 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at a plug-in from Codex called ColorSynth that allows you to have much more sophisticated color grading controls inside Premiere and Final Cut Pro. So Codex are a company that I'm best known for making raw video recorders. They're used on pretty much every big professional film set shooting in raw on the Alexa or the Canon C700 or a lot of other cameras that shoot more data than you can fit on a convenient card. They also developed a new recording media to work with the Alexa Mini LF that I saw at NAB and was impressed by. But the thing that I was really impressed at NAB was this thing called ColorSynth that they've developed. In the color world is pretty much divided. You have the professional colorists, people that work in DaVinci Resolve or something like that, you know, that's a specialized color program that has a pretty steep learning curve. And then you have other people that are working in just the native tools that come with Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. What Codex wanted to do was bring those same professional tools that are in things like Keylight and Resolve into the editing programs that people are already working in so that you don't have to do a round trip. So you can do your whole post-production workflow in the editing software that you're most comfortable with. So they came up with ColorSynth which is a $99 plugin for Final Cut Pro and Premiere. And you apply it as an effect. You're able to have very sophisticated controls of color, contrast, masks, hue versus hue, all the things you'd expect in a really high-end color system that Premiere and Final Cut Pro don't have natively. Suddenly, yeah, in there. Another thing that Premiere and Final Cut Pro's native color applications lack is a control surface. So that if you're color grading an entire film or you spend a lot of your time color grading, there is no native, properly designed way to do that without having to mess with the mouse or the keyboard. So Codex came up with Codex Keys, which is a $1500 control surface that works with the ColorSynth app in Final Cut Pro Resolve, soon to be avid and other NLEs as well. So if you get ColorSynth and really like it, find yourself using it a lot and spending a lot of your time color grading, you'll definitely be able to speed up your workflow and take your grading to a much more professional level with the control surface. So I've been playing with the app for a little while now. Let's dive into Premiere and see how it works. I've got a clip of my friend Asin throwing a punch to camera here and it is in Canon C-Log2. So I'll go over to my effects tab, video effects, Codex, ColorSynth, drag that onto the clip. And now my effect controls, I get the ColorSynth control. And you'll see I have the keys in front of me. As I go through these different things, it will populate whatever the controls are into this little LCD here on the controller and then that dynamically affects the function of these knobs here. These layers up here essentially, each one's a different function and they work sequentially. So input, selection, color EQ, shape, shadows, returns, highlights and then output. And we can toggle them on or off and we can move through them, the ones that we've toggled on with the up and down key. So let's start an input. Now the first thing is white balance, but since we're not, we're still in a log space, it's kind of hard to see right if I change the temperature around. It's not impossible, but it's hard to see what colors I'm changing. So I'm going to hit the middle key, actually click down on the dial and reset it and then go down to our exposure tab. Then I'm just going to turn up my contrast significantly to my saturation. And then you see straight away, I've got really like a color space transform going on. I can just make pivot to see if I want that contrast to happen. If I want to bring up my scopes in my editing panel here, and I can always hit the tilde key to go full screen on either of these, and what's great about having the keys is that I can go full screen on this and adjust my, say, offset or whatever without having to actually lose screen real estate to the actual color synth plugin. We're in an input grade. We're going down to, we've got our exposure and we've got a much more log-like image, REC709-like image. So now let's go up to our white balance and adjust our temperature. You can see our scopes moving around now, so we're not flying blind. And it's a little too warm, I think, but I'm looking at the white curtains of the background here. They look a little blue, so somewhere there. Now that I have some image that I want to work with, that's how I make my input grade, I'm going to go over to my selection and do a skin selection, skin qualifier. So I'll turn on this guy here, and you can see as I drag this around with my controller or use it with the keys, I'm starting to see just his skin popping out, picking up a little bit of the tree. I can further qualify this with a shape. If I want to throw a ellipse on there, there it is. Titian width and height. So I'm only picking up the face. I might lose it. Let me play through my clip. I lose a little bit here, so let's make it even wider so that it stays. I just want to keep it off the tree. So now I've got my, let's go back up to my qualifier, and I can increase the density now. So I'm going to get lots more of the skin, and now over to my modifier, and I have the same linear functions and exposure controls that I had before. So I can increase the saturation of the skin, or I can take some red out of the skin, or I can even increase the contrast of the skin. And if I want to see what I'm doing here, I can always click on my, click on and off my selection, little too orange, I think. I do like that extra contrast. So I can hit my play button here to play it through, make sure it doesn't play it backwards. I can also step through frame by frame, or if I had multiple versions of these, I could go from clip to clip. So that's my selection layer. Okay, next along the line is my color EQ. And I think it's smart of color synth to put your layers in the order that you should be calibrating in rather than letting you, you know, make nodes all over the place. It kind of enforces a good discipline of correct color procedure, I guess. Let's look at the main color EQ. This looks very intimidating. It's all it's really saying is hue saturation luminance in, or hue saturation luminance out. So this is, this is hue versus hue. And if I drag this up, I can see straight away what it's affecting. So