Color Correction Gone Wild! AE7.0

Nice stuff dude... Not to imagine, what color will be capable of.

Any chance removing that CA? That was because of the lenses, wasnt it?
 
Blood Angel said:
Nice stuff dude... Not to imagine, what color will be capable of.

Any chance removing that CA? That was because of the lenses, wasnt it?
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CA? I don't quite understand what that means.... So many acronyms, so little time.... LOL:grin:
 
The huge blue line along the wall is what he's talking about.

This looks like Color Finese. I hug the plug-in every time I see it. Maybe mixed with a few adjustment layers. Neat.

have you seen Dvxuser RHYDON's work? he uses a similar Ae/Automatic Duck workflow. Pretty amazing.

And now, FCP COLOR. It's going to force people to learn about color theory, I hope.
 
Ah, ok now I know what you mean. I don't know if AE can fix chromatic aberations. I know RAW programs can help make it less visible. I'd say it's probably the fact that I have essentially FOUR differnt optical devices in front of each other! Nikon 1.4 prime, M2, HD achromat, and finally... the built in Lecia lens. This doesn't even include the internal optics of the camera (ie, prism). So where the abberation comes from is a wide open guess as far as I'm concerned, but hey, the fact that you even get an in focus image with that much stuff going on is quite remarkable really...

Kholi, I used zero color finesse. This is all standard AE 7.0 stuff, in fact, its all standard since like version 5.0. Just wait for the AE tutorials to appear. I have lots of tricks up my sleeves :grin: You don't need a ton of fancy plug ins, AE is pretty freaking powefull on its own. I have seen Ryhdons work, good stuff!

I don't know how a DP could get by without understanding color theory personally...
 
Shooting as close to a RAW look as possible (cine-like-d etc) with as much dynamic range as you can eek out is like creating a digital negative with as much dynamic range to work with in post. Stu Maschwitz (DV Rebel's Guide) suggests shooting with as much dynamic range so you have decent color range to work with in CC and compositing. I used to shoot cine-like-v alot but had trouble tuning in post. If I shoot in cine-like-d then tune in post to a cine-like-v level of contrast I can still CC the footage without clipping any colors. It ends up looking like cine-like-v once finished but with more detail and no clipping. Once you feel confident on what you need to tune the footage in post you wont need it to look like your final CC in the viewfinder.

I shot my first few projects on Cine-like-V and had trouble with losing detail in the shadows and highlights when I CCed. After shooting another in Cine-like-D CCing was much easier.
 
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Arson,

Do you ever raise the pedestal up?

I always make sure to light for whatever the end dynamic range is, so that also helps with maintaining detail in the shadows and highlights. Some people shoot a gray scale, make a note of the range, and then shoot based off that, but when they start CCing, they are in for a sudden suprise! Areas they didn't want to lose suddenly go by by.... they didn't realize that the look they were really after, actually had less dynamic range to work with, the devil is in the details.....:evil:
 
Man I have to agree AE 7 is quite powerful.
And until the recent fcp2 there was little out there that could compete
unless there was an app that had the same strenght and didn't need to render,
but then again there is exporting (which is where a lot of rendering takes place).

Apple's Color app look promising, though we have yet to test it. I'm sure it will
give a new meaning to the word color correction. The issue I find with
being to close minded is that we tend to get blinded, to see AE 7 would be the best
color corrector or best noise remover is to limit yourself, because I'm sure there
are things far greater than it that we may not even know of. With that said I've always had a rule of thumb not to get so involved in one thing that you lose sight of everything else around you. For example, even if I'm Apple Certified and I have a great understanding of FCP suite, I'll still dive into Adobe's, and dare I say it AVID.

Knowledge is power as far as I'm concerned.

cardmaverick said:
Arson,

Do you ever raise the pedestal up?

I always make sure to light for whatever the end dynamic range is, so that also helps with maintaining detail in the shadows and highlights. Some people shoot a gray scale, make a note of the range, and then shoot based off that, but when they start CCing, they are in for a sudden suprise! Areas they didn't want to lose suddenly go by by.... they didn't realize that the look they were really after, actually had less dynamic range to work with, the devil is in the details.....:evil:
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I totally agree! At the moment, AE7.0 is my stongest option. Avid color correction is supposed to be insane when you hit the DS Nitris level, but I only work on the Adrenaline, and there's a lot to be wished for.... So I jump ship to AE! LOL, on some projects, I've actually gone to photoshop via batch editing of frame exports. That'll open up even more doors if you do it right.:thumbsup:
 
mcgeedigital said:
Combustion has some very Smoke-like CC built in and is very nice.

