Day 1 of 20 Color Correction and Compositing

Today I had the pleasure of touching up the images in a process known as color correction.  So the majority of the day was spent looking at scopes, adjusting colors for each and every clip in a sequence from the middle of the movie.  Although this set of clips was not extremely challenging, the set of clips took several hours to work through as the process is quite time consuming.  After working through a few scenes I started work on a composite.

Compositing for the particular shot I'm working on consists of replacing a cell phone screen with a new screen.  I got a late start and left it half done but I thought I'd share with you some of the steps to creating a composite shot like this one.

The first thing that I did was create the overlay screen.  To do this I set up a camera to record the new screen.  After I brought the new recording onto my computer I stabilized the footage so that it had no movement and saved that file.

Now that I had my new screen prepared I was ready to set up a project file for the new composite.  I brought in the clip with the screen I wanted to replace and had the computer track the movement of the cell phone.  This information will be used to tell the computer where to put the new screen so that it will move with the cell phone's movement.

And the last step I did before leaving work was to take the new screen and add it as a layer to my project.  Then I cropped out everything but the screen to leave me with the perfect image to have over the top of the cell phone.  Tomorrow I will finish this composite and hopefully show you the final results.