Color correction advise

skinners1

skinners1

Active member
OK, I have some footage delivered to me that needs some post work. A local church (I have family that attends here) shot footage of a service, used 3 cams and live mixed through a edirol v4 mixer and delivered product on a single DV tape recorded through a Sony DSR-30 deck. Easy enough to add a few titles, do a little post work, place on DVD and voila... HA!!!

Color on the 3 cameras was way off. White balances were either not done, or done poorly. What would be the best way to correct this situation? Some cuts are "cuts", but most are cross fades and virtually impossible to split. Is there a way to desaturate the color completely and start from scratch? Any advise would be greatly appreciated. No money involved in this one, just would like to deliver a product that they can enjoy, and hopefully get more work out of it!
 
First find out if color match is required by your customer. Some people don't care.

If they require color matching, then just make a color correction profile for each camera, and apply it to each clip from that camera. For cross dissolves, just razor in the middle of the dissolve, make color corrections, then add the dissolve again. I don't think people would notice a difference in color during a 1 second dissolve, and I would guess that they're not changing camera angles all that often (like MTV).
 
You could use adjustment layers with CC applied for each clip and cross dissolve 'em when there is a dissolve in your footage below.

EDIT: Or, if you don't have adj layers in your NLE, you can do the following: For each cross dissolve duplicate the footage, so you have two layers. Cut the clip in the 1st layer at the point, where dissolve ends, and in the 2nd layer, where it starts. Then, using the opacity controls for layers, make them dissolve.
 
you could also see if in addition to the mixed version they might have the original mini dv tapes from each cam?

then you could color correct the entire tape and recreate their edits.

matthew
 
If you cannot get to the original tapes and don't feel like editing it again, go ahead and take the vid clip into your editor, start cutting away, divide the cuts into 3 layers. Each layer should be designated to each angle.

if you're working with premiere, you can copy and paste effects and settings to each clip, so once you color correct 1 clip from 1 angle, you can paste the same correction to another clip from the same angle. It's a lot of work, but it is much better than re-editing it.

I am pretty sure that FCP and avid have similar options which allow you to apply the same settings to multiple clips.
 
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