Avid Tutorial: How to Bring Your Shots to Life with These Basic Color Correction Tips

nofilmschool by Robert Hardy

As most post-production folks know, Avid Media Composer is not the most intuitive piece of software. Even the simplest of tasks can take far too much time if you’re unfamiliar with the Avid interface and workflow. However, once you’ve grown accustomed to the program, it becomes one of quickest and most powerful editorial tools at your disposal. Because Avid is such a prominent tool within the industry, yet one that is shied away from by many younger filmmakers, I will be starting the “Avid Tutorial” series (and a Premiere version as well). Each post will be an aggregation of the best topical video tutorials from around the web in order help people become better oriented with the key concepts and functions within the software. So without any further ado, let’s take a peak at some of the basic color correction functionality built into Avid Media Composer, and see how you can take your shots from bland to vibrant in a few easy steps.

For those who shoot with flat or log profiles, how you control and portion the dynamic range of your image is absolutely crucial. Simply maximizing the dynamic range in any given shot can immediately give your images an incredible amount of depth and “punch”. Now that various scopes and waveform monitors are built into just about every NLE, this simple task should become habitual with all of your projects. However, while the lift, gamma, and gain controls are most useful for maximizing your dynamic range, they can also be a tremendous creative tool for shaping the tone of your image. Personally, I always maximize my dynamic range first, then play around with the gamma controls in order to push the image in one direction or another. This way, you can get dreamy “washed out” style images while still holding onto deeper black levels, and on the flip side, dark and high contrast images while still holding the highlights. read more & watch the videos