here it's affecting his shirt, here it's affecting the tree, and the corner will be affecting his skin. Let's just get his shirt. And there we go. We can change his shirt, make it slightly more a dark blue. And then in my hue versus saturation, I can do the same thing, you can find that dark blue again, and I can just pull a saturation out of it. So again, I can always modify this too. And then with the luminance, I'll do the same thing again. And I'll just make his, I'll find where his shirt is, and make it less luminant, not that much less luminant, probably somewhere there. So now you can see, I'm able to qualify and affect really quickly without any kind of mask, both his shirt and the cooler in the background. So then go to my output layer, this is where I can, once I've done on my modifications, I can then add final touches. So if I still think that needs a little bit more contrast or saturation, now this one will affect everything that I've done, it'll affect my CaliQ, my selection, whereas if I had applied it in the input layer, it would only affect the clip itself, the raw footage, not all the modifications. So here in my output grade, if I find, I just want to redo the color temperature just a little bit, make it a little cooler, maybe a little less green, that looks about right. Now I'm thinking about it, now that I'm looking at the shot completely, it is, this green is kind of dominating the image. So let's go back to my CaliQ, let's do hue versus saturation, and I'll grab the greens as well, instead of, whoops, apple Z. So I want to add another point now, because I don't want to lose my blue modification, I'm just going to find my, wherever my green is, there it is, and just pull that down. I could also take the, the luminance out of it, at a second point, let's pull the green down, make it a little darker, now you can see straight away my eye goes to his face, boom. So it's a little bit of a bleach bypass kind of look, but I'm really happy with that, and if I wanted to do the whole thing, I can always turn color synth on and off, or I can turn my individual layers on and off as I go, see what each one is doing, and then if I wanted to, I could copy this and transfer it to my next clip, so I'm transferring my grade from clip to clip and modified each, again modified each time, or within color synth, we have storing different layers. So now I can transfer this same, these same settings to my next clip, modify them, store them again, copy grades as we go. Just to show a couple more functions of color synth, I have four nice shots of Los Angeles mountain range, and what I'll do is highlight all four in my timeline, go to effects, drag color synth to there, so now it's on every clip. What I'll start with is a color space transform, so in color synth, I'm going to go to preferences, instead of it being the source gamma and curve being Rec 2020, I'll change this to Canon Cinema Gamma and C-Log 3, which is how this was shot, and then I'll go to Rec 709 and leave it on 2.2. Now when I click save, you can see that this immediately goes to a more contrasty, more Rec 709 curve. What I'll do is go in down into my input grade here, and I'll pull my gain down, so pulling down my highlights to there in the middle, pushing up my mids, and then pulling down my blacks to fill up my entire scope here, then click down a few more, increase the saturation, increase the contrast. I can go across here and play with the pivot if I need to. Now I have something that looks like a pretty good shot, so what I'll do is go back to my color synth tab, store this in number one. Now when I go across to my next shot, I can just click one, and not only do I get my color space transform, which is now my default, but I also get this new grade. These color synths preferences affect the one that's selected, so here I'm going to hit this, maybe I'll just go to my output, click down, add a little bit more contrast and saturation, so you can see what I'm doing. Now I, for instance, think these reds are distracting, this fire plant in the foreground, so what I'll do is go across to my color EQ, and in the main EQ, scroll down here, and what I can do is select the color synth plugin so that it's active, and with my eyedropper, go through and pick this color, this hot color here. Now we see it's automatically selected. In my hue out, I can just bring this up until that red matches the green of the plants around it, and if I want to widen my cue, that'll affect the range to the side, so the softness of the bump. I've changed it from a striking red to a more similar orange, so I can just go and store that in number two. Now if I go back to my original shot here and load the two, now I can see more saturation and contrast, but it's knocked the red down again. Another cool function of this is my end shot here, looking down on the city, I'll activate number one, and then I'll go across here to my shape, and I'll use shape one, and again if the color synth is highlighted in my shape one qualifiers and my rectangle, you actually get a little space that you can do, and I can affect the width with this, I can affect the height here, I can affect my x and y, and if I go across I can do feather, or I can use just my mouse to drag the feather down. It needs to be a little wider so it covers the whole screen, and now in my modifiers, click down, bring down my gamma, and you see you have a really cool Ridley Scott style graduated ND filter, and I'm going to store that in number three, so go across to my second clip here, say I'm going to activate that, activate number three, and then I can go to my qualifier again with the color synth selected, and you know, see what's going on here, push this up if I wanted to, pull out the feather, go back, drop it down just a little, then go to my output, click down twice, three times, increase my saturation, my contrast, and I've got a cool looking shot again. That is my look at Codex Color Synth and Codex Keys. I really like the system for what it's worth, I found it really efficient to use, and a great way to save time going back and forth between different applications. If you're a Premiere or a Final Cut Pro person, and that's where you want to live, now you have the option to add a whole bunch more sophisticated grading tools, and do a lot more with your footage. Thank you very much for watching. Thank you to Codex for lending me both the app and the keys. It was really fun to check out. You can find links in the description to all this stuff and where you can get it. Leave your questions in the comments, and I will see you next time.