How to create the "300" Movie Effect in FCP

Yes, Looks is great. Personally I have no interest in becoming a colorist and learning how to really use Color, so Looks is a great way to get, well, Looks.

You can't create the same look as 300 in FCS. That movie cost $60M and the post production lasted a year and was done by 10 different effects/post facilities.

As mentioned, the best way to get a faux-300 look is with the most expensive grading tool or plugin you can afford.

As an aside, the use of the term "grading" is interesting. It used to be strictly an English term, while we here in the US called it timing. But what do you know, timing lights aren't in common use any longer. Now grading is all we've got. Maybe the big DaVinci guys still talk timing-- but I haven't requested a timed print in over 20 years.

Ugh. I'm old.

Oh, Jim. Color timing of optical prints! Analog heresy around here in this digital realm I would suspect. I've never done it but would love to learn.

There are printer lights adjustments in the Color interface, for some odd reason. Yeah, bandy about the word "grading" like using the word "filming" for videotaping, drives me nuts, but whatever.

You are not old Jim, just not as young as you were yesterday.

Stolen from the Color user manual:

"Color Timing for Film

Programs being finished and color corrected on film traditionally undergo a negative conform process prior to color timing. When editorial is complete, the original camera negative is conformed to match the workprint or video cut of the edited program using a cut list or pull list. (If the program was edited using Final Cut Pro, this can be derived using Cinema Tools.) These lists list each shot used in the edited program and show how each shot fits together. This is a time-consuming and detail-oriented process, since mistakes made while cutting the negative are extremely expensive to correct.

Once the camera negative has been conformed and the different shots physically glued together onto alternating A and B rolls, the negative can be color-timed by being run through an optical printer designed for this process. These machines shine filtered light through the original negatives to expose an intermediate positive print, in the process creating a single reel of film that is the color-corrected print.

The process of controlling the color of individual shots and doing scene-to-scene color correction is accomplished with three controls to individually adjust the amount of red, green, and blue light that exposes the film, using a series of optical filters and shutters. Each of the red, green, and blue dials is adjusted in discrete increments called printer points (with each point being a fraction of an f-stop, the scale used to measure film exposure). Typically there’s a total range of 50 points, where point 25 is the original neutral state for that color channel. Increasing or decreasing all three color channels together darkens or brightens the image, while making disproportionate adjustments to the three channels changes the color balance of the image relative to the adjustment.

The machine settings used for each shot can be stored (at one time using paper tape technology) and recalled at any time, to ease subsequent retiming and adjustments, with the printing process being automated once the manual timing is complete. Once the intermediate print has been exposed, it can be developed and the final results projected."

I love stuff like that. Just knowing you once worked like this makes you a hero in my book. Respect.
Kids these days want a plugin or a button they can press to make it happen.

Get off my lawn etc...