Your opinion - Color grade IN camera or POST

[Kholi]

I tend to shoot clean and favor grading in post, aside from color-correction for lights, ND and polarizers on the camera.

I do generally "paint" the HVX with a fair amount of pedestal play and a minimal color saturation bump. Bringing in, and more importantly, matching a look scene-to-scene, is much easier in post when you can side-by-side your footage on a calibrated monitor under optimal viewing conditions.

It always pays to light it properly at the right color temperatures, but beyond that I vote for scene-by-scene during the edit.

e

How much can you push the saturation after-the-fact, with the DVCPRO-HD footage, in post? And what does it do to your shadows/blacks?

I really need to look deeper into FinalTouch HD; it sounds promising. I hope that it's part of the new Final Cut releases.

 

[Disco Robo]

Theoretically speaking, if you have a perfect white/black balance saturation will have no affect whatsoever on your white or black since they contain no chrominance. The reality is that you wont have a perfect white balance and if you treak the color in camera you definitely will not. Blue blacks will get bluer, red blacks will get redder. It will be more apparent in the shadows 10-30 IRE than in the blacks 0-10 IRE since there is more luminance to push the color. Luminance generally affects color in a bell curve, and I guess to answer the first part of your question, using FCP you can push the saturation to cartoonish levels but it starts to look pretty fake at about 40% for a properly exposed image.

 

[Zak Forsman]

for fun i tried to match them in FCP using the color correct tools. two minutes later i came up with this...

original with crushed master ped in-cam.

graded "clean" version

which used to look like this

 

[SPZ]

Wow, very similar results, but some significant differences that caught my eye: While the background looks similar, the metal ducks have a different color, for example. The thing that most catches my eye is the fact that the graded version seems less noisy... Is there any noise reduction in this clip? Also, the grade clip looks a bit darker, but not in an unnaceptable way. Seems like both processes are quite viable... Now if anyone had a close-up of someone with dramatic lighting that could play around with... Because in short films, you will probably shoot people more than anything else...

 

[electricpig]

I really prefer the graded version. In normal situations, a master pedastal too low can really screw your blacks up and give you nothing to work with in post. Flat and lifeless, almost like oilslicks, and with the look of being clipped and videolike.

I personally find the 'Filmlike' look on the HVX book scene file too heavy, with a master pedastal that's too low.

 

[Steve Shovlar]

Personally I have found that its easier to shoot "flat" and then do grading in post. There are some wonderful filters out there as well, like Nattress and Magic Bullet which can get you the look you want.

I also agree that the graded picture above has less grain than the picture adjusted in camera.

 

[Zak Forsman]

no noise reduction done. you can see the difference in grain/noise between the originals as well. i'm sure one could get them nearly identical if you spent more than a few minutes on it.

 

[carlone]

Check this thread for great post processing on footage/images from the HVX: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=71299
And this to see what the guy did to achieve it:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showpost.php?p=690891&postcount=24
I say he did a damned good job with getting his look, after the fact.

Thanks Kholi - The before and after shots are eye opening and really show what "post CC" does best.

So what I'm getting from reading this is: In terms of camera settings, On set we should be protecting the blacks levels and guarding the highlight level for post CC to do it's best magic.

Many of the people I know use the term fix it in post - to me they really are talking about shooting bland and adding color later - would you guys agree that with cameras like the HVX (or better) those old rules just don't apply anymore?

 

[Erik Olson]

Everyone "fixes it in post", if by "fix" you mean grade and match scene-by-scene. Just like correction on lights, it is one more step in the process that gets you to your final render or answer print or wherever it is that you're going.

e

 

[Kholi]

no noise reduction done. you can see the difference in grain/noise between the originals as well. i'm sure one could get them nearly identical if you spent more than a few minutes on it.

I'd really love to know how you did that with Final Cut. I think I need to pick up that book that was mentioned, or try it out for myself.

It looks a lot better than the one done-in-camera. An obvious lack of all the noise and still bright. How'd you keep it bright, dude?

 

[Zak Forsman]

I'd really love to know how you did that with Final Cut. I think I need to pick up that book that was mentioned, or try it out for myself.

It looks a lot better than the one done-in-camera. An obvious lack of all the noise and still bright. How'd you keep it bright, dude?

used the three way color corrector. used the sliders beneath the color wheels to crush the blacks and boost the midtones to "keep it bright", pushed the midtone color toward blue, desaturated everything, then added a second 3-way cc filter, limited the effect to just yellow in the secondary cc tools and desaturated the yellow even further. and that's it.

