Boy, have I got one nifty editing technique for you. It’s a little advanced, and you might not use it everyday, but it’s a great trick to have up your sleeve—it’s the Sin City Technique or as some of you might know it … the Pleasantville.
The Sin City effect is a correction technique that allows you to select a specific color in your footage and highlight it by turning everything else in your scene black and white. This is the ideal outlet for all of you artsy butterflies out there waiting to come into bloom!
There are many ways to achieve this effect, but since I use Adobe Premiere that is what I’m gonna show you!
• Import your clip into the timeline.
• Double click that clip and open the Effects Control tab.
• Navigate in your effects window, under Video Effects, Color Correction, and Leave Color.
• Click and drag the Leave Color effect into the Effect Controls.
• Choose the eye-dropper tool
• Click the color that you want to keep in your video
• Change the “Amount to Recolor” setting to 100 percent
• Switch the “Match Colors Setting” to Using Hue
• To finish things up, adjust your tolerance and edge softness amount to the highest it can go before other colors start to come back into the image.
Now you can look Hollywood fancy with your new artsy technique!
Stephen Schweickart is the co-founder of VScreen. For more information on this topic visit VScreen’s site at http://www.vscreen.com/.
