Does your video lack that little extra punch to the image? Is the audio clean and clear?

At Trotto Photography we have decades of experience color balancing cameras so your footage looks good from the start. Then, in the edit we can tweak the tonal range and boost the impact of color for maximum impact. Adobe SpeedGrade 2014 makes it easier to “round trip” a project from Premiere Pro to SpeedGrade and back. You get richer blacks, better tonal range and accurate color with rich saturation. Proper values for blacks and gamma are essential before you adjust color.

Various analysis tools such as the Vectorscope and the RGB Parade are essential for color grading. While viewing these scopes we use the 3 color wheels to adjust luminace, contrast and color for the whole image or just in the shadows, midtones or highlights.

Secondary color corrections affect a selected area or part of the image. Secondary color corrections make it possible to improve tonal range and color for clips that were recorded in an uncontrolled environment like we have faced with the GoPro camera in high contrast settings. These secondary corrections are beyond the scope of the three way color corrector in Premiere Pro.

Audio:
We record the best possible sound into a separate audio recorder by selecting the best mic for the situation. (This audio is then synced with the video clips in the edit.) Outdoors we run into many sounds that are out of our control. We can use a blimp or fuzzy rat over the boom mic to reduce wind noise but we can’t control cars, planes, dogs, birds and many other things that make sound recording difficult on location. Even in an office we encounter sounds that will detract from the speakers voice. Poor audio ruins a video. Your audience will not struggle to hear the speaker over the “noise” in your video. They will stop playback and redirect their browser. Using Adobe Audition 2014 we are able to remove many of the unwanted sounds like pops, clicks, barks and phones ringing with a simple tool that removes the spike in the waveform and fills the dead space with the sounds around it.

Clapping sounds in this clip are easy to “see” and remove with the healing brush tool (area highlighted in blue circle). It’s a visual way to improve sound.

Air conditioner vents create a low hum. In most offices they cannot be turned off. We make a “Noise Print” of the sound and remove only that frequency from the audio track. In every situation so far the noise was at a different frequency from the speaker’s voice so the pitch of the spoken words was not altered. Even the volume of loud machinery in a manufacturing plant can be reduced so that your audience knows that the equipment is running but it is not annoying to the ear during the video.

So, for better color and audio in your videos hire the the pros with experience.