canon XLH1 in camera color

[Todd Terry]

Oh yeah, I know what you mean…

The XLH1 can look fantastic, but the factory defaults are nothing short of terrible… very flat and boring.

I’d say just hook the camera up to a good monitor shooting a well-lit colorful scene, and dig into the menu and start tweaking. There are (if memory serves) 23 different parameters that you can adjust. You will probably especially want to adjust gamma, knee, black stretch/press, pedestal, setup, and color gain.

We’ve made a bunch of presets which emulate my favorite filmstocks. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be of much use to you as they were not made for use with the stock lens (the cine lenses I use look very different than the stock… greatly different contrast and color), and since I don’t use it much I have not gotten around to making any presets for the stock lens yet.

It’s not hard though… and don’t be daunted by the zillions of choices. Just start at the top of the list and make small adjustments, using the old eye doctor’s “Better like this?… or better like this?” system… and work your way down.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Trey Gregory]

Hi Peter-
I’ve been using an H1 for the past 2 years and just love it! Obviously there are too many tweakable settings to give you any 1 group that will work for you. I agree with Todd T that you really should just sit down with a food field monitor and try out all the settings till you get something you like.

But here is one, with the stock lens, that I’ve found works pretty well for narrative projects.

I use this as a jumping off point and really tweak the preset for each project/location.

Gamma – Cine2
Knee – high
Black – Press
Set – -9
Sharpness – 5
HDF – High
DHV – 0
Coring -2
NR1 – 0
NR2 – 0
Color Match – Cine2
Color Gain – +3
Additional color controls – Per-Project

The individual color controls are definitely a matter of taste. But you can get some really cool effects if you mess around with those.

Also, if you haven’t been there already go here and print this out:

https://www.usa.canon.com/app/html/HDV/XLH1/total_image_control.shtml

Trey Gregory
ECG Productions – Atlanta
HD Production and Post
https://www.ecgprod.com

[Miles Johnston]

Very useful advice. I found the Factory setting very dull, very low colour and very washed out.DULL