Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 1339)

Color Correction Starts During Your Shoot
It’s important to remember that the process of determining the overall look of your video
begins when your scenes are lit and shot during production. To have the maximum
amount of control over your clips in post-production, you need to start out with footage
that has been exposed with your end goals in mind right from the beginning. Color
correction in post-production is no substitute for good lighting.
Optimistically, the process of color correction can be seen as extending and enhancing
the vision of the producer, director, and cinematographer or videographer as it was
originally conceived. Often, the cinematographer or videographer gets personally involved
during the color correction process to ensure that the look he or she was trying to achieve
is perfected.
At other times, the director or producer may change his or her mind regarding how the
finished piece should look. In these cases, color correction might be used to alter the
overall look of the piece (for example, making footage that was shot to look cool look
warmer, instead). While this degree of control is possible, it’s still important to start out
with clean, properly exposed footage.
Using a Chip Chart in Production
In many productions, a chip chart is placed next to the slate at the beginning of every
shot. This chart can be used during post-production to unambiguously correct each shot
so that the color balance of your images can be perfectly corrected. This then gives the
colorist a good neutral starting point for the color correction process.
Chip charts are especially useful during multicamera shoots with consumer-grade
camcorders. The white balance settings on such cameras often won’t precisely match,
even if manually adjusted. This can make cutting back and forth within a scene problematic
because you’ll be cutting from one color temperature to another. If, however, you shoot
a chip chart along with the slate at the beginning of each shot for each camera, you can
use this to color correct the footage from every camera used in the shoot, so that all your
shots match.
Example of a chip chart used
for color calibration. Chip
charts can be obtained at
a professional video store.
1339 Chapter 79 About Color Correction