 

[andy_starbuck]

That was an impressive demonstration. To get a better sense of the difference between the in-camera shot and the FCP shot, I overlayed and aligned them in Photoshop and used a difference blending mode. They aren't perfectly aligned images, but it gives a sense:

And here is a close-up with the contrast and brightness turned up to bring out the difference.

 

[Kholi]

used the three way color corrector. used the sliders beneath the color wheels to crush the blacks and boost the midtones to "keep it bright", pushed the midtone color toward blue, desaturated everything, then added a second 3-way cc filter, limited the effect to just yellow in the secondary cc tools and desaturated the yellow even further. and that's it.

You know what? I tried it and it was very easy. I think that's because the noise in the still was clean as opposed to it's noisey counterpart.

I guess it all depends on how you handle the footage before it reaches color correction.

 

[pheboglobi]

The best way? IMO, talk to your colorist first about what is best - and then do tests.

If you don't have a colorist, well, then I guess that answers that about tweaking it in post. (don't)

Garrett

 

[SPZ]

Completely off topic- or maybe not :

Any good suggestions on a practical color correction tutorial book for FCP? Something that can really help improving CC skills? I do my own C.C, and while I can get interesting results, it never looks close to something like the folks at Motivity Pictures are achieving.(regular posters at the DVinfo site)

I tried Shake's C.C, and it seems to do a better job, but looks a lot more complicated...

Back on topic...

Aren't the Color adjustments one makes in camera prior to the 8 bit 4:2:2 compression of DVCPRO HD? Wouldn't this mean that, theoretically, color correcting in camera first would get you better results in overal color rendition ? (Assuming one can get the effect it wants fully on the camera without additional color work in post?)

 

[PaPa]

for fun i tried to match them in FCP using the color correct tools. two minutes later i came up with this...

original with crushed master ped in-cam.

graded "clean" version

which used to look like this

could u polease explain what u did to get this ? Not the color correction, just the saturation/gamma/pedestal/contrast/brightness stuff

thanks!

 

[Zak Forsman]

could u polease explain what u did to get this ? Not the color correction, just the saturation/gamma/pedestal/contrast/brightness stuff

thanks!

everything i did, i described in an earlier post. only used the tools available in the three-way color corrector in fcp. spent about two minutes on it. nothing fancy.

 

[PaPa]

actually, now that im looking at it again, it see a large difference between the two.

the graded pic seems to not have as much punch as the in camera shot. my shot seems to be quite a bit more saturated ( noisier yes ) but the curtains are much richer in the green/blue respect, as well, the ducks have more of a contrasty golden punch to them.

overall, the graded one still has some of that black and white feeling to it if you konw what i mean? This is one of the things i have been testing with shooting very flat, you lose some of your contrast in hte overal picture cause your highlights, and mids mesh together, as well as your mids and lows. More lattitude yes, but it does blend alot of the iamge propertiestogether.


not an attack on your cc job, just an observation and a question as to how doing a little bit in camera will dramatically alter your CC'ing.

Here is another thought: That in camera graded shot had a master pedestal of - 11 or - 12 ( dont remember )

the clean one had a master pedestal of +3.

If i had shot it with a master ped of - 2 or - 3, it may have been able to retain the contrast of the original allowinga flatter image, more lattitude, but without flattening the image to the point where many of the levels blend together.

????? truth here?

 

[Zak Forsman]

yeah, like i said before. if i had spent more than two minutes on it...

in my line of work, i have graded hundreds of thousands of shots. when i saw your post asserting that you could only achieve a certain quality in-camera, i had my doubts and thought I'd do a little experiment. i don't think there is anything in the camera's onboard controls that can't be achieved in post.

because i own my own post-production company, it is much more cost-effective for me to shoot a neutral image on set where time is money. and perfect the image in post, where time doesn't cost me anything.

 

[peter orland]

Hey cygnet, nice work on the frame match. That is a perfect example of what is possible with a good eye and skill set to match. I think that the discussion of pre v's post colour manipulation is also very dependent on what you are doing with the finished product. Most amateur/semi professional work can get by quite comfortably with in camera tweaking, it's quicker and easier, very few full timers would work in this fashion. Most pro end work is done in a team. I light and shoot, someone else who is better, faster, and for some strange reason seems to like sitting in dark rooms staring at monitors for hours on end trying to perfect the "look" does what they do best. That took Zak two minutes to achieve what I consider to be a professional match, equally as good as the in camera if not arguably better. Forget two minutes, two days later I'd still be trying to find what page the colour correcting info was in the manual.