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Colour Matrix SPX800 (PAL)?
I apologise if I’m on the wrong forum but I have posted elsewhere with no success.
I have also posted on the neighbouring P2 forum, who suggested I try here.
I’ve been a Sony man for 20 years and now have gone P2 with the SPX800. I’m really trying to understand what others are doing with the Colour Matrix on this camera. It appears in its factory default MATRIX ‘A’ is the default setting. My concern is that the colour is very vibrant compared to what I’m used to with Sony. In particular, reds are, on many occasions, illegal on the vectorscope. I have aways trusted factory settings from camera manufacturers, but I now turn off the MATRIX ‘A’ for all of my shoots.
I would welcome any other’s experiences regarding these settings or if Jan is watching, I would value her comments.
Thanks in advance.
Roddy Jamieson
Roddy Jamieson
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3 Replies
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Hi Roddy;
The SPX800 is similar to most current Panasonic cameras in that it has powerful menus to build you own “looks” for the camera. The cameras have two user-definable master Matrices, A & B. These can be adjusted from an almost monochrome (B&W) look up to KodaChrome on steroids look! I would suggest that you check the matrix vaules and set them to “0” (zero).
There is also a 12 vector colour corrector, this has the useful ablilty to adjust individual clours for both saturation and phase, great for commercial work where you need to tweak a product’s colour to make the client happy. You have a choice of settting all the values of the CC1 and CC2 menus to zero, or just turn it off as a function in the Low /Med/ Hi menu settings.
Another thing that can cause oversaturation is the master gamma setting, if the value if 0.50 or higher it will cause a higher contrast picture with boosted colour levels. Set this to 0.45 (correct but not necessarily the best point artistically).
Hope it helps!
Cheers! Steve Mahrer (Panasonic)
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Matrix settings can be quite subjective and Steve’s recommendation to set the values to zero is a safe way but will result in very low saturation values for your shooting. You should be viewing the waveform monitor with in Flat mode as well as checking it in the chroma mode to see how much saturation you actually have when the matrix is turned on. The waveform monitor is more accurate to determine if values are illegal than looking at the vectorscope which can be misleading at times.
The best method to set up matrix in a camera is to hire an experienced video controller/video engineer who uses a DSC cam align chart, waveform vectorscope, and a color critical monitor to build a matrix setting which is pleasing but also comply with legal broadcast limits.
Such a process is one of the best method to create matrix values that match from camera to camera.
For example if you like a particular Sony Matrix you can use that as a baseline to build that same matrix “look” on your SPX-800.
Tony Salgado
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Many thanks gents for your replies, much appreciated.
Roddy Jamieson
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