Rebel CC
Sunday, October 22, 2006 at 2:23AM The response so far on my upcoming book has been wonderful, so I wanted to give you more than a tease of what’s to come. I’m working on my last chapter right now (!), and it’s all about mastering or onlining your film. It probably won’t surprise you that I advocate doing this in After Effects rather than your NLE software. The power and control AE offers is just too much to ignore. But for all that power, there’s one big piece of the puzzle missing, and that’s a simple, elegant, telecine-style color-correction tool for coloring or grading your movie.
Enter Rebel CC. Although not as awesome as a real plug-in, this Animation Preset uses color swatches to drive a Levels effect using rather deep expressions.
You start by eyedropering your blacks, whites, and grays to optimize the image. These steps are optional—you can do them or not, or you can do only one or two of them if you don’t need to do all three. The eyedropper method is a nice fast way to perform the first stage in color grading: grading for consistency.
You perform the next step, grading for look, by using the color picker as a makeshift color wheel. Not as fast or interactive as one might like, but the control is there. You can set colors for shadows, midtones, and highlights, and you can even recover color information that may have gotten lost when you sampled your black and white points.
But why read about Rebel CC when you can watch about it? I made this quick video to show it off:
Download Rebel CC and place it in your Presets folder (in your After Effects application folder).
Music: Colour in My Mind by The Youngbloods
(Updated 061022 1:00pm PST to fix a compatibility bug)
See also: Colorista Free
Reader Comments (19)
Thanks for posting! Seems like the book will be a must-buy even for those of us who've never had to composite muzzle-flashes and flying gun cartridges. :-)
How's the new Blogger functionality working for you? I haven't gotten mine switched yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the tagging possibility.
Hi Jonas!
Yes, the dirty little secret of the Rebel's Guide is that it will be very useful to that small minority of people whose film's aren't action oriented. :)
The beta blogger features seem pretty cool. I had been thinking of switching to wordpress and hosting ProLost myself, but the truth is, I'm just not a web guy. I like a more drag-and-drop experience.
Could have used your LUT skills today, trying to help a colleague look at some 2K DPX sequences in AE7. They had done some CC after scanning, so perhaps that's why I couldn't get your "Linear in AE7" tricks to work out, either being almost totally dark or washed out...
This color management sure's tricky (said with a Texas accent, since I just finished watching Brokeback Mountain.)
I am so looking forward to this book, that once I get it, I shall recite passages from it five times a day while I kneel and bow my head towards Hollywood.
Ok, maybe I won't go that far. But I am really looking forward to it. I hope there's a chapter on green screen because I have yet to see a comprehensive introduction/explanation of everything involved in green screen [at least for beginners] anywhere.
Hi faithful,
Not a whole chapter but a section of the effects chapter fo sho!
Hi faithful,
Don't want to steal Stu'sshow, but I just posted a quite http://generalspecialist.com/2006/10/greenscreen-and-bluescreen-checklist.asp">long post about tips and tricks for shooting green/blue screen. Perhaps you can use that as a starting point?
-- Jonas
Thank you very much for the Plugin! Extremely effective tool for color corrections!
hi! just wanted to bring to your attention a guy on youtube who COMPLETLY ripped off this tutorial and called the rebel cc preset "his own creation" this guy is also known for having ghost accounts and ripping off SO MANY videos from websites including videocopilot.net and your own. you can see this video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYyDgrh1FNM
i have tried to comment on his channel and send him messages telling him to take it down but he refuses. please deal with this becuase this guy needs to learn that stealing is NOT ok.
thanks
p.s. i love the preset and tutorial!!!
Stu,
Just wanted to say thanks for posting both the free preset file and the tutorial. I've used it for a number of small projects and it works great!
I posted a sample video that I'd made with this preset (with links to this blog page in the description) on youtube (I'm not the rip-off artist mentioned in the other comment, I definitely credit the source!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP-UR_hSqaE
I also bought your Rebel's Guide, which has a ton of great tips. Thanks for all your work to help people make better content!
when i download rebel cc, and place it in "presets", should i extract it?
It's not working on my PC
when i place rebel cc in "presets", should I extract it? It's not working on my pc
I can't install this script on my AE CS3. I have put script in "presets" folder, but it seems, that no script was added. Please help!
Whens the book out?
jas
It was a little delayed, so the answer is: About three years ago:
http://prolost.com/blog/2006/12/23/rebel-late.html
I'm super stoked to give this a whirl, hoping it still runs on CS4. I have a feeling it'll give our fourth iSaber Battle a bit of an edge.
Thanks for just giving it away! You're a generous soul.
Thank you so muck for this!!
I can do the same thing without the preset, but is a nice set of shortcuts to people that don't undestand how to create his own workflow using the AE tools.
Very nice.
Hey! Thank you for taking the time to make the plugin and also the tutorial, it's great!