Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 Studio Techniques

It sounds obvious, but one of the most important things to remember when using the Three-Way Color Corrector effect is what exactly you are using it for. If you are making a secondary color correction, then all the color casts (offsets) and level controls apply only to the secondary selection. If you are white balancing or applying offsets, then the moment you start to adjust and select a secondary those adjustments go away and you are working with only the secondary selected. For standard three-way corrections don't touch the Secondary Color Correction effect unless you aim to use it.

Notes

For powerful examples of what you can do with the Track Matte key and color correction, take a look at the Color_Matte.wmv tutorial, located in the Video Tutorials folder on the book's disc. When the file loads in Windows Media Player, press Alt + Enter to play it back at full-screen size.

If you plan on doing secondary corrections, you can use the Fast Color Corrector to white balance your shots, then apply the Three-Way Color Corrector on top of it to make your secondary color correction. When defining your secondary the easiest way to build and select it is in the Mask Output mode of the Three-Way effect. Once you have defined your secondary always apply a little bit of softness to the edges of the mask to remove the possibility of pixilated artifacts or pixilated edges being rendered.

As you can with all effects, you can save any three-way correction as an effect preset that you can apply to multiple clips. In the next chapter I will reveal two cool effect techniques: track mattes (which you got a nice taste of) and picture-in-pictures (also known as PiPs).