Hollywood Cinematic look in Premiere Pro

Hey everyone, in this video we are going to look at how to create a cinematic Hollywood look in our footage. We're going to go from this to this. It's going to be a nice way to kind of combine a lot of the things we've learned so far, let's jump in. 

So before we start Color Grading, we've actually been doing Color Grading up until now. Color Grading, the term is used for just, like getting consistency across multiple shots. So that's grading the footage, but often, like on YouTube tutorials, is you want that kind of special look for the Color Grading. So we're going to look at the Hollywood cinematic look in this video, it's very personal. So there's no way, like Hollywood button, this is my interpretation of what I feel Hollywood is. 

The first thing you should do before you do anything is correct your footage, so at least it's consistently the same and normal. So we're going to bring in a couple of shots that have already got-- they'll be normalized-ish. So they're in our Color folder, they're called Color Grade 01, 02, and 03, bring them in and create a new sequence. You can see, I've got a new project going for this one, let's rename the sequence so we don't get too lost. This could be 'Hollywood', let's go call this 'Cinematic'.So cinematic, that will do. 

So these guys have a reasonable look on them already. So they've come from Pexels, thank you, Taryn. They're consistently across, so get everything, get your Scopes out, get everything looking the same first, before you apply your grade or at least your stylized grade. So let's assume we've done that, and we don't want to-- you can fix every individual clip, like we've been doing up until now, but in terms of adding a Color Grade style, we're going to do it to an Adjustment layer. 

So we're going to make a new Adjustment layer, there we go, it's going to match my sequence, which is perfect, and I'm going to drag it on and stretch it out, so it covers everything, let's tidy this up. Who remembers how to select just the audio? That's right, have nothing selected, hold the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC, delete him, that's just a nothing bit of audio attached to that file, and let's look at the contrast as well. So we're going to, sorry, the Comparison view, it's this one here, that little icon. If you can't see it go to '+', and drag it. Is it on by normal? I think it might be on by default, I can't remember, actually. 

So drag it down, if you can't see it here, just drag it into this menu, and we're going to see our before and after. We're going to use this button here, 'Shot or Frame'. So what we want to do is, be matching, so it's before and after. You can turn that off so that you've got like a reference, and then be working over here, and be trying to get the same color grade. What I want is to have that on so they're kind of both the same. We'll color grade this first part, maybe where the balloons are, in here. I'm at 12:02, you can do it anywhere you like. 

Now this is very personal, but for me the Hollywood film look, basically clearing out the mids, and having just accentuated highlights and shadows is what I like. So the easiest way to do this, is make sure your Adjustment layer is selected, and let's go to 'Basic Correction', and our 'Contrast'. Let's have a look, let's open up one of our Scopes, so let's go to 'Lumetri Scopes', and in here I want to see the Luma waveform, there it is, there. You can see, the before and after are there as well. 

So you're going to end up-- let's just do something big, can you see, it's showing you this shot, before I made the adjustments, and after, so you can compare them. What I feel like gives us the most what we want, in terms of that Hollywood feel, is that contrast, can you see, I'm just clearing out the middles, as in all the mid tones getting squished up or down, not leaving much left behind, and I feel like that gives me a lot of what I want from this look, can you see, the before and after, I don't know, what do you think? 

All right, I'm back, my machine crashed, it gives me a really good excuse to show you, A, that it happens to all of us, and B, the Comparison view is a bit weird, that's why I haven't done it much in this class, because it's, I don't know, everybody's level in this, that's watching this video, so the Comparison view can be a little strange, but this gives me an example to, like go and show you. So if I turn my Comparison view on now, and match it, so we're kind of matching a frame shot comparison, and you're like, "Oh, where's my before?," because that's showing me the after and before now. You want to go before, before. so what we want to do is, with our Adjustment layer off, this is how to kind of like reset it. This is what I do when I'm personally working, turn it off, turn that on and off, so it shows me like the normal version, or the one with Lumetri off. 

Now turn this back on, there's a lot of that. So where are we, so contrast is up, let's look at tinting the lights and the darknesses, so we can do that, the best, the easiest way is under the Color Wheels. We've got our mid tones, shadows, and highlights, and I want to add some coloring, to the highlights and shadows. Up until now we've been trying to make the highlights perfectly white, but now we're actually going to add a tint, and you can decide which way this goes. 

We're going to go for that kind of orange teal fashion look. So we're going to go, the Highlights, I'm going to drag them down to this teal here. I'm going to go exaggerated so you can see what I mean, and this, up to the oranges, and you can decide, that's kind of more, like stranger things, old worldy one. Let's go the other way around. Let's go the shadows more tealy, let's go the highlights kind of up in this warmer space here. You may or may not like this, we're going to leave face detection, we don't need it on now because we don't have any faces. So we're going to leave it off, where are we at? 

Even with the Comparison view, I find, turning on and off is a little bit easier, actually, let me show you with a different-- we're going to use Color Correction, remember this one from earlier, I'm throwing it on the same Timeline, and I will show you that orange and teal. So shadows are going to go right down into this, kind of teal, further that way, we're in there. Let's turn off Comparison view for the moment, so we can get it nice and big, you can see, the highlights are going to drag into the orange here. Let's also do some 'Basic Correction'. Give me a sec. 

