ColorGHear TOOLKIT- color grading SYSTEM for AE

shian

@jobless Nice! I'm glad you're really getting the hang of ColorGHear. I was worried that maybe what seemed pretty obvious to me wouldn't get across to the general user public, but it looks like you understand it really well. I'm sure by tutorial 12 you'll be an absolute pro.

And thanks for the vimeo update.

jobless

Yes it is GH1. The green ch. is cleanest of all but when you push it hard it breaks :)
Here are some pics with curves applied to footage to illustrate the problem and to show how Gkiller can be effective. Offcourse there is lost of fine details in hairs, but who want to push color and luma so hard?
Ghraikiller is awsome...
From left to right:
1 original Green Ch
2 original Green Ch + Curves
3 original Green Ch + Curves + GhrainKiller Default
4 original Green Ch + Curves + GhrainKiller Green Ch Reduction at 0,5

If you need original file you can download it from:
http://www.nikolicnemanja.com/00016.mts

I'll change description page on Vimeo...
Cheers

shian

No I mean - In the vimeo description page, it would be helpful if you said publicly there the same thing you've said here, about the codecs, that you added grain, that the noise is from vimeo compression and not the plug-in, that you cranked the chroma further than you could without GHrainKiller, etc, etc.

BTW its weird that you would have grain in the green channel. Is it GH1 footage? I'd love to get my hands on some so I can tune the GHrain Killer and create more GHears dialed in for the GH1.

And thank you for sharing.

jobless

Actually I added grain on top of it :) And this artefacts are from vimeo compression... Cineform export was clean as original.. :)
The parameters I need to dig out from various compositions (meny of them I deleted), however I used Fist and GhrainKiller and Ghrainkiller was set to default except for green channel ( I needed to increase grain removal - my clip were very noisy in green channel )

shian

@jobless Cool. You can see the noise with how far it's pushed. It'd be interesting to see you include those same clips without the GHrain Killer to see how much noise is there when pushed that far. And just to protect my reputation, it's be nice to have the parameters of the test that you put here in your post in the description on vimeo.

jobless

I did some tests with old clips. The colours are overcrancked purposely to see codec behaviour when used together with GHrainKiller.... and it is much cleaner :)
I used Cineform and Mts files in the clip and both of them look good and you can push the colours much further than w/o GHrainKiller...
Cheers!

duartix

Well thanks Shian, my interest in ColorGHear has changed from REAL to MAJOR. If all goes well with my AEX setup, I'll be a customer in the short term.

shian

@duartix GHrain Killer is the similar to Neatvideo - a statistical estimation temporal denoising filter, using the de-noising engine that comes with AE, but with one MAJOR distinction: it targets the kind of noise and artifacting native to DSLR footage, and I show you (well, I will show you in the tutorial that comes out this week) how to identify and target certain kinds of noise, and then create better sampling, which is the key to noise removal with image retention.

But even the default settings do a great job of killing noise.

If you know how to process photos in photoshop, ColorGHear should become very familiar to you very quickly.

duartix

I'm really a noob when it comes to color grading (except for an extensive personal photo processing background) in that all my video editing was mostly done in VirtualDub and it was centred in stabilising (Deshaker) and denoising (NeatVideo). Stepping up to AEX will take a real effort but I have no doubts that the results are worth it, and I have a REAL interest in ColorHGear.
Going back to noise, I know that NeatVideo is a dedicated temporal/spatial denoising filter and probably the best one around. I wonder how short of NeatVideo the GHRainKiller is. Is it good enough in most cases of incandescent ISO3200 footage on the GH2? It is an exclusively spatial denoiser, right?

shian

@Vitaliy_Kiselev Excellent suggestion. Is there any way I could get limited editing function to clean up the thread?

You guys can contact me through the PM function of this site, or by emailing me at colorghear@gmail.com. For members with questions about the site, please use the contact form on the site because it will send me details about your account (browser and OS) and whether or not you're a registered member, so I can provide quicker more accurate support.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@shian
I suggest to use email and PM for personal problems support, as it makes topic unreadable.

shian

@ Hallvalla Hmm, I'll take a look at it. It's still just the private the email that you get, right? Cuz the member receipts I get are just ********* in that field. But if it's a major issue, I'll see if there's a way to change it.

artiswar

The Premiere workflow is ridiculously easy. Right click and BAM. I'm throwing color grading down super quick. I did transcode to ProRes from ClipWrap.

