A question on best place to do color and sharpness changes.

C

cwoodhou

Active member
I posted a similar question in the technical area without response, so I'm wondering I should have popped it here.

I'm hoping one of the experienced folks can tell me if it is better to do color, sharpness and tonal adjustments in Final Cut Pro or by using the camera Scene settings? In this case I would set the HMC151 to a give the maximum possibilities for later editing. Reading Barry's book, he only discusses scene settings, which surprises me a little. (It might be that scene settings work on a higher bit-depth file than using FCP/Prores).

In my more familiar territory of the digital camera world, for the best quality result, I shoot RAW and do adjustments in Photoshop and in the case of sharpness, as the very last adjustment.

My emphasis is on quality rather than convenience.

kind regards

Chris Woodhouse
 
cwoodhou said:
I posted a similar question in the technical area without response, so I'm wondering I should have popped it here.

I'm hoping one of the experienced folks can tell me if it is better to do color, sharpness and tonal adjustments in Final Cut Pro or by using the camera Scene settings? In this case I would set the HMC151 to a give the maximum possibilities for later editing. Reading Barry's book, he only discusses scene settings, which surprises me a little. (It might be that scene settings work on a higher bit-depth file than using FCP/Prores).
Click to expand...

No...he also discusses individual parameter settings. Noise is the enemy of maximum possibilities, and he does discuss that various parameter settings may improve the subjective quality of the signal while degrading the objective quality of the signal. If you want mex possibilities, pay attention to where he talks about what gives minimum noise, and you'll have your answer...almost. This assumes that you can get FCP to provide all the signal processing that the camera itself makes possible. I'm not quite sure that's true.

Remember that if your shadows collapse to black, or if your highlights fade to white, that's a form of noise.

M
 
thanks for that Mike - you have clarified what my 'maximum possibilities' means. Low noise, use the full range but with no clipping. From memory that could well be Cine D gamma. I know that FCP does colour and sharpness. I'm not sure if it does 'curves' as Photoshop. I'll do some more digging. It is as St Ansel says, the negative is the score, the print is the performance.
Chris
 
don't recommend cineD...too noisy. cineV is cleaner.
in general, i've found my best results from a combination of 'baked-in' scenefile settings in-camera with additional fx applied in post. many people will argue that you should shoot as flat as possible and tweak in post, but with this camera, i never get as good an image as if i had just gone ahead and shot it the way i wanted in the first place.
so i encourage you to play with the scene files and shoot with something that gets you most of the way there.

i'm not even sure anymore about trying to save shadows and not clip any highlights. that approach almost always results in my subject being incorrectly exposed. instead of trying to preserve and maximize dynamic range in every shot, i just go ahead and expose my subject properly, then try some lighting control to tame highlights or raise shadows. you'll always get better results by putting more work into production than you will trying to fix it in post.

and if it's just saturation and sharpness you're worried about, go ahead and dial it into your scene file. i always add an unsharp mask in post even with some 'detail' sharpness set in-camera. and i highly recommend testing out some denoise/grain-removal filters. After Effects and even TMPGEncXpress have some great noise removal filters that can really make your footage shine!
 
I kinda disagree with averan. Stock cine-D is a bit noisy, but I get great flat results with:

Detail -3
Vdetail 0
Corring +3
Master Ped -5
Gamma Cine D
Matrix Cine-Like


Regardless, one way to cut down noise in blacks is to always ABB the cam after a power on and set you Master Ped using the Waveform Monitor.

Close your iris
Turn on WWM. You will see a thin noisy line on the bottom. Lower Master Ped till the thin line looks solid.
 
Denwa said:
Regardless, one way to cut down noise in blacks is to always ABB the cam after a power on and set you Master Ped using the Waveform Monitor.

Close your iris
Turn on WWM. You will see a thin noisy line on the bottom. Lower Master Ped till the thin line looks solid.
Click to expand...

Nice!
 
Denwa said:
I kinda disagree with averan. Stock cine-D is a bit noisy, but I get great flat results with:

Detail -3
Vdetail 0
Corring +3
Master Ped -5
Gamma Cine D
Matrix Cine-Like


Regardless, one way to cut down noise in blacks is to always ABB the cam after a power on and set you Master Ped using the Waveform Monitor.

Close your iris
Turn on WWM. You will see a thin noisy line on the bottom. Lower Master Ped till the thin line looks solid.
Click to expand...
Denwa, can you elaborate on how you set Master Ped using the Waveform Monitor?
 
VideoMaker said:
Denwa, can you elaborate on how you set Master Ped using the Waveform Monitor?
Click to expand...

Not sure how to elaborate as the instructions were in the same post but..


Close your iris completely.

Turn on your wave form monitor. You will see a fairly solid line on the bottom (Since there is no light coming into the camera this should be a sold line).

Noise will show on or above the line, making it not quite solid.

Lower master ped till line looks solid.

This should give you cleaner blacks without dropping the master ped to far.

Very noticeable when using cine-D as stock settings are a tad noisy.

There is another thread on here where this was first mentioned by someone else. I think there were even pics. :)
 
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