Monday at NAB I saw in on a session by colorist Robbie Carman called Match It: Scene to Scene Color Correction. He passed on a lot of great tips for Apple Color … and a surprisingly large number of them were for dealing with bugs! Here’s 5 of my favorites:
1. Find your “establishing shot” in a scene, as in a shot that is representative of the overall shots in that scene, and grade that shot first. Use that as a reference and base for the rest of the grading on that scene.
2. Control + G toggles the grade on and off of a shot.
3. Double-clicking a still store brings up a split-screen of that still and the current frame you are parked on with the playhead. You can compare them side-by-side in the split screen and it is also reflected in the scopes. Control + u toggles that split-screen on and off.
4. Using Color’s groups functionality you can apply a grade to a group and that grade will appear in all the shots in the group. Make a change to that group and changes will ripple through all the shots in the group.
5. You can copy/paste grades in Color but there is a bug in the software that doesn’t show the pasted grade in the grade bar of the timeline. Click on the shot and they will then show up.