Color-correct sequences in SpeedGrade

[1-2-3 Training] This is Adobe SpeedGrade.

It's a powerful, professional, high-end grading application designed to work with multiple media formats and provide you with real fine finishing for your content.

I'm looking at Adobe SpeedGrade now in what I want to refer to as the full mode.

I've got access to the Timeline and Clip controls, and I can modify the way my media plays back.

I want to highlight that because in a moment I'm going to open a Premiere Pro project in SpeedGrade— it's a new feature in Adobe SpeedGrade— and it's going to limit the access to controls that I have.

It's going to stop me accessing the ones that I don't want.

So just very briefly, here I've got some media that I'm working on.

I have a timeline in the center of the screen.

Right up at the top I can browse and locate media on my hard drive.

This is some content I shot in Venice recently.

And just next to the Color tab here, where I view the work that I'm doing, I've got a Render button.

I can output to multiple file types.

And I've got a Result tab here where I can look at the files that I've created.

Most of the work you're going to do is here in the Color tab.

And right down at the bottom, you see I've got a number of tabs.

Again, I've got a Timeline setup and a Clip setup for interpreting my media.

But the really interesting part is here—the Look tab— and this is where I modify my shadows, midtones, and highlights and so on.

Essentially all you need to do in SpeedGrade is make changes to these controls, and I'll just demonstrate this.

I'll pull down my shadows a little bit on this clip and maybe pull up the highlights— maybe I'll just drop the mids a little—just to give a little bit more depth to the image I'm looking at.

And if I go full screen—the little button top right here—I can get a better view of my media.

I can play back with the space bar.

The space bar stops it again.

The escape key takes me back to the main interface.

SpeedGrade has a lovely new feature that allows you to match media.

Here, for example, I've got a shot with a bit more color in it.

And right up here at the top right, I've got the option to do 2-up or even 3-up views.

I get multiple playheads this way.

A playhead is just one of these lines.

And you can see I've got timecode indications to show me which media I'm looking at in these 2 displays.

And once I've got 2 playheads visible, I can just click this button right in the middle here— Match look to master playhead—and SpeedGrade will match my media between these 2 shots.

This is really powerful.

This isn't just making an adjustment based on an individual color under the cursor.

This is looking at the full range of colors in the shot and applying matching adjustments.

It's really, really powerful and very useful, particularly if you're working with multicam media.

If I'm happy with the adjustments that I've made, I can very quickly add these adjustments to a Look file.

I can just press Control or Command-P here, for example, and I can rename this, and I've created a Look file on my hard drive.

And that Look file can be applied inside of Premiere Pro using the Lumetri effect, and you can just browse within that to this look.

So you can create looks here and bring them into the Premiere Pro timeline.

And until very recently, that was the only way you could do it.

If you wanted to grade during your edit, you'd have to send things out and roundtrip them and render them and adjust them and send them back again, and it took quite a few steps.

You'd really be grading at the very beginning or the very end of the edit.

But now we've got access to non-linear grading in the truest sense, and I'm going to show you how this works.

Up at the top left, I've got the option to open a project file or—as you'll see now in the Tool Tip—a Premiere Pro project.

I'm not going to save this project.

That's okay.

And I've got a Premiere Pro project set up here I'm just going to open.

There we go!

Now I can choose which sequence I'm going to work on.

There's only 1 in this project, so I'm going to click Open.

And now you can see actually I've been making some rather rough adjustments to this Premiere Pro timeline already using the Lumetri effect and some looks that I created earlier.

Now that I'm inside of SpeedGrade— and again, I'm looking at a Premiere Pro project here directly with mixed media.

Now that I'm here, I can make any changes I want.

I'm just going to collapse this Looks browser here and I think— well, let's see.

I've got a pretty strong green tint in the highlights here.

Let's pull that back a little.

I'm just going to hold the Shift key down while I drag.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the SpeedGrade interface because there are some fantastic tutorials on Adobe TV.

You can find plenty of guidebooks on how to use it.

But you see I've got my Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights.

Maybe I'll go in here.

Maybe I'll just select the adjustment layer, and this is an adjustment layer from inside of Premiere Pro.

Now when you open a Premiere Pro project in this way, you'll notice that some of the controls are grayed-out in Adobe SpeedGrade.

You see how I can't click on the Timeline and Clip tabs.

That's because in a sense I'm in a picture lock mode.

I can't adjust the contents of my shot.

That is, I can't add or remove frames.

I can just work on the color, and I think this is fantastic because this is a way for you to find your way into color correction.

If you don't really know what you're doing you can have a play, and don't worry about making changes to your Premiere Pro project that you don't want.

So here, for example, that's a little bit too red.

Let's pull that back and— well, while we're here, I'll tell you what.

I'll make this really obvious as well.

I'll pull this over to the green so you can see the result inside of Premiere Pro.

So I've made an adjustment here—several adjustments.

If I want to send this back over to Premiere Pro, all I have to do is click on this button right here— Direct Link to Adobe Premiere Pro.

Before I do that I just want to mention this button over on the right of the timeline that allows you to browse to different sequences within the Premiere Pro project.

I also want to mention that I'm working at a pretty low resolution here, so you can see this content easily on the Net.

You will want to work on a higher resolution screen than this generally if you're working with SpeedGrade.

So I'm going to click this button, and when I do SpeedGrade's going to ask me if I want to save the changes to the project, and I absolutely do.

I'm going to close the project now in SpeedGrade.

SpeedGrade is going to let go of the project and fire up Premiere Pro, and there we are straightaway now.

We're looking at the same very simple project, and each of the clips I've made an adjustment to inside of SpeedGrade now has one of these Lumetri effects.

This is an effect added to Premiere Pro with the release of Premiere Pro CC.

It just lets you browse to a lookup table file—if you like a color correction file— and apply that look to your video.

If I want to I can—well, maybe I'll select this clip, select the Lumetri effect, hit delete, and remove it.

And then if I decide actually it would be pretty good to work on that again in SpeedGrade, I can just go to File, choose Direct Link to Adobe SpeedGrade.

Premiere Pro says, do you want to save changes?

I say yes.

And now here we are back in SpeedGrade, and I can carry on working on my media.

So you can now very easily toggle backwards and forwards between SpeedGrade and Premiere Pro.

This is a powerful, brand-new work flow that's just been added to— I suppose you'd have to say the combination of Premiere Pro CC and SpeedGrade CC.

But the real feature is that SpeedGrade now has support natively for Premiere Pro projects.