Speaker 1: A polished export is what sets professional colourists apart from amateurs. One of the most common mistakes I see in videos here on YouTube is an inconsistency in grading. The two main culprits here are contrast and colour. When there is a disconnect between scenes in contrast and colour it serves as a distraction to the viewer and takes their attention away from your story. In today's video I'll focus on matching contrast but make sure you keep an eye out for the next one that focuses on colour. Let's jump into post. So we've got the scene over here it's already been matched in contrast and colour and I'm showing it to you as a reference so that you can see how it looks when it's off but then I'm also going to show you how to fix it. Next we'll take the same sequence and I just damp it with the contrast and as I'm playing it back you should be able to see a difference but there are some subtle differences that you may be not able to pick up with your eye and this is where the real magic comes in is you don't want to rely on your eye you want to rely on the built-in tools of your editor. And the best tool to do that is definitely going to be the waveform. First thing you want to switch off the colourize because you just want to focus on contrast and when comparing clips to each other it's much better to just see the black and white and not be distracted by different colours. So the first thing you want to do is establish the baseline. So we have to find a clip that has the correct contrast and one that we want to match all the other clips to and for me it's this one over here. So what I'm going to focus on is mostly my black levels and my mid-tones and I'm going to draw a line over here because this is where I want my benchmark to be. So when you switch on your reference levels I've already set this you can see there's a line by the highlights and there's a line here by the blacks. So this helps you to when you look at your clips you can see which ones are under or over the line but what I'm not going to do is I'm not going to simply take a clip like this and pull the blacks until it's above the line. I'm actually going to compare it next to my reference clip and I'll do this by using a split screen. So over here you can see there's a clear divide between the image on the right and the image on the left. So now when I make adjustments over here I can compare it with my main reference image. So I can see the blacks are clipping quite a bit and it's definitely under the line so I'm just going to bring it up a little bit, this clip over here, here we go, right about there and the rest of the image does look balanced so now I can use this one for the next one because they will flow into each other. So this one compared with this one. Again I can clearly see the blacks are clipping quite a lot and I want to just balance it out a little bit, bring it this one over here, bring it up just just above the line that's more balanced. Now in the highlights over here I can see it's quite a bit brighter over here and it doesn't really blend with that image over there so I'll just bring that down and I'm going to do that with a mask. I've already done that. You can see there I just brought the highlights and the mids down on the mask and then you can see the level dropping down and I disable this one. You can see how it's leveling out with the previous image and going full screen just confirms that. Next we'll take this clip over here, we can compare it with this one again, just enlarge the waveform. We can see this one is the one on the left, that's the correct one and this one has to come down quite a bit. So we'll just select it, bring down the levels right about there and the highlights are also fine so we'll just carry on to the final one. We can see there's some clipping in the blacks here especially as she moves into the frame, there we go, we can fix that. Just above the line, full screen and then one more clip is actually, I forgot about this one in the beginning, you can see it's also off and I'm going to use my main clip because that's the one following on it and we'll go to our waveform and I definitely need to bring down the blacks a bit so we'll just go make sure it's selected, bring it down right about there and that's pretty close and then I can see the mids are quite a little bit lower than the mids over here so I'm definitely going to bring that up a little bit. Just as I do that you can see the highlights also kind of matching at the top and then I'm going to bring down my blacks just a little bit more. And now we've got a balanced image and my favorite feature is the ability to look at all these images at the same time so when you select them like this they actually go to split screen and when you press full screen you can actually see with your eye that they are indeed matching. Matching contrast is essential to putting out a polished export and failure to do so can quickly degrade the quality perception of your work. By using your waveforms and comparing clips next to each other you can rest assured that your project is ready for export. Now it's one thing to say use the scopes but another thing is understanding how they work so if you want me to do a focused tutorial just on this please let me know in the comments. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.