I have a video with a rotating color wheel that changes the hue every 30 seconds or so. These go from blue to red to green to yellow, and it makes the video itself very distracting and hard to watch. Is there any way to make these color transitions less pronounced?

Not having seen the video, my first thought would be to perhaps adjust/reduce color Saturation..? I don't know what your level of expertise is so I'll provide links to two videos/courses that deal with color correction.. This first video (and the two that follow in this Basic Color Correction course) covers the basic controls for color adjustment in FCP:

The video can be seen here: https://youtu.be/S9SQcUxMJ8I Other than going to black and white, I'm not sure that saturation changes will help that much. I'll watch the videos you recommended however, and see what I can do. Thank you.

You didn't mention whether the color wheel made up the whole frame or a smaller part of the frame, but if so this video (and the following videos in this Advanced Color Correction course) https://www.macprovideo.com/course/advanced-color-correction might offer some useful information useful about applying color adjustment to just the wheel itself:

Sorry I wasn't clear. The color wheel is an actual color wheel in the room, where different colored lights shine in the room - in this case on a stage - to change the "mood" in the room... Very 1970s lighting.

> The video can be seen here: https://youtu.be/S9SQcUxMJ8I Aha—I was picturing something completely different! :-) It looks like what you need to do is perform color corrections for the different hues each time the color wheel changes, and then automate those (gradual) color corrections. This is beyond my limited FCP experience (I'm really an audio guy) but it seems like that should be doable with Keyframing, as per the video below. Obviously the color corrections you'd have to make would be much more drastic that what he does in the example, but it seems like that approach could get the job done. Perhaps if Iain (the course author) notices this thread he might be able to weigh in with some more specific advice..

Course author here, and yes, that’s going to be difficult to correct, because it’s such a drastic change. In general you can’t correct color to “normal” when the original source video is so heavily tinted. To try, you would apply a color correction, likely color wheels because of the Hue control, and correct at the start, then add a keyframe. Move a few seconds along, then change the settings to correct it again, and repeat all the way along the clip. That should improve things but won’t be perfect. Usually people will forgive odd lighting in an environment like this though.

Thank you for your input. I will see if I can correct it a little and how much work that will really be. I have about 50 of these that I would like to preserve and make a little easier to watch. I do understand that I'll never get to "normal," but I'll follow your advice (and take the training class) and see what I can do. Thanks again.