[Kevin Camin]

This is unrelated to your question, but it isn’t a good idea to shoot green screen with DSLR cameras–you’re going to have artifacting around your key. DSLRs shoots highly compressed footage with not enough data collected in the color channels to make a clean key.

[Kevin Camin]

I was able to correct your footage with AE tools and didn’t need to create any masks or mattes.

The first issue with the footage is that is lacks contrast and that muddies the colors. Just move your highlight selector in Levels to meet the edge of the histogram. That makes a huge improvement.

The next thing I did was use the Vibrance effect to push up the undersaturated colors. Vibrance is great because it leaves alone already saturated things like that bridge in the background and is more delicate on skin tones.

The last thing I did was use the Selective Color filter and added blue in the Cyan and Blue channels. This gave a little bit more color to the sky without much effect on the talent.

This is just one approach but it took me about 2 minutes to do.

[Kevin Camin]

I agree. I am learning Apple Color and Color Finesse currently.

But I think there are some people who are not colorists, who use AE’s color correction filters to do their color corrections, and I think AE is not really set up to do this well. I think PS is a much better environment to analyze and manipulate tone and color (sample points with variable sizes, target adjustment tools, out of gamut warnings, finer controls with many of the filters) After I made my corrections in PS, the adjustment layers can be imported directly to AE and applied to my comp–they are the same filters: curves/levels, hue/sat, vibrance, etc. and behave in the exact same way.

It’s just that in AE they can be tough to use. For example, imagine you are using the ‘Curves’ filter to color correct your footage. Besides the curve box itself being incredible small and hard to manipulate. You can’t click an area of you footage to place a point on the curve. You can’t set down color sample points to see numerically what you are doing while adjusting the curve–you need to run the arrow to the image area in question and look at the info panel then back to the curve then back to the image (and as far as I know I think the arrow in AE is point sampling the color information and there is no option to have is average pixel clusters such as 5×5 or 11×11).

I’m comfortable using all the color correction filters inside AE, but I don’t think they are hard to use in the AE environment.

But I agree that a colorist 3rd party app is best.

[Kevin Camin]

What is stopping my iMac display from being used as a broadcast monitor?

Does anyone have any good book recommendations or resources on working broadcast ready post-production?

Thank you.

[Kevin Camin]

The Panny wasn’t set to 24p due to the operator’s error.

Your statement:

“Even if you shoot 720p24p on the Panny and then upres it to 1080p it would look better than any 29.97i to 24p.”

Why does 1080 29.97i converted to 24P look worse that 720p upresed to 1080p?

Thanks for your help! : )