- [Nick] Hi, welcome to Final Cut Pro X Weekly.
- [Jeff] I'm Jeff.
- [Nick] And I'm Nick.
- [Jeff] We're talking about the Color Board this week.
- [Nick] We're going to start by finding out
how to select the Color Board via Command 6,
easy keyboard shortcut to get us
right inside the Color Board.
- [Jeff] You won't have to go and grab the effect,
just, boom, Command 6, it's there.
We're going to talk about the keyboard controls
for Exposure, Saturation and Color,
so you can toggle between those spots in the board.
- [Nick] I like how you highlight those, Jeff.
- [Jeff] Yeah, they're nice and visible.
Command, Control, E, S and C.
We're going to talk about how
colorist think about seeing contrast first.
Then, we're going to make Final Cut
work a little bit smarter.
- [Nick] Yeah, we're going to look at workspace,
it's one of my new favorite features of Final Cut 10.3
We're going to also talk about keyboard remapping
and how we don't have to be stuck with the
keyboard shortcuts that Apple gives us
and maybe even make our color work flow, that much better.
- [Jeff] Coming back to the actual Color Correction itself,
we'll see a quick way to reset the board with Option-Delete,
adding another Color Effect with Option-E,
the default effect,
and then finally, we're going to wrap with
turning them on and off and you'll see
another colorist tip along the way.
Let's go ahead here and get started.
The first piece is speed with getting to the Color Board,
is being able to use the keyboard command, Command 6.
You can go directly to the Color Board
and even though, the Inspector, which I'm going to open now,
doesn't show a Color Board at all,
when I hit Command 6, it gets me to the Color Board
and the act of touching, any of the pucks here,
instantly add on the Inspector, that Color Board.
Just for a good piece of keyboard lore,
again, it's Command 6 to get there,
it's Command 4 to get back and close up the Inspector.
Command 4 a second time, it opens it up,
just a real nice keyboard set.
Let's go take a look at the pucks though, themselves.
- [Nick] We've got three different pucks here,
inside the Exposure pane that we're currently in.
We've got one there for our shadows,
our mid tones and our highlights.
One thing that we can do with a puck is,
once you select it, you can of course, drag it up and down.
But, the other thing to do is if you use your arrow keys,
if you use the downward and the upward arrow key,
you can see those adjustments being made,
right there inside your viewer.
- [Jeff] One note I'm going to say about this is,
Color Correction is often about big, bold moves.
Little nudgy moves, I do towards the end
of tweaking something, not at the very beginning,
I need my eyes to see it.
Speaking of which, we've mentioned before
and I'm not going to mention in detail
this idea that we see our contrast first.
I start off on the Exposure and that's
Command, Control, E for the Exposure.
I might jump to the Color tab, probably next.
- [Nick] Maybe that's Command, Control, C.
- [Jeff] Command, Control, C, that's right.
- [Nick] And then to get to the Saturation.
- [Jeff] Command, Control, S.
- [Nick] I just want to also draw
out one thing of attention here,
to the top right-hand corner, which happens to be
a way of resetting the pane that you're in.
- [Jeff] I'll go here to Exposure
and I'll hit that reset hook.
There's a better way to work with that.
We're going to see that in a moment,
but let's first talk about something
they added brand new in 10.3.
They added this idea here, of Workspaces,
and we're working on our default one,
you can see a built-in editing one.
But, there's one there for Color Correction
and when you do this, it knocks you into
this view with having the Color Board,
if there is one there open, it opens the Effect panel
in the bottom right, but it also in the top left,
opens up your Scopes, with all four Scopes visible.
This is pretty much how I would work on a single system,
on a single screen, with these Scopes visible.
- [Nick] Yeah, this is absolutely great.
Within one click of the button, you're able to
get your entire color workspace,
where you get four Scopes and just a little cavier here,
if you press Command 7, you bring up your Scopes,
but it only brings up one of them.
- [Jeff] I didn't know that.
You know, I have to point out that,
Command, Control, C, S and E,
for Color, Exposure and Saturation,
and this Workspace key here for Color and Effects,
I'm going to give it a bit of an opinion here,
I think they're terrible.
- [Nick] Yeah, it's not the easiest
to remember Control, Shift, 2,
every single time you need to go to Color and Effects.
- [Jeff] This is a great time to point out that
we could go over here, to our Commands
and Customize them and add or change them
and one of the ones that I do often.
- [Nick] I just have to say, Jeff,
I love the visual layout of this keyboard,
it makes it extremely easy to remap your keyboard
and also, easy for us to do this Color Correction.
- [Jeff] Absolutely, I can see that the number 0,
is empty and I might go ahead here, and I might just say,
I'd like to set 0 to the Color Workspace.
Put in the word, workspace.
There's Color and Effects, I'm going to come down here
and I'm going to click, Final Cut Pro,
I'm just going to hit the number 0.
Final Cut says, Command Set is owned by Final Cut,
make a copy, I'm going to make a copy,
I'm going to call it, surprisingly, Color Correction.
