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B&W in AE
I exported a clip from Avid Xpress DV 4.6 into AE to turn it a high contrast black and white. I desaturated it (Effects>Adjust>Hue/Saturation) and the clip turned grainy, noisy, almost unusable.
Would there be any reason why desaturating a clip would make it look so damamged?
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8 Replies
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No. It may be from showing you something about the color channels you didn’t notice before from the color. I would look at the individual color channels anyways when doing B&W. It’s rare that the default combo of the three channels give the best result. Often you’ll find that the blue channel is by far the noisiest. So just dropping it alone should clean up your image. Many times, just the red channel looks the best. You’ll find that many B&W photographers shoot with red filters over their cam. Taking a color photograph and just using the red channel is very similar if not the same thing.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Using the Channel Mixer plugin set to “Monochrome”, you can define how much of each colour-channel gets mixed in the final grey.
Like Andrew said, this usually gives the best result. -
Geez, I step down as Cow leader for a few days and they’re already calling me Andrew 🙂
Yeah, what he said, I use the color mixer on monochrome a lot for just this. Actually more often to create a matte to pull a key without using a keyer.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Althought Fiflip and Andrew’s answers were good, if you had a chance to put your hands on DigiEffects Delirium, they have a plug-in that does exactly what you need.
Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional -
So long as people are agreeing with me, I might as well contribute. 🙂
In layman’s terms, DV compression samples twice as much data in the green channel than blue and red. You’ll get a lot less noise if you follow the advice above and separate only the green channel.
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Yikes !
too little caffeine I guess…
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While it’s true that the green channel is usually closest to the Lumininance channel of YUV encoding, if you really want just the Grayscale information, without any interference by poor colour encoding use this:
Channel Combiner
From: Luminance
To: Lightness Only( There’s also a YUV to RGB converter in there that you can follow with a Channel Mixer to extract the Red Channel afterwards, but it limits grey values from 16-235 )
I prefer using the channel mixer, it might not ensure the most grain-free result, but it gives a lot of creative freedom.
I usually go for lots of red, because it brightens and evens out skin-tones -
That did the trick. Thanks all.
Zatoichi
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