NewTek - VT[4]™

VT-Edit - "Match Colors" in Tool Shed
by Aussie
added 12/31/2004

Here is a new tool added to VT-Edit’s Tool Shed called Color Match. This lets you grab the color, brightness and contrast data (YUV) from one clip in your edit, and apply those settings to other clips.

This tutorial will take you through three stages:

Setting Up to try Match Colors
Running Match Colors
A Few Other Examples

Setting up to use Match Colors:

1. On an empty desktop, open up a VT-Vision, and also VT-Edit.

2. Set VT-Edit to show an Editing view (here we use storyboard) and a Filebin view.

3. In the Filebin view, locate some video clips. Here we used the “NewTek Content” folder (that came on your VT[4] Content disks) and went into theVideo/Clips folder.

4. Drag two video clips from your Filebin up into your editor pane. Here, we used the ”Bici.avi” and “PlaneFlying.avi” files. We plan to grab the breen grass color and apply it to the hills in the flying footage.

Tip A - If you do not see the editor on your VT-Vision, you can grab and drag the VT-Ed button shown in (A) below and drop it on top of the VT-Vision screen.

Tip B – You can magnify the storyboard icons by clicking and dragging on the magnifying glass show in (B).

Tip C – To have the timebar jump to your selected clip, you might turn on the “Track Clip” check box shown in (C) below.

5. Now let’s open Tool Shed with its button located near the top right of VT-Edit.

6. Tool Shed offers a number of tools for uses in VT-Edit. Use its Control Tree to select the “Video” tools, and then select the “Match Colors” tool.

Running Match Colors:

7. Let’s look at the Match Colors panel. In the upper area of the tool, you can tell it to “learn” the colors from a clip at the current timebar position. After learning the colors, you can select a different clip and perform the tool. Optionally, you can selectively perform the “Brightness”, “Contrast” or “Color” settings only.

8.1 Select a clip in your project to copy colors from - we chose the Bici.avi clip. Then click on the “Learn” button in the Tool Shed panel.

8.2 Next, select a clip in your project that you wish to modify. It should appear in the lower “Match Colors” view. Note that you can even scrub through this clip (by clicking and dragging on the mini-view in Tool Shed, and you can also click the “Mark” button to grab the current timebar position

8.3 Lastly, set any options (here we leave all 3 options turned on), and then click on “Perform”. You will see the output update with the color settings.

9. Below is a split screen showing a “Before and After” view of the final clip.

Here is a comparison of the two clips, ready for a dissolve. See how it has grabbed the “green grass from out first clip, and enhanced the grass in the plane footage.

A Few Other Examples:

10. Try some other clips. Here we used the red in the flag to tint the hills with a similar red wash.

And this next example uses the flag to brighten the “PinWheels.avi” clip.

11. Lastly, note that you can zoom into these clips or even boost the color saturation before “learning” the data.

Try this experiment. Find a clip with a nice flesh tone and use Control Tree’s Positioner to Zoom right into the flesh. Then click “Learn” in Tool Shed. Next find another clip and zoom into its flesh, and then click Perform.

Enjoy!