We all know that production can sometimes be a challenge, so it's nice to know there are tools that can help you out when things don’t go quite as planned. The Warp Stabilizer VFX tool in After Effects CC happens to be one of the best when you have that shot but it's just got a little too much camera shake. To preview our clip, I will click once in the Timeline and then press the Spacebar to begin playback. And sure enough this footage is very shaky. So, I will press the Spacebar to stop playback and then press the Home key on my keyboard to make sure the Current Time Indicator is on Frame 0:00:00:00. Let’s select the layer in the Timeline. Go up to the Animation menu and choose Warp Stabilizer VFX to apply the effect. Once applied the effect immediately starts analyzing the clip. What's nice is the fact that it's analyzing this in the background which means I can go to any other composition in my After Effects CC project and continue to work as this analysis occurs in the background. If I want to see a status update as to the progress, I can just go to the top of the Effect Controls panel under Warp Stabilizer VFX and you will not only get a status but you will also get a rough estimate as to how much time is left for the analysis. Once the analysis is complete all you have to do is press the Spacebar again to preview the stabilized shot. I don't know about you but I think that's a pretty drastic difference. Let’s press the Spacebar to stop playback and look at some of the settings in the Effect. Under Stabilization let’s start in the Result area and click on the drop-down menu. Smooth Motion is a setting designed for when the camera is actually in motion, for example, a camera that’s on a dolly shot. Since this camera was static in one place except for the camera shake, let’s choose No Motion. Notice the shot will automatically be stabilized again and no analysis will be required. Now under the Method options click on that drop-down because Subspace Warp is the default and Subspace Warp works by looking at each individual pixel for each individual frame over the entire duration of the clip and it stabilizes the shot pixel by pixel. Let’s choose Position from the drop-down and then press the Spacebar to preview that. And you will notice just with Position you will get a fair amount of distortion that happens within the shot. So, I will press the Spacebar to stop playback again and go back and change the Method back to Subspace Warp. Now just to understand how much this shot has been stabilized, under Framing drop-down let’s click on that and choose Stabilize Only and press the Spacebar to begin playback. Now you can see the edges of the footage dance around the scene, so you definitely have a much more clear picture as to how much stabilization has been applied to the clip. I sometimes like to do this just so I have a better understanding as to how much the image is changing. I will press the Spacebar to stop playback and change that setting back to Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale. Whenever you choose a setting with Auto-scale you can just go to the Auto-scale area to see exactly how much it's magnifying that clip. Anything under about 120% is usually relatively okay. When you start getting above 120%, you might start to notice the image get a little bit soft. So, the next time you have that perfect shot but the camera was just a little too shaky you know you have got things covered with the Warp Stabilizer VFX Effect.

 