Now the difference of doing all these corrections now, I should be doing an Adjustment layer to this, is I'm trying to actually get a look, rather than get it correct or consistent. So I guess that's the difference when you're doing a color grade on purpose. Let's look at our Color Grade now, on this one, can you see, it's a lot different in here, with that orange and teal, yeah, cinematic-ish. I'm thinking Transformers and Blade Runner, and those types of things. All right, let's bin him, goodbye. 

So what else, is let's look at a different one, and let's look at adding some grain. We're going to go to 'Effects Library', which is not down here at the moment, for some reason mine's up here, it's normally down here. I'm going to go to 'Noise', and we're going to apply it to our Adjustment layer, so that applies to everything underneath. Now we're going to zoom in a little bit, click in here, a new little shortcut, now this brings up another reason why you should be shooting, or at least working with a codec that's not h.264, because you can see, it's already really noisy. 

So we're going to add noise on top of it, just because, we're going to drag it up a little bit, and we'll say, a little bit, that's 100%, I'm going to go to something like 10%, something like that. So it's there, and you can decide whether you want to use a colored noise or a black and white noise. That looks a bit strong, but if I go back to 0 there, oh sorry, go back to full screen, 'Fit', it's not working. We've got a bit of, just a hint of that green in there now, and it's across all of the clips underneath. 

Now we're faking a lot of this, like a lot of this color comes from the lenses being used, the lighting being used, we're kind of adding it in post to get that look, also, like a little bit of vignette, probably a little bit too much, but vignette, I'm going to just, way too much, somewhere in there, on, off. So we're going to add some black bars. We're going to open up the graphic, we're going to do more about Essential graphics later on. I'm going to show you this quick trick, for adding the bars, top and bottom. Now these bars, top and bottom should be, it's the aspect ratio of the actual way it's being shot, and what kind of camera, the sensor it uses. 

We're going to fake it by going to 'Essential Graphics', 'Edit', we're going to add a 'Rectangle', we will make it black, we will make it this wide, by this wide, by randomly this. There is an aspect ratio that you can calculate properly, this is a total hack. So I've got one, this is going to be Bar 1, Bar Top, even, and we can duplicate it by right clicking 'Duplicate', and this other one is going to be Bar Bottom, and this bottom one is going to come down the bottom. We're going to do it for the entire clip. 

So we've added some green, we've added some bars, maybe a bit thick, because I'm going to need for this one here, to maybe move the position, under 'Motion', position up a little bit. My computer is running really slowly at the moment, it's the greatest-- the noise, it's the grain, here we go. 

Now this one is already in slow motion, we're going to do slow motion properly a little bit later in the course, so that's kind of nice. Now let's see if we can play this back, there is no chance, oh, it's playing okay. I'll take it back, it plays fine. I bet you, yours-- oh, oh, there we go. So let's use this at this moment, to decide, how do I get it to play back nicely, so I can check my effects. The easiest one is to say, can I live with 1/4 quality, and you can, I can't work out the grain on this one. So that might be enough for you, because you might be working on timing, and just kind of general color, but that's a bit low. 

The other reason it's running so badly is this red bar. How do I get rid of the red bar, that's the quiz question. I'll give you a second. All right, so it is the Enter key on your keyboard, or you can go to 'Sequence', and go to 'Render Effects In to Out'. This is probably the easiest one, it's going to run really quick. While it's rendering I'll talk-- the other way of doing it is using proxies. We're using very small file sizes with terrible compression, or a lot of compression, so that there's a lot of kind of like art effects in the video, but the other problem is that, Premiere Pro, in most editing programs, don't like that mp4/h.264 codec, because it's so jam-packed that it's very hard to operate. 

So you might be using originals, that are in a different codec, like our ProRes or our GoPro Cineform, or even if you do start life with h.264 mp4s, you might create proxies in a different codec to make things run faster, and again, I'm a bit bored, I'm going to cancel, but we know, look, it's actually done a chunk of it already, ah, playing back nicely, way too much grain, it's okay, we can go and change it, and have to re-render it, but that's all right. I've added probably two, exaggerated the orange and teal, I've pushed the contrast up and down, so that the mid-tones get kind of left out a little bit. We added a vignette, we added way too bigger bars. 

The last thing we're going to do, is down here, where it says Adjustment layer, did you know, you can rename it, going to rename it, down here, we're going to go to 'Rename', I'm going to call this one 'Hollywood'. In the next one we'll do something similar, but we'll do kind of more of an independent Indie film kind of look to it. 

Another little last nugget of information, is if you are on a Mac, actually, a Mac or PC, and you are finding-- we talked about making it go faster, some of the other things that aren't as obvious, is programs running in the background. So Dropbox, if it's syncing, man, it hates life, it takes up a lot of system resources. The other one is Chrome, so Google Chrome, if you use that for your browser, and you are trying to edit, you will find it chews up a lot of your memory, so turn it off, if you can work that way. 

I use Chrome normally, but when I'm editing I have to switch to Safari, which is fine. I'm just, I don't like Safari as much as I like Chrome, so I only use Safari when I'm editing, because it's so much lighter weight, and Chrome is so, it's a beast, it sucks up all the system resources, and so does Premiere Pro, and they can-- yeah, it gets a bit slow. Anyway, let's get on to the next video.