Glenn Chan
Forum Replies Created
-
Note: I haven’t tried any of the control surfaces, which may really boost your productivity.
They are also quite expensive. I would research which control surface to get on the FT user forum. -
You could also look at Nattress’ Film Effects, which is seriously underpriced (and comes with top-notch support, free upgrades).
https://www.nattress.com/filmEffects.htmFCP + Nattress versus Color Finesse: They more or less do the same thing. It comes down to what interface you like better. I would prefer FCP because you should be able to color faster in it.
Nattress versus Final Touch: FT is more powerful in most areas. It also takes up more of your time.
Gamma curves in FT HD is clunky and doesn’t offer the same degree of control that Nattress offers.
FCP + Nattress has perfect conforms. Effects, generated media, multiple layers, dissolves, speed changes may not conform into FT.
FCP + Nattress is more mature and stable.
FT has motion tracking, which rocks.
FT has colorFX, which allows a wide range of looks.
FT has optimizations for speed over accuracy.
FT has improvements constantly being added to it and they do listen to user feature requests. My information may be outdated.
If you are spending lots of time on each shot, FT is a good tool to have.
If you aren’t going crazy on color correction, I’d probably lean towards Nattress.—
Nattress Film Effects info:
Version 2.5 changed the way gamma curves work, so you might want to try to demo that (not sure if the v2.5 demo is available… although you can just buy it, it’s not that much).The gamma curve options/filters is similar to what you can do in Color Finesse. The interface is different in that you adjust sliders, not a graph (which is like Photoshop-style).
Combine that with FCP’s color correction tools, which are good. The 3-way color corrector is really good- use it to adjust levels, white balance, and for secondary color corrections.
If you want to be broadcast safe, you may need to use custom controls so that it doesn’t squish your highlights (gamma curves will push values into the 90-100IRE area, which will be affected unless you set it not to).
2- The top things (in my opinion) that you can do in color correction is setting exposure levels, white balance, and adding film-like gamma curves (unless originating from film). This almost always makes footage look dramatically better and costs little of your time. At these specific things, FCP + Nattress is probably best.
Other things you can do is secondary color correction, masking / motion tracking (time consuming), setting looks (subjective; not everyone may like it). FCP has an excellent secondary CC (the key blur is better and slower than FT), ok masking (the interface is poor, but you can push exposure further than FT), no motion tracking (*haven’t looked into a particular plug-in), and can do a good range looks with Nattress and FCP’s 3-way CC (FT is probably better here).
—-
Glenn -
Hi Matte,
In case I wasn’t clear: I was talking about digital units, not analog.
I’m not sure exactly what the proper name for digital units is, but DV records Y’ Cb Cr and the values range from 0-255. Digital black level should be at 16 for Y’. My question is whether cameras record values under 16 (because of the compression). -
Sorry, to clarify:
What I was suggesting was this:
At the beginning of the game, all cameras manually white balance to the same thing. Then they don’t touch white balance at all for the rest of the game.In post, you apply color correction globally (i.e. to a nested project/sequence). This should counteract for the drift in white balance as the football game’s lighting situation changes.
Wouldn’t that work?
-
Frank, is it 130IRE or 133IRE? (I see 133 everywhere.)
-
If you have post-production time, you could just apply a color correction filter and globally adjust all cameras that way.
Most color correction filters in editing programs can be keyframed. Otherwise just dissolve between different settings.
2- If the camera operators keep a white card nearby, they should have the same color of light landing on the card. And this should be consistent with the light landing on the field.
Or maybe there’s something on the field or near the field that is white, and that the camera operators can fill the camera frame with.
-
3:1:1 is something adam wilt made up to approximate betaSP sampling to the color sampling digital formats. Graeme’s article indicates that betaSP is probably something more like 3.something:1.something:1.something.
Anyways, it may not be too useful to characterize betaSP as 3.something:1.something:1.something.
2- Scott, have you tried applying chroma interpolation or chroma smoothing to the signal from DVCPRO? I believe DVCPRO decks with SDI out do this.
-
maybe the following article is helpful:
https://www.nattress.com/Chroma_Investigation/chromasampling.htm
Graeme Nattress compares DV and betaSP and digibeta in terms of color and luma resolution.
DV has slightly better luma resolution than betaSP, and slightly worse color resolution.As others pointed out, betaSP is not a digital format so it’s not really 3:1:1 or 4:2:2.
Typically you want to capture betaSP digitally with 4:2:2 color sampling to get the most out of it. -
Some people report that the High power version of the radio shack / realistic tape eraser will work.
The normal version DOES NOT work. I know because I’ve tried 😛
-
Vegas can also export XML, but I have no idea if it’ll work. The two programs handle dissolves differently, which could also be a problem. And Vegas XML formatting is probably different from what FCP is expecting so that may not work.
A good way to describe Vegas is: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
2- If you want, you can do all your color stuff in Vegas. Vegas’ color correction tools are pretty nice and better and worse than FCP’s in some ways.
The basics:
Only use the Sony DV codec. This is the default.Look at the histogram (under video scopes) to see if your values are in legal range. 16 is black, and 235 is white. The histogram is right, the waveform monitor can be wrong depending on how its set (so just ignore the waveform). A lot of the filters and transitions assume black = 0 and white = 255, which isn’t right. This is different from Final Cut.
Filters can be applied at the media, event, track, or video output level. This can save you time.
In the video preview window, you can copy things to clipboard. There’s another button which lets you show the clipboard contents to compare stuff.
To fix dark shots, you can use the color corrector. Gain, offset, and gamma affect brightness. Hold crtl and use the mouse wheel to get smaller increments in adjusting those settings.
To fix dark shots, increase gain and decrease gamma, or just increase gamma.
You can also play around with color curves, but you should make a preset with two points so blacks stay at 16 and white at 235. (Sorry if this is confusing.) Use the black to whtie gradient generator and the legacy broadcast safe filter to help you. Right click points on color curves to reset tangents.To get noise reduction, go to https://mikecrash.wz.cz/
Get the free filters. Dynamic noise reduction and the smart smoother can be used to give you ok noise reduction. Use low settins on the dynamic noise reduction… like around 7-8 to avoid motion artifacts.
Third party plug-ins can do a better job. You can frameserve out to Virtualdub and there’s free NR plug-ins for it (i.e. MSU).
The latest version of AE has nice noise reduction.With Vegas, you should preview on an external crt-based broadcast monitor to get accurate colors (the video preview is off). In Vegas 6, you can get better monitoring if you use a windows secondary display, using color profiling and studio RGB.
(Maybe this is all a little complicated?)
3- Helpful Sony Vegas resources:
Forums:
https://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowTopics.asp?ForumID=4
https://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=54Tutorials:
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/vegasvideo.htmlIf I wasn’t lazy I could be writing better tutorials on how to color correct in Vegas.