Making the grade

Hi. I'm trying to grade a headshot. Subject is frame 1/3 right and I want to darken the left side of the screen (not straight down but on a diagonal - if that makes any sense). Anyways, I'm using 4 point garbage matte and the feather adjustment within that filter. Maybe you know my problem already but in if you don't then my points for my 960x720 footage are (pt1: -480,-360) (pt2: 200,-360) (pt3: -240, 360) and (p4: -480, 360). Problem I'm having is that It feathers the top and left edge of the frame and I just want it to feather the diagonal (between point 2 and 3). I'm probably going about this the entire wrong way huh? Thank you.

This is a real problem with all the FCP matte tools. It's really easy to do what you want to do in Color. If you have to stay in FCP you can make the gradient using a travel matte. Put the layer with the adjustment on V3. On V2 put a custom gradient shaped the way you want with white showing the adjusted layer on V3 and what's black showing the original layer underneath. To the top layer apply composite mode travel matte luma.

All the best,

Tom

Awesome thank you. But Custom Gradient? Who what how? Found the "Gradient Colorize" filter and applied to V2. Shaped? How do you shape? Sorry for being so ignorant on this end. But Thank you.

Generators>Render>Custom Gradient. Somewhere in the Generators.

All the best,

Tom

What Tom said. I remember alex had a plug I'n for that. Think it's this one. I could be wrong as I usually use Color for this.

[alex4d.wordpress.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Ha! I did it! This is amazing - my production values just doubled. Thank you! And especially thank you Tom.

Jonathan

This might help too: [www.finalcutters.com]

another simple method would be to use the free Vignette plug-in available here:
[www.haiku.com.au]

the in-built one had a fixed centre point, so wouldn't work for you, i reckon.
the Haiku one also has control over the colour of the vignette.


nick