Colour Correction

I am going to use the editing techniques that I used in my last film that I made for Hope; Fear; Desire, as I used a colour correction to change the aesthetics of the film.

As the venue was dark when filming The Last Party live in London the footage is quite dark and it is quite hard to see some of the footage.  To get over this hurdle I have decided to add a colour correction so that the footage is clearer and more visible.

The image above is the footage without the colour correction on.  As you can see some sections of the footage are extremely dark, for example; the lead singers hair is belting in with the background/roof, also the keyboard player is quite hard to make out as he is also blending in with the background, especially his keyboard.  I thought that this was ruining the shot as sections were not visible to I decided that to two this I would change some of the colour correction settings.

To change the colour of the footage I selected the colour balance setting and selected the midtone red balance and changed the changed the settings to 16.6.  What this did was add some red into the footage.  I decided that I wanted to add red to the footage as the studio footage was quite red and orange so that I thought that it would complement the other footage well.  I also dropped the midtone green balance from 0 to -5.5, which got rid of any green and changed it to red, which is what I wanted.  I then added a some midtone blue, as the red was slightly harsh which made the footage look unrealistic and as if it had been tampered with too much.  After I had done that I altered the highlight red balance, 34.5, to brighten the footage up again, as the footage was then a bit too bright I added green, 36.6, and blue, 35.2, so that the footage wasn't as harsh as before.  Therefor making the footage a lot more visible and clearer.

The image below is the footage after I added the colour balance to it.  There is a massive change in colour, as its gone from looking quite greenish and dark to looking reddish and a lot brighter.  The lead singer's hair was hard to make out before because of the colour of the footage, whereas now it is a lot clearer and easier to see, along with the keyboard player.  I am very happy with the way that the colour correction had come out as it has brighten up the footage, and when the footage is being split screened with the studio footage there is a nice comparison between the reds from the studio footage and the reds used on the live footage from the colour correction.  I am now going to add the colour correction to the rest of the live footage so that the continuity is correct.