When incorporating groups into a grading workflow, your first task is to choose a grouping strategy for the timeline. Depending on the nature of a project, you can base groups on locations, scenes, color temperature, shot size, or the criteria of your choice.
In the commercial project in this lesson, you will create groups to differentiate between scenes based on locations and times of day.
1. Open the Project
2. Enter the Color page.
3. Click 1 of clip, and Shift-click clip other to select the consecutive garage clips in the timeline.
4. Right-click any of the highlighted clips, and choose Add to Current Group.
A green link symbol appears in the lower-right corner of the clips to indicate their group relationship.
5. Right-click any of the grouped clips, and choose Groups > Group 1 > Rename.
6. Enter the group name Garage. These clips will now be linked when you start utilizing the group-level Node editor. If you found that some clip are not in the same scene and you wanted to remove from the current group you can do it also.
7. Right-click you want to remove , and choose Remove from Group.
You can also use Groups for filtering purposes.
8. Right-click one of them, and choose Add into a New Group.
Adopting Groups in a Classic Color Grading Workflow
With your clips sorted into groups, you can now proceed to choose the modes in which their grading will be targeted--from individual adjustments to group-wide uniform changes.
Doing so will allow a much faster and more precise workflow in which you’ll no longer need to duplicate and reapply grades to each individual clip. By reducing this duplication of effort, you’ll also have less chance of mistakes creeping into the workflow. Instead of readjusting specific nodes on multiple clips or keeping track of dozens of stills, you may tweak a group grade to amend all of a scene’s clips at once.
The following figure shows how the classic color grading workflow, previously expressed as a node tree structure in Lesson 1, can be translated into group-based node structures.
The following is a list of available grading modes in the Node editor and their relationships to the traditional grading workflow:
Group pre-clip allows you to normalize footage with common luminance ranges and address obvious tint or temperature issues.
Clip mode enables you to address the individual needs of each clip in the group, including matching and secondary grade adjustments.
Group post-clip is best utilized for creative scene grading. By this stage, your clips are matched, and their individual secondary requirements have been met. Matching the clips ensures that the creative grade is uniformly applied, and requires only minimal tweaking on a clip-by-clip level.
Timeline will affect every clip on the active timeline of your project. Color correction and creative grading is not recommended at this stage, but you could use this mode for artificial grain or applying vignettes and effects to short-form projects.
This breakdown suggests the order in which to address and process visual data, but you should not see it as a strict order of operations when grading. As with a standard grading workflow, it is entirely acceptable (and expected) to jump between group levels to make adjustments throughout the entire grading process.
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