Weekly progress 2/2
This week I ended up making this project. I modified the background music, added particle effects, and did color-grading.
Approach
I made a new soundtrack with a softer tone and I originally planned to replace the original background music, but when testing, I found that mixing the new and old sounds will get better results. So I kept these two soundtracks.
I reworked the particle effect using the Particular plug-in, which allows me to control the movement of the particles. Now these particles have the effect I want: slow-motion and depth of field effects (particles closer to the camera will be more blurred)
For better color grading, I use the Looks plugin. This plugin provides a better color grading experience and comes with color grading templates. I started grading from two of these templates.
After adjusting, I carefully compared the two effects, and finally chose the effect based on template2 because the colors are more natural and the yellowish hue implies the arrival of autumn. After that I continued to make more subtle grading: I pulled the overexposed part back to the normal position. The red channel on the left indicates red overexposure, and the right side is normal. Overexposure will cause some pictures to lose details and should be avoided.
In the end, I struggled with the output video. I tried 3 different transcoding methods to compress the video, but the colors are very different. Finally, I checked that it was caused by the player. I replaced the windows media play with VLM. Player, the color is the same as the source file, I guess it may be caused by color space issues.
