Participant

Question

Best Way to Match Shots

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
September 17, 2016
5 replies
13435 views

Since Adobe has killed the ability to use the SpeedGrade Shot Matcher in Premiere Pro CC 2015.4, what is the best way to do color and exposure matching between two clips in Premiere?

I am currently trying to match shots using Lumetri Color. Since it's a manual process, I am only successful some of the times. What I would love is an automatic exposure and color matching feature. If nothing exists in Premiere or After Effects, then what is the best third-party plug-in that would achieve the best shot matching?

Frustrated,

Michael

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Michael TiteraAuthor

Participant

Thanks for all the great information!

I used the Premiere/SpeedGrade converter tool and it worked! Thank you very much for this valuable resource. But why the heck did Adobe completely just kill the Dynamic Link functionality? It wasn't a technical reason, because obviously you can get around it with this conversion tool. It is definitely Adobe's way to say, "Surprise, we are getting rid of SpeedGrade!" But rather than just tell us why, they simply try to quietly phrase it out by breaking the connection. They basically did the same thing with Encore. I love what the Adobe Creative Cloud Team has come up with, but how they just kill functionality, without warning, is very frustrating. It makes you not want to upgrade, because you don't know what else they have simply dropped.

In regards to no more SpeedGrade, I can now see a lot of people jumping ship for Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve. It looks to be an amazing application. And it's free!: Blackmagic Design: DaVinci Resolve 12

Thanks again for the advice and help. I am going to try out the suggestions.

Cheers,

Michael

R Neil Haugen

Legend

From the rather ... small ... public statements that the PrPro team management has released, mostly through Kevin Monahan here ... basically, they didn't think from their "metrics" that enough people were still using SpeedGrade that it would really be missed. And with limited budgets, therefore wasn't worth the engineer time to keep updating it.

If you've been to the SpeedGrade forum, you may have noted that there's been a LOT more traffic there than was usual ... including some threads with well over a thousand views. On any of the Adobe user-to-user forums, that's a LOT of views. So perhaps some calculations weren't exactly as expected. Ah well.

And yes, Resolve is an amazingly broad and DEEP grading program with an editor module that's becoming ... interesting. Which is why it so surprised me that they have de-coupled SpeedGrade at this point. Though the Lumetri panel is quite good at what it does, what it does isn't built to do commercial duty grading.

And people and post-houses WANT collaborative workflows. Sending a project out from PrPro to Resolve can take hours of time for the PrPro people to figure how they want to do it, and for the colorist's assistant who then loads the gigs of drives that came along with the project into their system and re--conforms everything.

The Direct Link with SpeedGrade was a stunner. Ok, Sg is NOT as wide nor deep as Resolve, but still ... quite fast and good at what it did. I wanted say Hue/Hue added, and better and more reliable tracked masking, but still ... I could get by just fine with Sg.

But now, the only one out there with the equivalent of the Direct Link mode ... is BlackMagic's product. Very weird, to me ...

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Roei Tzoref

Legend

in the same topic, I am looking for matching a look from two very different clips to get a similar match color and tonality. I come from Ae, and I now realize that there is no way to open two scopes at the same time (in Ae too, we got your scopes just now BTW). I know I can match by eye using the references monitor, and I can also press one monitor at a time to change between the 2 scopes but shouldn't there be a way to have both scopes at the same time? the only way to have that is to place both clips at the same time in the program monitor and separate them maybe like this?

I have placed a graphic rectangle to make it easier to distinguish the two. at least I can see red by red, green by green, blue by blue... thanks to engineering team to at least give us that. not so much fun to setup.

also, I couldn't figure out a way to view channel by channel basis in gray-scale. I can do that very easily in After Effects and there are even shortcuts for this.

this would make color matching easier even for a color-blind user because he would just need to match two shots in gray-scale match. all of this to of course to avoid just correcting by eye... btw, this is a technique I use in VFX Compositing and I learned it from mark Christiansen here

I had an idea that there should be a way to use a 2 parade setup in a "blend" feature that will show one on top of the other in some kind of a blend mode/onion skin that will help you to match these shots more accurately.

I know that Color correction is an art and science, but it seems to me that the "science" part in premiere could use a boost.

what do you think?

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Oh ... as to within Lumetri, shot-matching. Right.

Build a new workspace with a 'new' panel that has both the Reference monitor and Program monitor in it, preferably put on your second and properly calibrated 'good color' monitor. Save it as say ShotMatching, then use the workspace bar managing box to move it onto your workspace bar for quick selection.

Use the mini-timeline within the Reference monitor to move to the clip you want to match.

Use the main timeline to set the Program monitor to the clip you want to correct to match the one showing in the Reference monitor. Adjust magnification as desired. If say balancing for skin tones, magnify each so that you're mostly seeing only skin-tones.

You may need to note where in the timeline the Reference monitor frame you're using is, so you can move the main timeline to that to get a view of the scopes for that clip, then set it back to where the clip is you're working now, and see the difference in the scopes. It would be WONDERFUL if one could simply click in the Reference Monitor & have the scopes go to that, click in the Program monitor & the scopes go to that clip ... but ah well. That would be easier, wouldn't it?

IF YOU HAVE OVER-BRIGHTS IN YOUR CLIP ... ! Meaning signal up above the 99 mark in the RGB Parade scope left-side graticules ... drop an RGB Curves effect on the clip, go to the Effects Control panel to grab & slide that up ABOVE (therefore before) the Lumetri effect in the Effects Control Panel, then use the Master or individual channels to either simply bring the 'lost' highlights back down or even do a basic neutralization of the clip. ANY SIGNAL ABOVE 99 GETS LEFT UP THERE by most of the tools in the basic tab. NOT good to view.

NOW ... you're ready to start matching. And for this work, I HOPE you've got an external control surface ... as it makes this SO much faster and gives better results. Say, the Ripple, for $350USD or thereabouts. Will save you more than the cost in a very few projects.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

R Neil Haugen

Legend

The Lumetri panel within PrPro is a truly wonderful thing ... as long as you don't need tough shot-matching, multiple secondaries & LUTs/Looks, and or the above within blending modes ... so I would note that there's a 3rd-party auto-converter app that's listed in a thread over on the SpeedGrade forum. It sells for around $10USD (it's in Euro's though, from Austria), it seems to work quite well to transmigrate 10.x prproj project file's header so SpeedGrade can open them as if they were a 9.x project file in Direct Link mode.

Premiere/Speedgrade Project Converter Tool

You have it open on your desktop, use Finder/Explorer to navigate to a project file, drag/drop it on the app, it does a save-as, adds an increment into the saved-as name, converts ONE (one) character in the header so SpeedGrade will accept that prproj file as if it were from 2015.2. Open the file in SpeedGrade, do your work, then save it.

Drag/drop back onto that app and it does another incremental save-as, reverting that ONE (1) character so the PrPro 10.x "current" builds see it as their own again, and off you go editing.

There are a LOT of things you can do pretty well and quickly within Lumetri in PrPro, especially with Tangent's Ripple or Elements panels which make coloring in PrPro vastly faster, more intuitive, and more capable. But if you're at all versed in SpeedGrade, the above mentioned 3rd party app is a life-saver. Especially when you need real grading, or have a project with a TON of shots, and need something more than just a bit of color correction.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

chrisw44157881

Inspiring

here is re:vision's plugin for match clip.

RE:Match - RE:Vision Effects

with just premiere, there is a gotcha, there is no support for dual scopes for 2 different clips. although you can printscreen your scopes then have mspaint up. haha.