort of problematic and
you just might want to ask for something higher quality then.
So let's take a look at another amazing tool
that's going to help you for shot matching.
So I'm going to get out of Cinematic Mode here
and really just--well, you know what--
just get all these shots in,
as this is fantastic material,
and what I'll do to really just make this work quickly--
as I'm interested in one particular tool and not creating a final look for it--
I'm going to show you another way of just really quickly
getting to something nicely looking.
I'm going to pull in a Lookup table, really just overall for the timeline
here in my Calibration pull-down,
immediately getting me to a more cinematic look.
Now, color, actually--at least for a lot of people, that's true--
color can be in the way if you just want to make sure that
the light in all the scenes are controlled
in really a similar fashion
and you get to a result rather quickly.
So I typically actually might want to start with
balancing the shots a little, but I'm going to get there just quickly
so you get my general idea of what can help you
with balancing the shots, just for light in the scene.
You've got all the options here too--
this is c-RGB, and if there's an Alpha present
you can also make that visible on screen.
And that's also already helpful for seeing some of the
imbalance here between the channels.
But if you just click on Luma--on the "L" here--
then it's actually really super easy to see
which scene actually needs--
you bring up the Gamma or tone it down a bit.
So, again--I would probably actually balance them a little first,
but then if you go to this pass--
basically watching the material, Black and White--
it's a whole lot easier to start doing Shot Matching
for that particular purpose--
really just controlling light in the scene,
as you're not distracted by color or by saturation,
whatever else there is--and it also will actually allow for you to see--
once the light is controlled in this scene,
if you come back, then, with Full Color View--
if, for the most part, what's actually different is saturation--
you're just getting more focused on really fixing that task,
rather than getting distracted by all the various things
that are sort of mixing and blending.
So yet another tool for helping you just look at
your material in a different way,
to get you to identify what you need to be working with.
Then something else is actually important to know.
You've got this pull-down here
for what kind of magnification you want to use.
I typically actually love, on a single-screen layout,
to really just quickly click on here--"Zoom to fit"--
which I had done already, but you've also got hot keys.
And so I've got: (Control+Shift+Home)
to give me pixel-by-pixel,
and (Control+Home) to fit to whatever is available to me
on the particular screen size I've chosen to work with.
And that's also cool if I go into this mode.
So if I use (Shift+H)
to really get a full-screen preview on this kind of screen,
I can really just easily do the same thing:
either Fit or then go for Pixel at grid.
At full-screen preview, I typically prefer that.
So these are just a couple of tips and tricks
for using Adobe SpeedGrade CS6.
There's a lot more to discover and we hope you're going to enjoy that.
[Adobe®]
