Color Editing of Stage Show in Theater

[HansP61]

I have footage shot in BRAW that I've inported into Premiere Pro 24.1.1. Most is OK but there are two dances where the colors are not right and I'm trying to correct them. On one the primary colors are supposed to be bright red and white with some red trim. The red has turned to pink and I want to get it back to red but don't know which effects and controls to use. I've tried Lumetri color but can't seem to get the pink to turn to red.

Similar clip where the dancers have white tops but different solid color pants. The colors are red, yellow, blue, green, and black (The Olympic Rings). The are all solid and deep colors but on my footage they come out more muted and pastel. The red looks pink, the blue looks purple, the green and yellow are washed out. How do I make them truer to the actual colors and more vibrant and less washed out.

I've not tried to corrrect the first clip yet so the still shows the colors as they currently appear on screen. 

The Olympic clip I have tried to use the lumetri on the clip with the still labeled with Lumertri. The red and green are slightly better but the blue still looks purple and the yellow is really washed out. Here are a list of the corrections applied with screenshots attached.

1. Exposure: -1.5

2. Hue vs Sat with the three colors selected, Red, Blue, Green. These are all raised to near the maximum.

3. Hue vs Luma Blue is brought down with Red nearly unchanged and Green curving down because the blue is down with only 3 points.

Red and blue have been the hardest colors for me to capture on film depending on the stage lighting and I don't know enough about the color controls to fix them. Please help. Currently shooting with a BlackMagic 6K camera but have had problems with Panasonic, and Canon cameras too.

[PaulMurphy]

Have you tried adjusting the BRAW Studio Source Settings?

Select the clip in the timeline, go to the Effect Controls, and click the Source tab (at the top of the panel).

[R Neil Haugen]

I work for/with teach pro colorists, have for a decade plus. Ok ...

Like Paul says, you probably need to get the footage converted from BRAW better in the BRAW settings on the Source tab. Your media needs white balance corrections to temp and tint, and exposure/contrast adjustments also, and done in the BRAW settings.

When you look at the clips on the sequence, you should already see a pretty close white balance, no clipped whites, nor crushed blacks.

Lets see if you can get that part down, then move on to further choices. One step at a time ...

Oh, and please, use the Color workspace for doing any timeline color corrections, using the Lumetri panel? Far better working space for color corrections.

[HansP61]

I feel like I may have been down this road before and not asked the questions I should have. I'm not sure if I have the BRAW Studio or BMD Plug In. I am a rank amateur and self taught so far so one step at a time will be good. I have the free version 3.3.3 of BRAW Studio installed but the features seem to be grayed out. Am I required to purchase the premium version to use the settings you're suggesting or are they available in the free version?

[R Neil Haugen]

@Nicolas from Autokroma would have better answers.

And really, the Autokroma site has quite a few 'papers' and videos on using both their free & paid, and the freebie from BlackMagic also.

[Nicolas from Autokroma · Accepted solution]

Hello ! 

Thanks @R Neil Haugen for the quote.

The features seem to be grayed out because you just need to change the Dropdown choice "Decode Using" to "Custom A" or "Custom B". 

You can use BRAW Studio without a Premium license for what you want to do, especially testing what you want to achieve with colors. A Premium license could give you advanced features to speed up your process then, like using the "BRAW Studio Panel" (top menu : window -> extensions -> BRAW Studio Panel) without time restriction and more. 

You can see all details between FREE and Premium licenses here : https://www.autokroma.com/blog/BRAW-Studio-FREE-vs-Premium

Best,

Nicolas from Autokroma 

[Richard M Knight · Accepted solution]

For the dance shows I do with BM footage I use the Autokroma plugin to decode the footage, These are my basic settings:

I then use the Lumitry tab in Premiere to fine tune the white balance using the picker in the basic tab and set the black and white points. For highly saturated costumes I often use the hue v hue and the hue v saturation curves.

[HansP61]

Thank you Richard. Because of you and Nicolas I was able to correct the colors and finish my editing. Do you mind if I ask what setting you use on the camera to capture the shows? I ended up with a little different than what you suggested and I suspect the difference is in camera setup.

[Richard M Knight]

I have a BMPCC 4K camera with and Olympus 12 to 40mm lens. My main Sony (now rather old) cameras only shoot HD at 25i so I run my BM camera at 50p to match the interlaced framerate. The theatre I mainly film at, like most others, have moved to LED lights, this does cause some issues mainly with saturated blue washes. The BM camera is one of my locked off wide shots and I set it  at 3800K white balance 3200 ISO, f-stop of 5.6 with a wide focal length of about 16mm.

[R Neil Haugen]

Richard's had good comments, and I love his BRAW settings for that work.

I've got an Ursa Mini Pro 4.6k and a pocket 4k, and have I think four presets in the Autokroma BRAW plugin. Depending on the dynamic range (contrast range) of what I shot and where I'm headed with it.

It took a bit of messing about to figure out what simply gets me to a good starting point. As that's what you do with the raw settings, get to a good safe-for-your-pixels conversion to the working space.

Doing gross white balance settings, contrast/shadow rolloffs and all. It's similar to log-to-linear transforms, in that the aim should be not to be 'finished', but to safely and correctly get camera data/pixels into the editing software.

[HansP61]

Thank you all for the suggestions. I'm burning a disc now so I can't save the screenshots yet but with your help I've finally gotten the color to look that way it did in the theater. I'll post the differences when the disc is complete.

[HansP61]

Here's the changes I was able to make compared to the originals. Thanks again.