Music Video - Grading

The grading for the video in our case was especially hard for a number of reasons. We decided to grade in Adobe Premiere Pro, using tools such as procamp or threeway colour corrector, however this caused quite a few issues with some shots.

This is what the interface for Threeway colour corrector looked like

This is what the interface for procamp looked like

Shots like the ones above were not too much of an issue as there was not much to change. We decrease brightness slightly and increased contrast as to make the image of the black on white more intense.

You can see the minimal change in the above image (there is a faint divide across Vivian's face, with the graded image on the left and the ungraded image on the right), and likewise with the VHS shots below, with the graded image on the right and ungraded on the left.

The major issues were with shots where we had taken with too high an exposure on the camera, which made them overly white. We tried to fix this in Premiere Pro, however the grading tools were not advanced enough to isolate colours, which meant we changed the colour of the background along with the subject.

To fix this problem, we had to open said shots in After Effects, which allowed us to isolate specific colours, which wasn't difficult luckily.

Once in After Effects, we used a plugin called Colour Finesse

The interface for Colour Finesse was a lot more complex than Procamp or Threeway Colour Corrector, but it didn't take long to learn how to use, as the principals of using sliders to change certain aspects of the image were the same.

As you can see, the change is really drastic and although the image on the left looks really nice, it was way too bright and stood out from the rest of the shots, so we darkened the image and brightened the background, making the subject stand out a lot more.