I think Color Correction is such an important step
in the work I do, that I have a dedicated keyboard for it.
- [Nick] I think that's absolutely true.
I just want to point out here,
that Final Cut is working very hard that
you don't overwrite your default keyboard.
- [Jeff] They're protected, totally.
I just want to show you a couple other keys here,
that are kind of nice. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to type in the word, puck.
Those three dials there, for Shadows,
for Mid Tone, for Highlight, they're called pucks.
You could put these on the keyboard.
I probably wouldn't do this on a laptop keyboard,
but on an extended keyboard, a numeric keypad,
I can set the pucks to one, four, six and eight,
up, down, left, right and maybe seven and nine,
for selecting the next and previous puck.
I could navigate all the pucks, without having
to take my hands off the keyboard.
- [Nick] I think that's extremely powerful,
to get you away from actually
having to click things manually,
you can nudge between the pucks
and you could use your arrow keys on an extended keyboard,
and get a really solid work flow,
along with the keyboard shortcuts for jumping
between your Exposure, Color and Saturation pane.
- [Jeff] Again, which I would put to way easier keys,
down here though, there's a brilliant key, Nick.
It's called Color Board Reset.
You know that hook arrow is great,
but there are times, I'm going to
go ahead here and save this keyboard.
But, there are times where I want to
use this Option + Delete
and if I've gone and I'm going to
go ahead and close my keyboard here.
If I'm on a clip and I've done something
really extreme to it and I'm not sure if I'm happy with it,
for example, I mentioned the idea that
you should adjust Exposure first,
I'm going to crush some of Shadows a little bit,
lift my Highlights, it's because your eyes
have more rods than cones, you see
Luma better than you see Chroma.
If I'm not sure about that, I can just go ahead here
and hit Option, Delete and just reset it real quickly
and I often find myself doing that if I get into trouble.
Another key that I'm finding myself using a lot
and I'm going to go back to the Inspector for this,
you can see we've got one Color Board here.
I like to add multiple Color Corrections
and the common way that you would add
a second correction, is you drag and drop it.
Let's go ahead here, just on this one,
we'll just do a on our first one,
I'm just going to go ahead here
and stretch out, just pull down my Shadows,
pull up my Mid Tones a little bit, just a nice little punt.
I want to maybe add a mask or go ahead here
and desaturate some of this, because I just
see a little bit of green tinge.
I might want to add a second correction
and dragging and dropping, it's a mistake.
What would you do, Nick?
- [Nick] I might press Option + E.
Which is actually the default effect in Final Cut Pro
and wait till you see this, we'll press Option + E.
If you look up there in your Inspector,
you're going to see a second Color Correction effect.
- [Jeff] The second Color Correction, you can have
a third and a fourth and I'll often do all my primary,
my main corrections in Correction One,
and I'll come back here and fix the sky,
or in this case, what I wanted to do,
is I wanted to come over here to the saturation tab
and just pull a little bit of
the saturation out of the Shadows.
Because if you're ever really struggling with a shot,
I'd say about 50% of the times, it's problem in the Shadows.
Now, the last and I want to really stress
about Color Correction is, your brain
in less than 60 seconds, can't remember
what the original image looked like.
It's really valuable to be able
to turn these on and off quickly, to see what you did.
This is not built-in into the keyboard,
but we're going to build it into ours.
I'm just going to go up here to customize.
I'm going to type in the word, toggle.
There's a whole bunch of really
cool toggle commands down here,
like toggling the Audio Fade, you can set them to keyboard,
you can sit back and toggle the Inspector Heights.
But what I'm going to do, is I'm going to go ahead
and toggle Effects on and off and for this,
I'm just going to type in number 1 as quick toggle
and it says, "hey, it's set to angle one,
it's set for multi-cam" I don't care.
- [Nick] This is your Color Correction keyboard,
which you set up specifically for Color Correction,
you're not worrying about multi-cams here, Jeff.
- [Jeff] I actually use from 1 to 0
on almost every keyboard I have,
and I don't care about multi-cam,
because all I got to do is reset
back to the default keyboard for multi-cam.
I'm going to hit save and now look at this beautiful thing,
when I close this up, I'm able to tap the number 1,
and I'm able to turn this on and off.
I can do the same with the first one.
Turn it on and off.
I'm going to hit that Option + E,
bring in a third Color Board, go over here,
I'm going to desaturate the Shadows,
desaturate the Highlights, super saturate the Mid Tones.
See if we can do that just a little bit
and maybe on the Color, come over here,
and I'm just going to punch a little bit of warmth
into the Mid Tones here.
A little bit of oranges in there,
there we go and if I want to see what that looks like,
I'm now just typing that number 1,
to see a before and after here.
- [Nick] I think it's so critical
to be able to see the adjustments you made,
next to the original clip before you started.
That's such a great way to do it,
by customizing your keyboard directly
within Final Cut Pro X.
- [Jeff] That was the Color Board, I'm Jeff.
- [Nick] And I'm Nick.
- [Jeff] This is Final Cut X Pro Weekly.