XHA1 color corrected to HVX

xray

xray

Well-known member
I did some fast color correction on two pictures Barry Green made for his comparison HVX versus Canon A1.
I noticed that on these shots I needed to do more color correcting than on other A1-HVX shots I corrected early on.
Normally its a blast, but with these images is was a little work.

I decreased the images size by 50% and changed them in .jpg for downloading purpose. It was my intention to show that with Color Correction you CAN make the A1 pictures look like HVX pictures. I did not alter the HVX pictures, but changed the A1 pictures to look like the HVX.

A question for Barry is (maybe I forgot to read that) what are the gain settings on the A1 while shooting these pictures? Even with AGC off you have a 3 position gainswitch on the A1 you need to go in menu to change the setting in L = -3db. For almost all the shootings you need to choose the lowest gain setting. I don't know if that was done with the A1 during Barry's shoot.

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Barry_Green said:
Excellent work.

AGC was off, gain was at zero. I didn't change it to -3.
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Barry,

Setting gain to -3 also helps to overcome the weaker neutral density filters of the Canon gear so you do not have to stop dwon as far giving you a better shallow DOF if that is what youare looking for.

Peace!
 
Can some of the A1 owners put up some footage that is color corected, tweaked to the best it can be? I want to see the end results. Show me what the A1 can do.
 
Are these color corrections done in the A1 camera or afterwards. It would be nice to have a HVX preset for the A1.
 
Joe said:
Are these color corrections done in the A1 camera or afterwards. It would be nice to have a HVX preset for the A1.
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I'm actually working on that right now! Got my A1 and HVX some color charts and a couple vectorscopes. Haha! Fun stuff.
 
It's a nice illustration. Keep in mind, this is Barry's settings on the A1-color corrected in post "vs" Barry's settings for the HVX not corrected at all. Barry attempted to put both cameras in neutral settings (except for the gamma curves)

If you want to compare in camera color saturation potential, it would be nice for someone to set up the canon to do that as best they can in camera and the same with the hvx.

I find this a nice illustration, and example, but I'm not sure that it should be taken as a comparison of either camera's ability to render color. I don't think that was the intention of this excercise.

Nice job on cc'ing by the way. It's a nice match.

Jason
 
Very nice, they look suprisingly the same. But the thing that strikes me with the A1 is the CA, man, in the first grab it's just awful. Is the A1 lens really that crappy compared to the HVX lens?
 
The gamma curves were attempted to match on both cameras too.

Like I said in the article, the only real substantial difference I saw was color. Similar dynamic range, similar resolving power, just color differences. I posted the PNG files straight from the timeline and even said that someone may be able to correct them in post to get them to match. Xray has done a fine job here of doing that.
 
MiniMan said:
Very nice, they look suprisingly the same. But the thing that strikes me with the A1 is the CA, man, in the first grab it's just awful. Is the A1 lens really that crappy compared to the HVX lens?
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Both lenses showed it, and surprisingly (or maybe not?) they usually showed it on the same subjects. But there was one pic where it was more noticeable on the Canon, which was the courthouse pictures -- there's some serious red/green separation going on there. The CA usually showed up on wide shots, especially on the edges of the frame.

But all the cameras do it; the only one that does it substantially more than the others is the JVC HD100 stock lens. It's extreme, the others are all in the same general ballpark (meaning the other 3-CCD offerings, from FX1 on up to XLH1).
 
COLOR

What color do you like, do you need, to tell the story? that fits in the 'timeframe' etc. It is personal and subjective. There is somewhere a general point that people like the images, call it 'the Zone'.

To get there with the A1 you need to process the images in camera. The XHA1 gives you full control on the colorimetry, presets, and not using that potential is a waste. You can get the A1 to create an image that enters 'the Zone.' Mostly its best to shoot flat or 'somewhere you want' and grade and correct later in post. But with the XH A1 you better color -mostly- in camera, its in the 4:2:2 before MPEG compression and therefore better. Do not go in the extreme during the shoot.

You can get the A1 in 'the zone' but you can get the HVX above the zone in post. There is more to tweak before you are in trouble. Although the dvcpro signal is not strong in everything, mostly it is, and gives you room to enter areas that you better not do with the hdv mpeg first signal. But you can alter color in post with the A1, I just shown that.

But stop imitating the HVX. Create your own colors that you like. Why doing the same? Creative does not mean imitating, you CAN make nice colors with the A1 go for that. Its only in mixed shoots you need to close the 'gap 'between cams. If you shoot in a HVX-XHA1 mix bring both cams to a point where color meets.

Mostly its push colorgain in A1 generally, add green, look at the blacks. You can set the A1 colorgain from -50 to + 50!
 
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Xray is right of course. The reason I've been working on an HVX color preset with the A1 is that I've got a shoot coming up where I'll be mixing shots from the 2 cams so I thought as a good starting point I'd do a preset that matches a basic Cinelike_D+Cinematrix setup. Plus I had the 2 cams+color charts+scopes laying around so why not? I've pretty much nailed it btw. My A1 is at work so I need to grab it and post the settings here (because I don't remember them).

But I did want to take it out to shoot some test footage first to get a personal feel for how the colors look, but it's raining like mad here in Austin right now so I'm not sure that's going to happen this weekend.

But yes, I do agree that it's artistically beneficial to think of colors in terms of what they convey to an audience rather than trying to emulate another camera's look. Think of how big/trendy/common (pick your word) D.I.s and colorists have become. There's a good reason and that's because the skillful manipulation of color can add so much to your story.

BTW if you rent an F900 Cinealta (the real gold standard for HD film production) from one of the big rental houses like BandPro or Plus-8, they typically provide them with their own presets that are developed in house and they are almost always "Broadcast Flat", because there are lots of advantages to shooting that way.

I personally like one of canon's preset looks (#9 but with sharpness dialed down.) It gives a nice desaturated "Children of Men" look that I'd like to use on an upcoming project.
 
I, too, was struck by the excessive amount of CA in the A1 shot of the marina (and how far it extended into the frame), where almost none was observable in the HVX frame. I also saw this on the A1 at DV Expo in Dec., but figured it was just that particular lens sample...apparently not.
As Barry says, all lenses may exhibit CA to some extent, but the comparable Sony V1u and my DVX100a show nothing that extreme.

Ken
the Screen Skins guy
 
From these grabs, i could easily tell which are from the A1 and which are from the HVX.

A) I see a little better dynamic range from the HVX (might be the settings though...)
B) The A1 exhibits a lot more CA than the HVX.

...but that's pretty close.
 
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