Another new module and the final one of this Program. This week plus
two more and I will be done with school, but not with my film.
Finishing the film will be my priority once school is finished. It's
sort of like graduating and then having to go to summer school, or
cleaning up after the prom. Or something.
There's no time to rest though, until I finish my film my stomach is going to be churning and adrenaline is going to be pumping.
This final class is shoe horning in two ideas, DVD Authoring and Color
Correction. We're using Apple's DVD Studio Pro for the authoring and
we're looking at color correction in Avid, which has superior tools for
the job over Final Cut Pro. Not so Color, Apples newest tool in the
Final Cut Suite. I address them all in this show, including reasons why
Color, which is the deepest and richest of the three tools for
professional color correction, should not be the first thing you reach
for when you correct color. Take a look at the T L Cooper Eclipse, an expensive sophisticated keyboard/input device that allows you maximize the color correction workflow. There's a great review of using this tool at Ken Stone's site. In the show I refer to Pitch Black, Titanic and the Lord of the Rings series are good examples of using color throughout a film to evoke place, mood and time.
Macaela Vandermost is the instructor for this module. She
introduced the idea of color correction at the beginning of the class,
because we're going to be spending a full day on Saturday, the last day
of the class, learning about color correcting in Avid. A lot of people
in class felt they should get an overview of color correction in FCP
and she kindly obliged. Color Correction is a difficult concept to
grasp and it's even harder to do well, so getting an introduction at
the beginning of the class and then more in depth instruction at the
end should make it easier to get it.
We spent the entire class Tuesday looking at color correction and
Thursday we did a quick run through of using DVD Studio Pro 4 to author
a DVD. Classes for the remaining module will go into depth on the
critical aspects of authoring, such as compression, creating menu
navigation and menu graphics and developing an efficient workflow.