Hallvalla

@shian Meant to mention your registration email includes the user's (name) and (password) spelled out. Not sure if everyone agrees, but I think having your password spelled out is a bit of a security risk, especially if you use it in multiple sites.

thx

shian

@chauncy raw MTS works fine, but with what little experience I've had with hacked footage, spanned files are a little wonky when it comes to scrubbing. But DNxHD and Prores work awesome. The trade off you have with higher bitrates is hard drive space. If ti were me, I'd invest in a large hard drive and encode with 5DtoRGB at 444 ProRes or DNxHD.

I'll cover workflows later this week. I edit in FCP, use Automatic duck to bring into AFX, and then export ProRes 444. If I had Premiere Pro, I'd edit in that, bring into AE, etc. If ProRes wasn't an option, then I'd do tests and see how much you have to bring the levels down to compensate for DNxHD's tendency to boost the luminance by 1/3rd stop on export.

Hallvalla

@shian

Thanks - works in Safari, was trying with FireFox.

shian

@hallvalla Had one other issue like this, try another browser. Opera for windows is not reading it, but IE is, Chrome and Safari on mac are working...

Hallvalla · Screen Shot 2012-01-02 at 1.38.40 PM.png

@shian

Purchased, all loaded up. But I can't access your tutorials (I'm logged-in). I'm sure I'm just missing something simple?

chauncy

I'm wondering how colorghear affects workflow with high bitrate gh2 files. I'm on win 7x64 with adobe cs 5.5. I have the full mainconcept plugin for premeir. It's all accesible through media encoder. My machine is powerful.

So what's recommended. Should I put the mts file directly in ae or use 5drgb to encode it with dnxhd first? Or should I do everything I want in ae first then render it to ... what? A final mov file encoded by dnxhd? That doesn't seem practical since the size of the then encoded file is bigger than the mts. Or should I, after encoding to a mov file, then encode to a h264 file?

What's a good workflow using colorghear to get a nice balance between size and highest quality?

Loving colorghear btw.

itimjim

Thanks Shian. Purchased, and look forward to working through the tutorials. I'm new to grading video, but not to photographic development. At $25, if you can even make my editing life 1% easier, it will be worth it.

Thanks for the hard work and commitment and I hope it is a success for you.

Tim

shian

*****ATTENTION***** -- if you are using CS4 or CS3 on Windows, I will have you a bug fix ASAP, likely by the weekend.

shian

@artiswar if you are going to "push" anything, raise levels, etc, always do that first, if you are going to try and stretch your image data like I did in the ColorFist tutorial, do that ABSOLUTELY first. Save any 3-way corrections for last or next to last, any spectral enhancement should happen early - like, layer 2 or 3. Once you have your grain killer set and mixed, turn it off while you work on everything else to speed up preview times.

Yeah, I'm really proud of the GHrain Killer, and in the next Tutorial I'll show you just how powerful it really is.

artiswar

@shian - Thanks for the tip! Any other quick nesting tips? anything I should do first rather than last?

Also, the Grain Killer preset is seriously making me regret purchasing Neat Video. Quicker render times, good results. Seriously a great thing you've made.

shian

For those having trouble finding their "User Presets" folder - use this workaround.

shian

@artiswar - Cool man. Can't wait to see it. Have you tried using the shadow lift as your first rather than last layer? You'll add less noise that way.

@rockroadpix - :) Awesome! 1 more coming tonight, another tomorrow, and hopefully once I get the CS4 bug resolved, 4 more by the weekend.

And with the tutorials, if there's anything you feel I didn't explain thoroughly enough, feel free to tell me. I have a thick skin, so you won't hurt my feelings very easily. And know that more info is coming, I'll try to hammer out EVERYTHING you need to start reeeeeeeally rockin' with the Toolkit by Sunday.

The grain targeting and tracking tutorial going up tonight will definitely help, and I will do a separate ingest and render episode so you don't have to sift through the AE intro to find the settings you need to render out amazing looking masters.

Howdy, Stranger!

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