48hr Film Houston: A Sound Mind... Please Critique My Color Correction

mentatDUKE

mentatDUKE

Veteran
Hello all. We recently did a short for the 48hr Film Festival. I was the editor and attempted some color correction. I made a comparison real so it was easy to see the difference between the two versions. Please critique my first attempt at color correction. It's a decent size download at over 60MB. Thanks for looking!

A Sound Mind In Corpore Sano Comparison Reel
 
I really enjoyed this, I thought the CC was done very well. I like the oversaturated look as long as it isn't overdone and it seemed there was a good balace between the oversaturation of colors and more natural coloring. What did you use for CC?

I was particularly struck at how good the audio seemed. Can you share any tips on your audio acquisition process/equipment?

I was also impressed with the actors in this one, they did a really good job. Although the girl seemed to act younger than her apparent age.

Good job...thanks for sharing this,
Larry
 
The color correction was absolutely amazing, although some of the cc scenes were too bright. What did you use to do this?

Thanks
 
Hi guys. Thanks for the feedback.

I know the color treating had problems in a few areas. Still learning how to manipulate it properly and figure out what all the settings do.

We used Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. It has a "color corrector" effect. I attempted to crush the blacks by changing the white and black balance (Is that how it's done?). I turned up the saturation and adjusted the color curves including the master curve. Perhaps that combined with it being a sunny day caused certain scenes to be a bit bright. As far as saturation, I think I amped up green the most. Perhaps I should have been more conservative with the green levels. Especially in scenes with a lot of sun and grass. Hmm.

I'd love to hear what those who have done a lot of color correcting think. Any tips, critiques or suggestions? Where did I go right and where did I go wrong? The goal was to make it a bit more film-like without resorting to Magic Bullet.

I'm glad you thought the acting was good. The director had access to real actors and I thought they did exceptionally well.

Regarding sound, we had access to great equipment for the acquisition. A Sennheiser ME-66 shotgun mic with boom, and blimp. We plugged it straight into the XLR in the DVX and monitored the gain levels to avoid clipping. In post, we adjusted the gain and audio volume levels with the pen tool to make sure it all matched up. In addition, we made sure not to blatantly "cut" audio. Whenever audio changed, we used fades to make it a bit more seamless. In some instances we'd use a cross-fade effect, in others, we'd fade manually by using the pen tool to decrease volume slowly toward the end of one audio clip and increase it as the other clip came on. Some foley was recored "on set" since we knew we'd need to avoid engine sounds and such in post.

Thanks for the great feedback. Hopefully some broadband users will go for the download and provide some more.

Keep it coming!

As usual, always happy to answer any questions.

Cheers.
 
Hey
Im getting an error message that says "421 sorry, someone is already logged into this account"
Brian
 
Nice film and story.
When there's not too much highlights that trigger the video look, it looks very nice, but I have to admit that I liked a lot those shots without the color correction too. Each one gives a different mood to the film.
Now, for the film look you were looking for, also consider cropping to a different aspect ratio than 1.333
I noticed the 180 degree rule is broken several times. When the guy talks to his "wife", the camera jumps accross the line and the girl doesn't look in the same direction as the guy.
Same thing in the scene with the doctor.
 
Thanks for the input. Regarding cropping, I was under the impression that one should avoid cropping in post since you'd essentially be discarding info on the top and bottom of the frame. Isn't a better solution to shoot 16x9 in the first place using the anamorphic adapter? That way, you're not faking the widescreen, it actually is widescreen. Could I be missing something here? Thanks
 
As you often hear, less is better or less is more. Just try it and you'll see. You have to shoot with the framing in mind though.
Concerning widescreen, adapter or not, and cropping there's been tons of posts about that and each person has an interesting point of view and gets interesting results with any technique. Try to find them and read them. That will be more efficient than me trying to sum it up. I've tried recently the squeeze mode and was very happy with it, but I read and saw so many good results by cropping the 1.33 in post that I will try that next time.
I think November was shot 1.33 and cropped in post. I saw it on a big screen and it looked very good except for a few scenes.
Watch for example the films from disjecta and read his interesting FAQ, http://www.pinelakefilms.com/faq.html
 
First off these look pretty good.

like all of the CC in the house.

A couple of times, was a bit too saturated for my taste outside without knowing what you wanted to accomplish story-telling-wise.

But otherwise pretty good and filmic.

I'm a newbie, so I too would like to hear what the experienced dudes have to say.

mentatDUKE said:
Thanks for the input. Regarding cropping, I was under the impression that one should avoid cropping in post since you'd essentially be discarding info on the top and bottom of the frame. Isn't a better solution to shoot 16x9 in the first place using the anamorphic adapter? That way, you're not faking the widescreen, it actually is widescreen. Could I be missing something here? Thanks
Click to expand...

