Matching colour between clips in Video by Zaweba

Shots that should look the same often don't. Two cameras record the same room differently, the light changes over an afternoon, and AI video generators are notorious for drifting from one clip to the next, so a character's coat goes from navy to teal between shots. Colour match in Video by Zaweba is built for exactly that problem. It nudges one clip towards a reference clip so they sit together naturally.

How it works

You choose a reference, the clip whose colour is right. Colour match then measures a few frames of the reference and a few frames of the clip you want to change. From those measurements it adjusts five things: brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and tint. It doesn't create a new kind of effect or a hidden filter. It sets the values of the ordinary colour grade on the clip.

That design has a real benefit. Everything Colour match does shows up afterwards in the Inspector as normal slider values. If you think it went a bit warm, you pull warmth back by hand. If you later decide to change the grade, nothing is locked away.

Why it suits AI clips

The tool was written with AI-generated shots in mind. Video by Zaweba has an Episode Builder that turns a script and a folder of short AI clips into an episode, and those clips often come from many separate generations. Each one is a fresh roll of the dice, and colour drifts even when the prompt barely changes. Matching every shot by hand is slow. Colour match measures and adjusts each in a moment, so the episode looks like it was shot on one day with one camera.

It works just as well for ordinary footage: two phones at a wedding, a drone shot cut into handheld footage, or interviews recorded an hour apart.

Using it well

Choose the reference carefully. It should be a well-exposed, properly balanced shot that represents the look of the scene. Correct it by hand first if needed, because every match copies its faults too.

Match shots that show similar things. Colour match compares measurements across frames, so it works best when the reference and the target have a similar mix of content. Matching a close-up of a face to a wide shot of a green field will pull the face towards green. Pick a reference from the same scene, with similar framing where you can.

Then check the result with the scopes. Play the two clips back to back and look at the RGB parade and the vectorscope. Skin on the skin line in both, and similar channel heights in the parade, means a good match.

Where it sits among the colour tools

Think of Colour match as a step between correction and look. Auto colour neutralises a single shot against itself. Colour match makes one shot agree with another. A creative look, from curves, wheels, a LUT or an adjustment layer, then goes over the top of shots that already agree.

Doing it in that order means the look applies evenly. If you put the look on first and then match, the match has to fight against it.

Limits to be honest about

Colour match only adjusts five broad properties. It can bring overall brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and tint into line, but it can't fix one object that has changed colour while the rest stayed the same. If a character's coat changes colour but the room is fine, that needs a secondary colour correction or hue curves on the coat.

It also measures only a few frames. A clip where the light changes a lot partway through may match well at one end and less well at the other. Split such a clip and match the parts separately if needed.

For most drift, though, Colour match in Video by Zaweba gets you most of the way in seconds and leaves everything open to fine tune.