I love the 3-way Color Corrector and use it all the time to balance whites, pull up the midtones and crush the blacks (love that term). In fact, pretty much every frame I process gets the treatment, so I often find myself tweaking color while looking back and forth from a broadcast monitor, my computer screen and the scopes (either the excellent FCP scopes or a stand-alone unit if one is present).
When the adjustment is subtle or creative in nature, I often find myself wanting to quickly turn the filter on and off for a quick “before and after” reality check. This is especially true if I have a Producer on hand and to be honest, if they can frequently and quickly be shown the “before/after” view, their appreciation for the adjustment process is greater. Because of all this looking around from screen to monitor, I really appreciate the CTRL 1 shortcut:
As you have no doubt guessed, this toggles the Color Corrector “filter enable” button (see illustration at right) on and off and, since that button is such a futzy little guy to hit with the mouse, this is just one of my favorites. It lets me keep my mouse on the luminance controls or the balance indicators (those little white dots in the color wheels) because CTRL 1 is pretty easy for me to do with my left hand (I happen to mouse with my right hand).
Note that this little gem works with both the Color Corrector and the 3-way Color Corrector and if you want to read a really great article on using these extremely useful filters, you should read FCP guru Andrew Balis’ classic article on the them at the always excellent Ken Stone site.
A Handy Little Color Corrector Shortcut
I love the 3-way Color Corrector and use it all the time to balance whites, pull up the midtones and crush the blacks (love that term). In fact, pretty much every frame I process gets the treatment, so I often find myself tweaking color while looking back and forth from a broadcast monitor, my computer screen and the scopes (either the excellent FCP scopes or a stand-alone unit if one is present).
When the adjustment is subtle or creative in nature, I often find myself wanting to quickly turn the filter on and off for a quick “before and after” reality check. This is especially true if I have a Producer on hand and to be honest, if they can frequently and quickly be shown the “before/after” view, their appreciation for the adjustment process is greater. Because of all this looking around from screen to monitor, I really appreciate the CTRL 1 shortcut:
Note that this little gem works with both the Color Corrector and the 3-way Color Corrector and if you want to read a really great article on using these extremely useful filters, you should read FCP guru Andrew Balis’ classic article on the them at the always excellent Ken Stone site.