You don't hurt yourt image AT ALL to crop in camera or in post. Yes you are throwing away 25% or so of the information ... but you are throwing away 25% or so of the image as well. What's inside the bars remains at the same resolution as before but now you have a TTL of 350sih lines of rez vs 500, but that 500 is spread over the whole 4:3 screen.
(This is for display on a 4:3 television set only)

This res quality is basically the same for squeeze mode but its a liitle lower (only slightly I'm told) than just cropping because there's some distortion due to the way the camera stretches the image vertically -- its called squeeze mode but it actually just stretches the image from top and bottom so that the area that would be black boxed is stretched out of the view of the screen.
(now you 've actually changed the shape of the frame so it will only play correctly on 16X9 monitor. It will look squeezed on a 4:3 ... Unless your primary output will DVD, in which case it will look right on either because the DVD will automatically shrink the image so that it fits on a 4:3 screen leaving black space on the top and bottom while maintaining the correct aspect ratio - the black bars don't exist! While playing fullscreen in the correct true 16X9 aspect ratio on a wide screen as well.

Both letter box and squeeze mode play at the highest resolution level an SD monitor can play without twitter.

If you want to cram in EXTRA vertical resolution, or shoot at the highest resolution possible then, yes, you would want to use the anamorphic adaptor, because that blows the image up on the vertical access optically before it gets to the CCD's so now all 500 lines of resolution are applied over the 16X9 shaped image.

If you are shooting for 4:3 TV, (or the web) and want a 16X9 aspect ratio, letterboxing the image is a completely viable solution and absolutely will not "hurt" it.

Check out my grabs that I've taken all the way to cinescope ratio:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/showthread.php?t=31255

When I output, I use Compressor to actually chop off the letterbox bars web display (higher bandwidth woo hoo), and for DVD I crop them off and blow up to 16X9 anamorphically -- this is the same as doing squeeze but in post and at a slightly higher resolution because compressor can blow it up cleaner than in camera squeeze.

Then there's a very labor intensive way to blow up your footage that actually enhances it do to the algorithm, using photozoom pro. (Search for posts by disjecta you can see his work and there's a sticky somewhere on how to do it.)

I too will eventually put a CC comparision clip up for my piece.

Thanks for showing this, hopefully will be an imformative discussion when the big dogs check in.
 
Thanks for that explanation JD. I'll have to look into this anamorphic issue a bit closer. From what you've said, using the anamorphic adapter sounds most attractive since you won't waste any resolution. It will be applied to the 16x9 area. I'll have to compare that to simply just uprezzing. Thanks for your comments.
 
mentatDUKE said:
Thanks for that explanation JD. I'll have to look into this anamorphic issue a bit closer. From what you've said, using the anamorphic adapter sounds most attractive since you won't waste any resolution. It will be applied to the 16x9 area. I'll have to compare that to simply just uprezzing. Thanks for your comments.
Click to expand...
According to Barry for 16x9 -
Highest res = Anamorphic
Next = shoot 4:3 and uprez in Photozoom Pro
Next = shoot 4:3 Uprez in you NLW
Next= Squeeze.

Again -- leterboxing in post or in camera doesn't alter or degrade the resolution for the middle area -- so your not "losing" any image quality -- you just have less image.

Yes the anaoprphic shoots at the highest rez possible, but the anamorphic is HARD to work with unless you are a hardcore DP because it places the horizontal and vertical planes at different focal lengths from the camera. I have one it took me an hour to get three shots that would have taken 15 minutes.

Remeber also that the DP that won the Cinematography award at Sundance shot 4:3 on her DVX100 (not "a" so no squeeze) and did a realtime uprezz instead of using the Anamoprhic (which was available) because she thought it limited the camera too much. Without it you can get critical focus at virtually any distance and fstop combo -- no longer the case with the anamoprhic, you have to use a chart and make sure you are under a certain f stop, or you just can't focus. Also no auto focus and no focusing by eye, or so they say, because your LCD is not high enough rez for critical focus. Also, image in your LCD will be squeezed unless you by a century anamorphic lens hood (th route I went) or by an external 16X9 monitor. 5 to 7 inch 16X9 camera mountable LCD monitors are popular, but I've nev er seen one with the rez for critical focus, they are a framing aid only.

If you are going to Film or HD uprez -- consider the anamorphic.
If you are going to mostly 4:3 TV's -- consider letter boxing in camera or in post (the great thing about letterboxin in post is that you can reframe your shots for perfect headroom).

I may try the anamorphic adaptor on my next project, but I use 4:3 crop and uprez in Compressor for DVD in case I give it to that fancy pants agent or producer who wants to view it on a 16X9 monitor.

Also remember -- again all the alternatives to anamorphic yield as high resolution as you can safely display on a SD tv.

A lot of people swear by the anamoprhic though.
Anither viable option is us the anamorphic for masters, or when feesable and shoot squeeze for closeups or run-n-gun.


Here's some footage to compare:
These guys are all about the anamorphic, their stuff looks great:
http://www.deadkidzfilms.com/
Click on "Field Theory" once you are in the page.

Here's links to disjecta's work. This guy's stuff will blow you away and he doesn't own an anamorphic.
This one was shot in squeeze before he started uprezzing with photozoom pro.
http://www.pinelakefilms.com/olympic.html

These were shot 4:3 and uprezzed in post with photozoom pro:
http://www.pinelakefilms.com/snoqualmie.html
http://www.pinelakefilms.com/birdcage.html

Good luck!
 
First of all, I REALLY enjoyed the film. Wonderful acting. Loved the sound. On some shots, I liked the original footage better than the CC. When there were a lots of whites in a shot, they tended to look too bright in the CC. Just my short two cents worth...
 
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