Match shots automatically with the Shot Matcher
Watch this tutorial to learn how to match color and contrast between two shots of the same scene in Adobe SpeedGrade.
Published
>> In this movie, I want to show you how with a click of a button, literally, you can drastically speed up the often tedious task of matching the look and feel of two shots together.
In previous versions of SpeedGrade, when you needed to match shots together, you had to do so manually using scopes, your eyes, and often just your gut feeling.
But now with Shot Matcher, matching two shots together is extremely simple.
Let me show you how.
Here in this project, I have two shots from a music video that I'm grading, featuring the wonderfully talented artist Chris Jane.
And this first shot is sort of my hero shot, meaning it's the shot that I'll come back to often over the course of the video.
And I've actually already gone ahead applied a grade to this shot.
Down here in my Layers stack, you can see that I have a Primary layer, and then with this LUT layer, I've gone ahead and taken advantage of the wonderful film stock emulations now inside of SpeedGrade.
Overall, I really like this look, but if I go ahead and scrub down to the next shot, which is just a wider shot, you can see that they really don't match.
And that's a problem.
So what to do?
Well, first, I want to visually compare these two shots together.
And the way I'm gonna do that is by coming up here and clicking on in this button right here labeled 2-Up to bring up my continuity checker.
And sure enough, visually, I can see that the shots don't really match.
Here, her shirt is a little warmer, a little more yellow, over here, it's little more green, and overall, I think you can say that this shot is warmer and has a little bit of more contrast than this one.
Down here in my timeline, you notice when I press the 2-Up button, I now have two playheads.
This one right here with 1 on it and labeled yellow is my master playhead.
And here, I have a second playhead.
What I'm going to go ahead and do with the second play head is drag back into the shot onto a frame I like.
Yeah, something like right there works just fine.
Okay, so now that I've found a frame that I like to automatically match the look and feel of these two shots together, all I need to do is come over here and click on this button that looks like a color wheel with a right facing arrow.
When I click on this button, I'll enable Shot Matcher.
So let me go ahead and click on it.
Wow, that's pretty amazing.
With a single click, I've automatically matched these two shots together.
And it's done a really nice job in my opinion.
Now down here in the Layers stack for the second wider shot, you can see that a new layer was automatically applied called AutoColorMatch, and of course, this layer was applied when we enabled Shot Matcher.
Also, keep in mind that any time after you've applied a match, you can come back in and manually refine that match by adding new layers as use see fit.
Now for this shot, I like to match so much that I don't actually need to make another correction but it's nice to know that you can if needed.
Now let me go ahead and delete the second playhead by clicking on this icon right here and dragging up into the viewer until I get this red X.
And let's back our master playhead up, right about here.
Let's go into our full-screen view and see how these shots match together.
Yeah, that looks really nice.
So I think you can tell that it is extremely easy to match the look of two shots together with Shot Matcher.
Just don't forget that after applying a match, you can always go back in with additional layers and refine your match until you're 100 percent happy with it.
With that said, I think in your own projects, you'll find Shot Matcher a very powerful and quick way to match shots together.
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Contributor
Robbie Carman
