23 September 2010 - 18:07#40: Secondary Color Correction with Garbage Matte in Media Composer. It’s for Grown-Ups.

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.

Download 480p | 720p

Thanks to Alexander Fell who gave me the tip on this one.

Do check out the older tutorial on Secondaries, it uses a Boris Continuum Complete Effect and is generally more friendly towards the not-die-hard-geek:
ASC #16: Apply a Secondary Color Correction in Media Composer