Before you ever consider stylizing video footage it's always wise to make sure you are starting with the best image quality, whether it's overexposed or underexposed, chances are you are probably losing information. So, in this tutorial, we are going to fix both, an underexposed and overexposed shot using the Lumetri Color Effect. Let’s start with the Underexposed shot. In the Project panel double click on the Underexposed Composition and then press the Spacebar to begin playback in the Timeline. You can see the clip is underexposed and it lacks contrast. So, I will press the Spacebar to stop playback here for a second and I want to draw your attention to something. Notice how dark the image is right now at 0;00;04;06. If I click up here on the top part of the Timeline towards the beginning of the Timeline, notice up here around frame 0;00;00;00 how much more bright the image is. Part of the challenge with color correction is the fact that shots change over time. So, sometimes you actually have to keyframe the effects. Now before we get into keyframing, let’s just apply a basic adjustment at Frame 0;00;00;00 here. So, I will go to the Effects & Presets panel, click in the Search area and type lumetri, l-u-m-e-t and sure enough there is the effect. To apply click on it and drag it and drop it right into the Composition panel. Go to the Effect Controls panel and all we need to do is open the Basic Correction area. Now, we can fix any of the exposure problems happening in this shot within the Tone section of this effect. So, I am going to scroll down in the Effects Controls panel to pop the Tone section up a little higher in our view. Starting at the top, Exposure adjusts the brightness of all of the pixels across the entire image. Contrast adjusts the difference between the lightest and the darkest parts of the image. So, a higher contrast makes that difference wider and a lower contrast makes that difference less. Highlights adjust the bright part of the image but not the absolute brightest, that's the Whites area. Same goes for Shadows and Blacks. Shadows adjust the darker parts of the image and the Blacks area of the image contain the absolute darkest pixels. Now to make a quick adjustment I am going to go ahead and click the Auto button here in the bottom of the panel. When I click Auto it does a pretty good job but you notice this area here is extraordinarily bright. So, let’s look at some of the adjustments that got applied. So let’s go back and fine tune this initial auto adjustment. Go to the Whites area and let’s drag that to the left to bring those levels down just a little bit. Now for personal taste I think this image looks a little flat. So, let’s add a little more contrast into the scene. Go back up to the Contrast, click and drag to the right to add more. You should also notice that this is going to make our colors appear as though they are a little more saturated. Overall, I like how this image looks, but if you remember as the camera moves the image changes over time. So, we need to add some keyframes. Go to the Effect Controls panel and start with the Exposure setting. Click on the Stopwatch and hold your mouse down as you drag through all the rest of the different settings in the Tone area. So, we have just keyframed our initial adjustment. Now move the Current Time Indicator down the Timeline until we get to an area where the image is significantly darker. I will stop right here at 0;00;03;00 in the Timeline. Now let’s go back to the Effect Controls panel and click the Auto button one more time to add our second keyframe. Press the Spacebar to preview the clip, and as you can see our color adjustments look nice and smooth over the entire duration of the clip. Press the Spacebar to stop playback and let’s look at how we can adjust the overexposed shot. Since the Composition has already been opened once we can just click in the Overexposed tab here in the Timeline. We need to apply our effect. So, go to the Effects & Presets panel and drag the Lumetri Color effect right onto the Composition panel. With the effect applied go back to the Effect Controls panel and open up your Basic Correction. Make sure the Tone area is open and then click the Auto button to create our initial adjustment. While, that’s made a pretty good adjustment I think the contrast is a little much. So, go back to the Contrast area, click and scrub to the left to soften that up a little bit. Now we can press the Spacebar and preview our shot. Overall, I think this looks pretty solid and since it's an evenly exposed shot we don’t have to add any keyframes. Now if you find yourself having to make corrections to a lot of footage you should consider getting a color calibrated monitor and using the Color workspace you can monitor the video signal coming out using vector scopes. But that is definitely a workflow requiring deeper discussions. For fixing exposure problems in After Effects CC the Basic Correction section in the Lumetri Color Panel is a great place to start.

 

Adjusting the color of video footage can be viewed as a technical process or a process designed to help set the mood and create the feeling in a shot. I'll start things off by coming over to the right side of the Timeline and scrubbing with the Current Time Indicator. So, click on the Current Time Indicator and drag back and forth across the Timeline to preview different areas of the image. And you can see no matter where I am in the Timeline I've actually got kind of a cool shot. There are lots of green pixels and lots of blue pixels. Now I'd like to warm this up to make it look a little bit more like sunset in the evening. To do that I'll select the Layer in the Timeline and go up under the Effect menu, go down to Color Correction and choose Lumetri Color. Let's work in the Basic Correction area. So, open up those options and then go down to the White Balance area. Notice it's divided up into three sections. If you don't see White Balance open make sure to toggle open the triangle. Now the WB Selector is kind of special. If you had a shot where there were clearly pixels that were supposed to be white, say someone wearing a white shirt, you could click on the Eyedropper and then click directly on the white pixels in the Composition panel and the White Balance would automatically adjust to make those pixels white. Since we don't have anything like that in this shot we're just going to use the Temperature and Tint settings. So, I'll start with Temperature. If you hover over the parameter and click and drag to the right we can scrub and that'll warm up the shot. The further you go to the right the warmer it will get. Now I think this is a little too far, so I'll bring my Temperature setting back to a setting somewhere around 120. While this looks okay, let's see if we can make some more adjustments with Tint. Now the tint area isn't adjusting the White Balance in the shot. It's actually adjusting the difference between the magenta pixels and the green pixels. So, if I click and drag to the right I'm making the image a little more magenta. If I click and drag to the left I'm making the image a little more green. Let's go ahead and drag to the right and we really don't need a lot of this to just warm up the shot. So, I'll set the Tint setting to 7.0. Now if we scrub through our project you can see we've definitely warmed up that shot. Now I think I like how this looks, but honestly, I find whenever I'm working on something as subjective as color adjustments it's sometimes wise to get up and walk away from the computer for a little bit. Just creating that small break can often give you some fresh perspective before creating your final output.