Chapter Four. Perfecting Video Quality

If you shoot live events outside of a studio, you're very good, very lucky, or you spend lots of time fixing the color and exposure of your videos. Fortunately, Adobe Production Studio has a wealth of tools to identify and correct these issues.

In this chapter, we'll start with brightness and contrast adjustments, and then move to color correction and image stabilization, and conclude by explaining how you can apply these effects efficiently to multiple clips. After Effects has great tools for color and brightness adjustments, but in this chapter we'll work mostly in Premiere Pro, where it's easier and faster to correct most videos.

While various Production Studio scopes offer some objectivity for adjusting brightness and color, many adjustments are just plain subjective. If the color or brightness of your computer monitor or NTSC display isn't accurate, your adjustments will be off. At the very least, you should run Adobe Gamma to calibrate your monitor (for a helpful knowledgebase article on the subject, visit www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/321608.html). You should also consider a third-party calibration tool for both your computer monitor and NTSC monitor or television (check www.colorvision.com for several options).

When producing for DVD, burn some corrected footage to DVD early in the process and view it on several television sets to gauge your adjustments. Otherwise, when you jump from the computer to DVD, you may be unpleasantly surprised by the inaccuracy of your adjustments.

Much of the footage shown in the examples discussed in this chapter comes from a test project I use to evaluate video editors. Essentially, it's a series of mistakes like underexposed video, white-balance issues, handheld shots, and other detritus. If you see text and/or time code on a screen, that's because it's part of my test project.