Preparing Your Sequence

Before you bring your project to me for color correction, there are a few things you can do to prepare your project in so we can get started more quickly, saving yourself some money in the process. On the other hand, if you're not comfortable going through any of these steps, I can do them prior to the actual color correction session.

 Duplicate Your Edited Sequence Before Following These Steps!

Before you follow any of the steps in this section to prepare your edited sequence for color correction, make a duplicate of it, and name it something like "My Great Project CC" to indicate that this is the sequence that's destined for color correction. This way, the original edited sequence is backed up along with all of the original clips and effects, should you ever need to refer back to the original

 Move All Clips That Aren’t Being Composited to Track V1

Editors often use multiple tracks of video to assemble scenes, taking advantage of the track ordering rules in Final Cut Pro to determine which clips are currently visible. On the other hand, it’s faster, easier, and less ambiguous for the colorist (me) to navigate and work on a project that has all its clips on a single video track.

For this reason, please move all video clips that aren’t superimposed as part of a compositing operation down to track V1, as shown in the following screenshots. If two or more clips are superimposed as an effect (such as a title sequence), by all means leave it be, and I can color correct each layer separately.

Unprepared Timeline Prepared Timeline

Tip—if you hold the Shift key down while you drag clips up and down in the Timeline, you'll lock their position in time so you don't inadvertently move them out of sync with the audio. Furthermore, if you don't want to change the track order of audio items that are linked to the video clips you're moving, you can turn off Linked Selection. This lets you move video items without also moving their audio.

 Remove All Non-Essential Filters

It's often difficult for me to distinguish between filters that are creating temporary effects that I'll need to replace, and filters creating permanent effects that you want to preserve. For this reason, if you've created any temporary color corrections during the offline phase of your edit, please remove these from your sequence before bringing it in.

Please note, I'm only talking about filters for color correction that were applied during the offline edit. It's not necessary to remove every filter in your program. By all means, retain any and all filters used to create effects that are integral to your program such as glows, flops, mattes (such as letterboxing), etc.

If you feel that these filters are a useful reference for the creative direction you'll want me to take, I can always open up your original sequence to take a look at what was done previously.

TIP—There's an easy way to find every clip with a filter (or motion effect) applied to it:

  1. Select the sequence you're preparing for Color in the Browser.
  2. Choose Sequence > Settings.
  3. When the Sequence Settings window appears, open the Timeline Options tab, turn on Clip Keyframes.
  4. Then, turn off all of the clip keyframes options except for Video: Motion Bar and Filters Bar (see the illustration below).
  5. Click OK.

After you click OK, your Timeline will change to display Motion and Filters bars underneath each video track of your sequence.

 Bring All Third Party Filters and Fonts Used in the Program

If your project uses third party After Effects or FxPlug filters that didn't come with Final Cut Studio, you need to bring those filters to me along with your other project and media files.

While most color-correction sessions don't involve motion graphics work, it's still good for me to be able to view your project as it's supposed to appear. The color and placement of superimposed titles sometimes necessitates changes to the color correction of the clip underneath. Also, if you need me to render a version of your program that includes the titles, I'll need to have the fonts.

Tip—After color correction, I recommend rendering at least one version of your program as a textless master. This lets you redo your titles at any time without having to re-render the entire program.

Step Media Manage Your Project

Once you've followed the above steps, it's best to eliminate unused media to save drive space, and to consolidate all the source media used by your project into a single folder for easy transport and relinking. This is also a good step to take before you recapture your media (if that's necessary).

Tip—If you're going to create high-quality slow motion clips using optical flow processing in Motion, it's best to media manage your sequence before taking this step. This will make it go much, much faster.

The safest way to use the Media Manager is to employ the following options:

  1. Which option you choose from the media referenced by selected sequence pop-up menu depends on whether or not your source media needs to be recaptured.
    • If your media is already at its highest quality and you don't need to recapture it, then choose Copy. This safely duplicates the media used by your project onto another hard drive (which you choose using the Browse button in the Media Destination section near the bottom of this window), while leaving your original media untouched.
    • If your media needs to be recaptured or retransferred (see section 1), then choose Create Offline. This creates an offline version of your sequence, ready for the reconforming.
  2. Turn off Include master clips outside selection. This saves hard drive space.
  3. Turn on Delete unused media from selected sequence. This saves more hard drive space.
  4. Turn on Use Handles, leaving the handles duration field at the default of 1 second, in case you need any last-minute editing tweaks later on.
  5. Turn off Include affiliate clips outside selection. This saves more hard drive space.
  6. Turn on Duplicate selected items and place into a new project. This further protects you by saving all changes to a duplicate project file, which is also saved in the directory you choose with the Browse button. The original project file is left untouched.
  7. If this is a multi-camera edit, turn off Include nonactive multiclip angles if you've locked your edit. This will save a lot of hard drive space. Warning–be sure to double-check your sequence after using the option to make sure that you have the correct clips.
  8. If you're using the Copy option, click the Browse button to choose a folder on an external hard drive to which you want to copy the resulting project and media.

The following screenshot shows the Media Manager set up to copy preexisting media.

Media Manager Setup

Give this process some time, as it might take a while for feature-length projects to be media managed. Once media management has finished, a good test is to unmount the hard drive containing the original media, and then try opening up the newly copied project and media from your portable hard drive so you can double-check that every clip was managed correctly, and that all the files relink to the project properly.

Important—Don't assume that the Media Manager worked perfectly, check every clip in the Timeline!

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