What if I told you you can correct log footage without the use of a lot? What if I also told you that you can get better results doing it yourself? My name is John of RattstrapMedia.com and today I show you how to correct log footage without the use of a lot. What is going on guys and welcome back to another video? My name is John and if you're new here consider subscribing and hitting that bell to get instant notifications when I upload new content. Today I'm going to show you just how easy it is to correct log footage without using any type of conversion lot. Spoiler, it's much easier than you think. For the longest time I've been messing with correction lots and I can never ever seem to just get the results that I'm looking for. It's always way too oversaturated to fake looking I guess. I've bought so many correction lots and I can just never get it to look right. You know I've wasted a ton of money on this. So why don't we jump right into Final Cut Pro and I'll show you exactly my workflow on how I correct log footage. All right so here we are inside of Final Cut. I have these four clips here that we're going to do. The rest of this is just the remainder of this video but what you're going to want to do is click this little view here and click video scopes if they're not open already but when you click that you can open up your video scopes. So you're going to want to get this one the RGB overlay. So you're going to want your waveform with RGB overlay selected. The reason you want RGB overlay selected is because you can see here see these little colors that's going to be red, green, blue and that's going to help you with setting your white balance. Generally I try and set my white balance as perfect as I can in camera but it doesn't always work out that way. So let's start with this clip here. Now this clip is just like it's just a stationary clip. I was recording this at 1080 60 trying to get this flag to blow in the wind so I could slow it down but it never actually ended up blowing. The first thing we can do here is go to balance color. Now I know it changed it but it's because it's set to automatic so you can go to white balance and that sets it back. So we found something white here so we can click that and that pretty much sets our white balance and then you just click the eyedropper again to get off of it. So now the first thing now that our white balance is sort of set we're going to go to here is your color panel. You're going to want to get the color wheels up. These are going to be your friend. You have your global here which is basically just your entire exposure of the whole clip. You're going to want to bring your highlights up to this line which is 100 not all the way. Okay just a little little under it and then your shadows all the way down to the bottom line just above it which is zero. So if I turn these off you can already see it's making a little bit of a difference there. Now what's really going to make a difference is pulling your midtones down or up I guess if depending on the type of footage you have that's going to give it more of that filmic look. Now remember you're not really grading this you're just kind of setting it to look somewhat natural. Okay now you have two options here for saturation. You can pull all of your saturation up on the global panel or individually. Doing it individually is what's really going to make it shine. So like obviously you can do too much. So you're going to find most of your saturation in your highlights and your midtones is where you're going to be saturating the most. All right so let's do before and after here. So here is before here is after. So it's correctly exposed and it's correctly colored. Now if you do have to manually set your white balance you would use these little areas here and like line up. See how everything's moving? You'll find like the happy medium there. Yeah that would be that clip done so that would be ready for grading. Let's move on to this next clip here which is the same vehicle just on the dark side of it. All right so again let's go to balance color. Back to here, hit the white balance. We're going to white balance on the Chernobyl. Bring our highlights up. Shadows down. I think this globally has to come up a bit. Yeah so I might have under exposed this shot actually. Which isn't really a big deal. I can get rid of any noise. I don't even know if that is noise. That might just be the pavement but you get the idea. So we'll bring in some highlights, saturation here. Midtone and the shadows. I'm not too worried about these colors clipping down here and stuff. You could fix that later on in the grading process but let's get this one done here. So we have this 240 here. It's pretty well exposed to begin with. So I'm going to set the white balance myself on this one. So I'm going to line these colors up. There. So now see how I lined them all up and they're all tall white across the board now. See the difference there? Very nice and warm. Okay so now what I'm going to do is that pull that down there. The shadows and midtones can come up a bit. I think four shadows down a little more. And boom there we are. Now let's bring up the highlight saturation. Midtone saturation. A bit of our shadow. Here's before and after. Before and after. Now let's do one last clip here. This is an actual clip of the Chernobyl guy drifting his car. So let's do an auto white balance on this. Get back to our effects. Little white balance and let's see. All right cool. Highlights. Shadows. And midtones. Highlight saturation. We'll bring that up. Midtone saturation. And shadow. All right so that looks okay. So now we can watch that through. Make sure everything looks good. Right now all we're doing is making it look natural. We're not grading. We're not doing anything like that. There's a difference between color correcting and color grading. Color correcting is getting your footage ready. Color wise to be graded to have that final look. So right now like I just went through all of this. I went through all of these four clips. Now I got them ready to add a final look. If you want to see a video of me performing a color grade comment down below and like this video and I will make a video on how I grade footage. And that is just how easy it is to actually correct log footage without any type of what. It looks better. It looks more natural. Plus you have total control out of how you actually want it to look. That's all I have for today's video. If you have any questions, leave them down in the comments and I'll do my best to get to them. My name is John from rachetrapmedia.com. As always, thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.