Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[CS6]
This is a video on 2 approaches on how to structure your grade
in Adobe SpeedGrade CS6.
So, what I'm going to do is turn into the application
and look at the 3 shots that I'm going to use for this purpose.
They're all from a 5D.
Nice footage from the Mattel Hot Wheels material that we've got here,
and what I'm going to do is show you the first approach,
which would be to put everything into one grade
in a layered fashion, so I'm going to do that by using a preset
I already created for this, quickly showing you
the things that I've got here, so I've got a primary layer, nothing done on that yet.
I'll use that for balancing the shots.
I've got a look-up table layer here which has used the opacity function.
If we use it at an angle you're going to see that this is actually
expressing a bit too much of what a look-up table can do
and turning this into a more cinematic feel,
so I'll bring that down to where it's been.
And then I've got a primary here, turning it on and off.
You'll see I've just added a little bit of a vignette to it.
That's about it.
The first approach would be to put whatever I need into really just one layer,
then I'm going to make some more adjustments, so I'll bring down black a little bit more.
I actually think I want to warm up the midtones just really quite a bit.
It's out there in the desert.
So, once I'm happy with the look I can now easily move on to the next shot
and just 1 on the num pad to recall that look.
And as the material is somewhat the same in terms of lighting
and everything else that's always going to work nicely,
so if you have a scene like that
that just really is established with these 3 shots
it's super simple to work like that.
Just recall the looks if necessary, quickly refine it.
Just by going back to the primary layer here and looking at my scopes
I'll probably bring down the offset a little,
and this feels like gamma could come up a little bit
to make it a better match to the first one.
If I want to be sure I'll just double check by bringing in a second playhead
and just compare these two.
Yeah, so I think a little bit more of bringing up the gamma here,
but generally speaking I'm happy with that, and this is totally where you could work,
and the easier the material is the easier it's going to be to work like that.
The more uniform the material is the more fun it is
to just work like that as you can just really get it done super quickly
and use the recall function just on one layer.
Now, here's another approach towards doing the same thing,
and the more you have to do in shot matching it's going to matter,
and the more you actually want to then actually just twist the look
of something and not so much work on the grades anymore
the second approach is actually also really nice.
So, let me just quickly delete the second playhead.
We're going to start really just with a simple setup again,
so let's just quickly go back to square one.
Approach #2, I'm going to go to my timeline tab over here,
and the first thing you're going to notice if you look at the tools here
there is something if you wait for the tooltip to show up that says
"Extract grading from the current video track into a separate grading track,"
so let's click that.
You're going to see a regular grading track appearing on the timeline,
and by the way, in case you had grades done just on the footage track
you can now easily bring this to another layer and make it a separate track.
It has a couple of advantages.
For one thing, the eye icon also that you're familiar with
from the layer stack also appears on each grading layer.
The track itself can be turned on and off, which is something that's of advantage
if you want to work more analytically, and the next thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to use here one of my timeline elements,
which is adding a grading track, so I'm just going to do that on top
of that second layer, and SpeedGrade is always working its way up,
so I'm going to put that at the end of the processing chain.
That's actually something that's rather important to know
because there is no logical way.
You could assume it works the other way, but we've chosen to
just always work up, so whatever you put on the last area
is the last command that is going to be executed in your commands of grading.
So, I'm going to stretch that out, and actually I didn't pay too much attention while talking.
It is already beyond where I needed to be, so let's correct that.
You can see that this is easy to be applied because it has a magnetic feature,
so it will just stick with these 3 shots on the timeline or
if I'm not mistaken actually there's another one coming, so let's make sure.
I'll just cover all of them.
Here's an interesting thing I could do.
Going back into the Look design area
each layer is now showing the layer stack over here
that I just applied to each individual track, so I could come back actually now
and just say, "Okay, I'm going to have just the very same look I started with
applied to the grading track here," and just to really illustrate that
you can now turn this on and off, and if you do this with multiple ones
some people even prefer to use that just for showing
different versions of pretty much the same thing,
which is another valid approach.
You make it work your way.
It's one of the tools where you can actually find a lot of other creative use,
but what I wanted to illustrate here is something else.
The look-up table, if you just watch me doing this over here in the layer stack,
it actually makes a difference whether it goes last or it goes first
or it sits somewhere in between, so this at one point if I'm working really fast
can get in my way, and I have a preference of using that
look-up table pretty much as a simulation going outwards, so here's what I'm going to do.
I'm actually going to kill that, either reset that
or really just take it out of the layer stack.
Probably that's best, so we'll take it out,
and what I'm going to do next is actually get that one
just back in, choosing it here from my LUT menu in the filters,
and I'll bring it back to the same kind of opacity as in the original one.
Now, this is now guaranteed to go last in my set of commands
in the grading layer, so whatever else I do on the layer
underneath will never have an impact on where the look-up table
is in the chain of processing, and that can actually go further.
You also might want to decide that you have yet another layer here,
and let me quickly show this to you, so I'm just going to do another extraction.
And this one I'll just leave in the timeline.
Pretty much we're saying whenever there is a vignette
that's going to be on that layer, so you can also structure your project
for saying the first layer is always going to be
a vignette, and if it's not present it's just empty.
Not a problem.
The second layer is--let's say secondary is the one I have to attach with that,
and then you build it up as you need it.
You can bring in either individual layers
or really just stretch across scenes
or just make it work for the entire project.
That's another nice use.
If all is actually working the way I want it but then towards the very end
we're going to decide that all of the project
actually needs a little bit of a twist in a certain direction
I'm just going to span across the entire timeline
instead of messing with each individual shot to make that change.
That's a quick overview on how to work with
the timeline structure and the two different approaches
on how to make your grade work in Adobe SpeedGrade CS6.
[Adobe]
