Final Cut Pro HD | H•O•T Hands-On Training [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

1.

Open Chapter 09 Lesson 1. You'll find it inside the Lessons folder on the FCP HDHOT DVD included with this book. Double-click Seq Ready to Title to load it into the Timeline. It should have all the graphics you've created so far during this chapter. If not, open Seq Ready for credits.

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2.

Position your playhead at 01:00:16:01the shot of the lady in the blue top holding a sheet of plywood.

3.

Select the video scopes by choosing Tools > Video Scopes.

Final Cut has four video scopes: Waveform monitor, Vectorscope, RGB Parade, and Histogram.

These last two scopes, although helpful, are nowhere near as important as the first two. So, you will concentrate on the Waveform monitor and Vectorscope in this exercise.

4.

Choose Waveform from the pop-up menu in the top-left corner of the Video Scopes window.

The Waveform monitor shows all the pixels in the picture in the Canvas, ranging from black, at the bottom, to white, at the top. Various shades of gray are in the middle. Pixels on the left edge of the Canvas are on the left edge of the Waveform and pixels on the right side of the Canvas are on the right side of the scope.

A properly exposed picture has pixel values that range from top to bottom. Images that look washed out are missing black levels. Images that are gray and dull are missing white levels.

Although you can't recognize specific images in the Waveform, you can recognize the various gray levels of shapes. For instance, it's easy to spot the highlights on her hat, the midtones of the plywood, and the darker shadows under the hedge.

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5.

Move the cursor inside the Waveform and watch as the yellow guidelines make it easy to measure the level of grayscale.

The Waveform monitor is how you measure your video levels, which is why this scope is so important: video levels are"TV-safe" provided that white levels do not exceed 100% (100 IRE). The only time they can exceed 100% is if you are shooting, editing, and outputting to DV.

However, the Waveform monitor tells you nothing about color. For that, you need to open the Vectorscope.

6.

Choose Vectorscope from the pop-up menu.

The Vectorscope tells you everything about color and nothing about grayscale. In fact, all blacks, whites, and shades of gray are a single dot in the center of the scope. The Vectorscope displays color in two dimensions: hue is represented by the angle of the color, red is at the top left, magenta at the top right, green near the bottom left, and cyan near the bottom right. Saturation is represented by how far out from the middle the color is.

For instance, it is easy to see the colors in the picture by looking at where the pixels clump: the small jet of blue from her top, the red/yellow of the plywood, the green from the shrubbery, and a small jet of yellow from the tops of her gloves.

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7.

Move the cursor around the Vectorscope and watch as the yellow guidelines allow you to easily measure the distance and angle of a color.

The Vectorscope measures your color levels, which is why this scope is so important: color levels are"TV-safe" provided that they do not exceed a rectangle drawn to connect the tops of each of the six color boxes.

However, not all the boxes are the same distance from the center. Red and Cyan are the furthest out and allow the greatest color saturation. Yellow and Blue are the closest in and allow the least color saturation. It is very easy to create a graphic on the computer whose colors are well outside video color safe. The best way to tell is to use the Vectorscope.

If a color exceeds this "box," it will not play back safely on videotape or DVD. (The video distorts, or"tears," and often creates an audio buzz caused by how the video and audio signals are processed inside most TV sets.) You must correct any illegal colors before outputting.

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8.

Remember in Exercise 2 when you created the yellow upper-corner graphic, and I told you to select a color near the edge of the color wheel? Put your playhead over the text clip and look at it on the Vectorscope.

If you got too close to the edge, your color would exceed the yellow color range. If this is the case, open the text clip in the Viewer and change the color of the super until the Vectorscope indicates it's OK. The yellow color in this screen shot has about the maximum saturation you can have without exceeding color limits.

9.

That's it for this exercise. If you changed the color on your graphic, save your work. Otherwise, quit Final Cut if you need to take a break.

NOTE | Clamping Video Levels

Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to set the video rendering for a sequence to clamp (or reduce) white levels that were too high in imported graphics. There's also a filter you can use that does the same thing for video.

(Remember, if you are shooting, editing, and outputting all in DV, you don't need to worry about this.)

Chapter 11, "Filters and Keying," talks about filters in detail, but this filter is important enough to discuss here. (You will learn how to apply filters in Chapter 11.)

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Here's a video test signal that is too white. Whites that are too white are called super-white. You can clamp this video level so that it doesn't exceed 100% by applying the Broadcast Safe filter (Effects > Video Filters > Color Correction > Broadcast Safe).

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When this filter is applied, all the super-white levels are rolled down to 100%, although the remaining levels in the picture are not changed. You can use this filter whenever you need to control video levels for lots of different clips and don't want to color-correct each one.

NOTE | Title 3D

It's beyond the scope of this book to discuss Title 3D. Sigh… I just don't have enough pages to cover everything in Final Cut. (Some academic versions of Final Cut may not include the Title 3D plug-in. You can tell if you have it by going to the Generator menu, in the lower-right corner of the Viewer. If it is installed, it will be listed immediately below the Text menu option.)

However, this text and graphics plug-in is very helpful in creating titles where you need multiple

Fonts

Font sizes

Font colors

Shadows

3D text

You select it, like all other text, from the Generator menu by choosing Title 3D.

You edit text created in Title 3D by double-clicking the clip to load it into the Viewer, clicking the Controls tab, and double-clicking on the Title 3D icon.