Blackmagic Forum

Appreciate some advice here.

A. When scrolling through the frames in CUT, noted that the thumbnails in the lower half:
1. are not the same as the image shown in the timeline (can be different by more than 100 frames)
2. stay the same as I scrolled through the frames in the lower half.

Why and how can I correct these?

B. For a video taken in different environments (eg outdoor and indoor), I have broken the video into clips and then do the color grading on each clip. Noted that even for all the indoor clips, my color grading is ok for the frames I adjusted and not ok for some other frames taken in another room.

Instead of breaking the video into many clips due to the different lightings and then do color grading on each, is there a better and more efficient way to do color grading? Get the white balance right for each scene? What am I doing wrong?

Many thanks.

I don't use the Cut page, so I'll tackle the second question.

You're saying the camera moved through different rooms without stopping. so it's all one clip?

Yes, different types of lighting in different rooms.

OK. You'll need to keyframe your adjustments to have them change as you move through the rooms.

Jim Simon wrote:OK. You'll need to keyframe your adjustments to have them change as you move through the rooms.

Thanks. Will explore that. I assume the keyframe mentioned is not clipping the video but marking the video into segments.

plumberbm wrote:Thanks. Will explore that. I assume the keyframe mentioned is not clipping the video but marking the video into segments.

I strongly suggest you read the manual and/or go through a basic tutorial on color. This will explain all the essentials on things like color keyframes and so on. The color section starts on page 2542 (of the 16.2 manual) and goes through about page 3000, so it's not that bad. Blackmagic as well as FXPHD, Ripple Training, Mixing Light, and Lowepost all have decent online video tutorials.

Noted and thanks.

I have watched 2 color video tutorial so far but guess I need to watch them again. Will try the manual.

Besides doing post-processing to correct for this, any things one can do during shooting? Adjust white balance and others?

Thanks.

plumberbm wrote:any things one can do during shooting?

Hire a really good Key Grip who can light the rooms properly.

You can use Scene Detection feature, you can read about it in the August 2020 manual on page 356.
What is does if you have one continuous video and want to detect different scene changes in your video.

Note: Dissolves and other transitions are not automatically detected, although dissolves most often appear as a triangular cluster of lines peaking in the middle.

I hope this helps

Yasir

Yasir Salah wrote:You can use Scene Detection feature, you can read about it in the August 2020 manual on page 356.
What is does if you have one continuous video and want to detect different scene changes in your video.

Note: Dissolves and other transitions are not automatically detected, although dissolves most often appear as a triangular cluster of lines peaking in the middle.

I hope this helps

Yasir

Noted and many thanks! Will explore that.

plumberbm wrote:Besides doing post-processing to correct for this, any things one can do during shooting? Adjust white balance and others?

Note there are numerous films that were made in such a way to convince the viewer they were done in a single shot -- 1917 and Birdman are two famous examples. The trick in those cases is that the colorist had to use complex keyframes and shapes to maintain the right look as the actors moved into different rooms, went outside, went back inside, went down hallways, and so on. Sometimes there are multiple solutions. One key is not to let the camera overexpose or clip any highlights, because it's difficult to recover from those situations.

Yasir Salah wrote:You can use Scene Detection feature

I don't believe that will help here, as it's one continuous shot.