I can't wait until the Hydra 14 bit mod for the HVX come out.
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Me too! I'm on the edge of buying an HVX grey market cam and getting the Hydra mod. Sounds like the red mini is a way's off. I see your from Alexandria, thats cool, I'm out in Loudoun County. Never used combustion, but I'd expect anything from autodesk to be pretty good stuff.

Sinarch, I just shot some more test HVX footage, natural light only, but I modified with a polarizer. I used +15, +7, 0, -7, -15. I'll put up some stuff when I can. My varicam shoot is now officially downsized to HVX, so I'm figuring out my sweet spot settings for this show.
 
I'm sorry to hear that maverick, but Please do post the test. I did some test of my own. One I can't put up because my friends gf is in it and she didn't want me to post it anywhere. but the other test were set with all the settings on the camera, the settings from Barry's book, and your settings also. The camera had the M2 on it and it was lit with a 2 bank Kino and a 4 bank Kinoflo right infront of the target. I haven't even had time to try to play with these test yet, but I'll put something up when I get a chance also.
 
siniarch said:
One I can't put up because my friends gf is in it and she didn't want me to post it anywhere.
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Party pooper. :D You could just pixelate out her face...:evil:
 
Chris, the flower shot looks amazing. I'm going to have to take another look at AE7.

BTW, the Huge.mov stops playing at 1:02 in both quicktime and vlc. Quicktime gives a buffer overrun error, so maybe it's just my machine?
 
jmc said:
Chris, the flower shot looks amazing. I'm going to have to take another look at AE7.

BTW, the Huge.mov stops playing at 1:02 in both quicktime and vlc. Quicktime gives a buffer overrun error, so maybe it's just my machine?
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It's your hardware, I'm working on a 4 core Boxx workstation. The flowers are some of my favorites too. Which one in particular? I'm fond of the ones that have glowing white petals.:grin:

OK,

More helpful info, man, when I figure out the HVX sweet spot, you can bet its going on my site, which I now finally have a domain name for, I'll release it latter.

On resolution settings and image quality....

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showpost.php?p=728717&postcount=19


Barry Green's thoughts on that post....

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showpost.php?p=760203&postcount=29

Very interesting indeed. I don't know what the guys detail setings were though. I'm currently playing with that right now. The resolution advantage is nice, but I'm more interested in the less aparrent compression. As this seems to be the bigger issue for post CC.

The things I'm very sure of right now are:

Raising the pedestal and dropping in post is viable, and clean if done right.

Too much HVX in camera crush (-11 to -15) creates a FAR more noisy image right out of the camera, less flexible in post. Minor cursh is not as noisey, but again, less post flex.

I originally thought in camera crush would be cleaner, but after some further testing, I now take that back!

Things I'm investigating:

+7 chroma. The theory is get as much saturation as you can, becasue desaturating is always an option in post, and non detrimental. After seeing what happens when you use in camera crushes at their max, I can't help but wonder if this actually causes more noise to be generated... Gonna do some more tests on that one. An interesting note on saturation though, when you incease contrast, your color saturation appears to increase. Some food for thought, most of my HUGE.mov shots are actually desaturated! I have a funny feeling that +7 is still the way to go, as pedestal seems to be the biggest noise issue.

Ok enough ranting, more testing.

..........so many variables!:grin:
 
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Actually Autodesk bought Discreet logic (Combustion, Flame etc.), which is a Montreal company. It's interesting that the compositing softwares are ruling the lower end c.c market. Is there a reason why these softwares handle c.c. better? Just curious, and thanks for the cool tests you are doing.
 
dogcat said:
Actually Autodesk bought Discreet logic (Combustion, Flame etc.), which is a Montreal company. It's interesting that the compositing softwares are ruling the lower end c.c market. Is there a reason why these softwares handle c.c. better? Just curious, and thanks for the cool tests you are doing.
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AH yeah, now I remember that... As for composting programs handling CC better, I don't know for sure as to why, but here is my guess:

Compositing demands control.

Thats basically it. When you composite, you are merging several elements together, and making them match can heavily depend on contrast, exposure, color, the whole nine yards, so any good compositing program better have some way of dealing with those issues. Another thing to note, I'm using some of AE's compositing tricks to apply special CC adjustments (I haven't realeased how I do this yet). In other words, I'm using tools for purpose's beyond what they were originally meant for by doing CC with them.
 
Ok, it's been a while. I have an update, shoting 1080 PA is by far cleaner looking than 720p. The image holds up much better during color correction. I recently shot a whole Pilot TV show using the raised pedestal, super sat chroma, and 1080 24pa and it looks amazing. Very clean and very flexible. I'd post some grabs, but I think I need to get some permission fist from the studio.
 
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