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So you want to change the skin tones in a shot by doing a secondary color correction. You’re using the methods outlined in ASC #16 (and of course, they work incredibly well!), but there’s that nasty balloon in the shot that has a skin-tone-like color but that you don’t want to affect.

What you need now, my friend, is a garbage matte. A garbage matte restricts the key to applying only to a specific section of the image. I hear you say: "But can it be done in Media Composer?" I say: "You bet your ass it can be done! And in real-time, too!"

So in this show, we’ll build a secondary color correction with a garbage matte using the Spectramatte, a Paint Effect and a Matte Key.

If this isn’t cool, then I don’t know cool. Oh. Wait.

Update: When I first uploaded the video, I had drawn the most stupid garbage matte ever. So I added something that — while still showing the original garbage matte and thus retaining the full extent of my stupidity — will show you how to do it better.

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The way Media Composer processes effects has some weird side-effects: Sometimes an effect applied to an upper video track also affects the video tracks below — whether you intended that or not.

So this week we’ll take control over that issue by learning how to use nesting to your advantage.

UPDATE: It turns out you don’t need to use the Collapse command after all. François-Cyril Geroult wrote me that if you can select the two segments with the red/yellow arrow and then apply the PiP from the Effect Palette using ALT/Option-Doubleclick.

He even made a short video to show me how it’s done (because I was too dumb to follow his instructions, which I think is very telling…)

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