Color reproduction

G

georgizdr

Member
Hi everyone!

I'm new to all this so please bare with me. For the past couple of hours I've roamed through the forums looking for an answer to my issue, but to no avail. I've looked at a series of films featuring amazing color reproduction(e.g. stoiqa's "Flowers by D90" and capice's "Switch") that I'm just not able to achieve.

I've read Kholi's instructions on lowering the ISO, but since I don't yet have a lens with manual aperture I'm not able to try that out. I have tried changing the Picture Control on the camera to various options, of which Vivid burns the colors out (e.g. red looks pink) and the others just flatten them out. How do I go about achieving the results that those guys have? Should I be using some particular settings? Could it be that the default output codec looks bad, should I try converting to a different one?

I currently employ a 18-55 f/3.5 lens, and am heading in the direction of buying a 50mm 1.8. All of this is concerning video only - I get great colors when taking pictures.

Please let me know if I am missing something or if you have any suggestions. All replies are appreciated.

Thanks!

Edit:
Ok, I'm getting accurate color reproduction in QT, but when using Media Player or Media Player Classic the colors are way off. Any ideas?
 
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install a better codec. i use picvideo which produces indentical results to quicktime player. also, the camera has a tendency to overexpose, so lock your exposure at something brighter before shooting, that will give you more saturated images.

good luck.

/matt
 
Thanks for the tip Matt. I went ahead and installed PICvideo, but still getting the same results. I'll look around for a better codec.

Also, if the camera overexposes, shouldn't I be locking my exposure at a darker level to compensate for that? Or does it just overexpose in LV, in reality underexposing the recorded video?

Thanks.
 
picvideo is one of the best codecs there are and if you don't get good results with it something else is wrong. did you set it to normalized yuv?

as for exposure just think about it. what happens when you aim the camera at something darker? if the auto exposure darkened the image when the subject was dark it would be very hard to take pictures. :-)

/matt
 
I uninstalled my other codecs and ran on PICvideo alone, but it still gave me a pink-ish image that I don't get in QT. I'm trying other codecs atm.

You're right about the exposure.. :-)

Edit: Funny thing. I uninstalled all the codecs and now everything plays fine. I guess codecs are like women..
 
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again, i can assure you picvideo produces perfect colors (the deblocking can cause some chroma bleed in dark areas but that's it). if it doesn't for you something else is wrong.

/matt
 
georgizdr said:
I uninstalled my other codecs and ran on PICvideo alone, but it still gave me a pink-ish image that I don't get in QT. I'm trying other codecs atm.

You're right about the exposure.. :-)

Edit: Funny thing. I uninstalled all the codecs and now everything plays fine. I guess codecs are like women..
Click to expand...

You don't need to uninstall the other codecs. You just need to tell your player which codec to use.

If you were using Media Player Classic with ffdshow, then open the d90 footage with the program, and go to the ffdshow video decoder settings. Change the 'MJPEG' and 'Other MPEG' Decoder from 'libavcodec' to 'disabled'. Now you'll be using the proper picvideo codec.
 
Well, I had to uninstall picvideo too. So now I'm left with Windows' default codec, whatever that is, which does its job fine. All I care about is that it works. :beer:

Next step is to get a Manual Aperture lens.
 
Sorry but why do you ask questions if you're not interested in answers? Trial and error might (seem to) work sometimes but it hasn't made you any wiser. /m
 
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