I spent last Sunday at my brother’s house doing a finish on the music video he shot last month for an artist named Mion.

Earlier that week he finished the edit after a marathon session at his editor’s place. Mucho technical glitches like failed hard drives and crashing computers didn’t help any.

He brought it over on his way home and me and the family watched it. It was really good. Even more amazing because it was super low budget, only had one location, and he did all the preproduction from California while the talent and crew were in Seattle, WA. I have a feeling my brother is going to make it big someday with that kind of talent and drive.

Anyway, I liked what I saw, but asked him if he’d done color correction on it yet. He’d done a little, but he thought he was done. And I was pushing a little so he’d get that final MTV polish to his video. I didn’t pick the best of times to bring that up. But to his credit, my brother thought about it and then we got together to show him what we could do to his footage to plus it.

After some fumbling around in Final Cut Pro, I figured out how to do all the compositing and color tricks that I wanted to do. First we did some simple vignetting of a couple of insert shots that made them look more dramatic and helped to focus the eye. Did some minor color tweaks. Things were looking good.

Then I hit one of the first glamour shots of Mion and really went to town. Color correction made the image punchier. I added a gradated blur to the background simulating depth of field. Immediately the image felt more like film instead of video. I composited a blurred version of the clip over itself to simulate a little diffusion. Finally I keyed the skin tones, gave a slight blur and comped that over the whole thing to give that smooth complexion that everyone has on TV these days.

My brother loved the look! Seeing the before and after for comparison was pretty amazing, even to me. This was my first time doing finishin work on live action like this, so I had a lot of fun putting theory into practice. I guess all my work doing lighting for CG helped with knowing what to do.

Spent almost 12 hours finishing a little over a minute of footage. I had a lot of fun and will probably want to use the stuff on my reel for variety.

We’ll finish the video later this week and deliver it. I just read Mion’s website and it’s been a month since the shoot. So I think she’s pretty eager to get the final. My brother gave her a rough cut last week. I think she’ll be shocked to see the difference from the raw cut to the finished footage.