Video Editing : Coloring for Style (page 2)

The One Color effect was used in Rumble Fish, Pleasantville and Sin City. The general effect is to have a black and white video with just one object of color. We'll use the Color Corrector filter for this effect. This filter looks similar to the Color Corrector 3-Way but has only two wheels and the process is often called Secondary Color Correction.

Green screens and blue screens are used when a director wants to make an object or background disappear. This is because green and blue tints are rarely found in the color of a person's skin. When the color is "keyed-out" in post-production, segments of skin rarely disappear, just the desired object. The same idea works for us with One Color. If you know you want a black and white clip but with a woman's lips colorized, "paint" her lips either green or blue. In addition, it is best, but not essential, to eliminate this very color from the rest of the shot. If the green that you use on her lips appears elsewhere in the shot, we can stop the picture from disappearing by using a garbage matte.

Place the Color Corrector filter on the clip with the woman's green lips. The Limit Effect Eye Dropper in Final Cut is our main tool for this; other programs should have a similar tool, often known as "The Pleasantville Effect," but it might be called "selective color replacement" or other such similar name. It is easiest when you zoom into the desired object, in our case the lips. Click on the Limit Effect Eye Dropper and click on the green lips. Now go to your Saturation slider in the filter controls and drag it all the way to the left, desaturating the selected green, turning it gray. Chances are, all of the lips' surface area has not turned gray because there are different shades of green on her lips. Click on the same eye dropper again and select an additional shade of green, hold down the Shift button while clicking. The new shade should turn gray and the previously selected shade should still be gray. You may need to continue this process many times to select the entire desired area. You most likely will have to adjust Softening and Edge Thin to perfect the selection process. Start with the Softening option, as the Edge Thin option will not work without first Softening. This process will take some finesse and fine-tuning. Be patient.

Many color correctors will have a Key button. This toggles between a matte version of the selection and the current version you are looking at. Clicking the Key button will turn the entire image black except the selected portions, which will be white. This identifies the alpha channel you created for this image. When activating this feature, you may find you selected some other unintended areas because of some similar tints you've selected elsewhere. You can place a garbage matte over these undesired areas to keep them from being affected. A garbage matte is a video filter or effect that can be placed on a video clip to select portions of a frame and commit them to the alpha channel, giving them a user-selectable transparency (usually completely transparent). Now that you have only the desired area selected, and in effect turned gray by using the desaturation slider, we can turn the entire image black and white and the desired object back to green using the Invert button. Now drop in a second Color Corrector filter and, by moving the Hue wheel on this new filter, you can change the woman's green lips to any color you desire. Pretty cool. Most intermediate to higher-end programs have these features, although the names may differ.

We have touched on only four popular color effects achievable with color filters. There are many, many effects that can be realized. Don't be afraid to experiment with the filters and eventually you will stylize your video on your own computer in the same way as the big boys and girls are doing in Hollywood.

Contributing editor Morgan Paar is a nomadic producer, shooter and editor currently making documentaries in South America.

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