Day for night

[Geraint Pari huws]

You can darken everything, take the chroma down and add some blue but however well you succeed with color correction you’ll probably find you’ll need to add a couple of lights to pull it off, a lens flare plug in or some spot color correction on a couple of street lamps or windows will help. Depending on your location, you’ll rarely see a night scene with no light sources…

[Terence Curren]

Your biggest problem is the sky. Day for night shoots tend to avoid eveer getting the sky in them. You will never get the overall picture dark enough to sell the sky as night. You really need to do the two separately.

Copy the chot and place it back on top of itself on V2. Color correct the V1 shot looking at everything but the sky. The trick is to darken, desaturate chroima and then go blue, more so in the blacks in the blacks. Curves are great for this.

Then Color the V2 shot looking only at the sky. bring it way down and desaturate the chroma.

Now the tricky part. If you were in anything but Xpress, you could use an animatte effect which would allow you to draw a mask allowing you to composite the two elements. In Xpress, you can try a horizontal edge wipe with a soft edge if the horizon is clean enough.

If that doesn’t work, is the sky brighter than everything else in your shot? If so, copy the shot yet again and place it on V3, use a color correction to make it black and white, use the master curve to bring up the top end and drop down the bottom end until you have a solid white sky and everything else is black. Now drop a Matte Key on top of that and it will key V2 through the sky.

If not, do you have Avid FX on your system? Or Boris Red, Fx , etc? Go into them and mask the sky.

PS: Or tell your director to go reshoot it the right way. 😉

Terence Curren
http://www.alphadogs.tv
http://www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca

[Tim Young]

Many thanks. Most comprehensive. My preferred option is the re-shoot…

Animatte would make my life much easier….

[Joe Womble]

This artful approach that Terry describes is the best way to go about it, to be sure. Give it a try, you will learn a lot about your Avid’s capabilities as you proceed.

Boris RED (Avid FX) has a day for night filter, too, that might work for you. It is customizable, like all Boris filters, so you may get what you’re looking for with this approach.

Regards,

Joe Womble

[Mike Colao]

Terry’s method is spot on.
Just used it in a video I’m cutting.
Thanks for the advice.

-MIKE COLAO

[Will Tripp]

I’m absolutely no expert or anything but having played around with this,
Before I try to apply any colour correction at all I see if it’s possible to use chroma key to key out the sky and blur it a little in order to grade the foreground and sky separately and have the sky dark enough and still be able to see detail. I find it’s udually an easy method and gets much better results than without.