DVX100B and horrible reds

J

janekfr

New member
I have a new DVX100B. I have noticed that it tends to render saturated bright red colors with pronounced
vertical streaks whenever something red is bordered by a darker color. It looks like a compression artifact and it has that interlaced look except that the lines are vertical and I am shooting 24p (other modes show the same phenomenon as well). The effect is very pronounced and the look is that of something produced by a cheap single-CCD camcorder. A red field will become entriely blotched by dark vertical lines when zooming out. Also, a dark object on a red field becomes surrounded by thick verical lines and everything gets out of focus and has a dirty appearance. This does not seem to happen with other colors or color combinations, which show sharp contrast and no "bleading". Could it be a that one of the CCD's or its subsystem is faulty, or something else is producing noise?

BTW, I cleaned the heads and this less than a month old DVX is too new to have anything worn out. I am shooting 24p / Cine-gamma and either Cinelike Matrix / Master Pedestal -3, or Chroma level +5 / Master Pedestal -5. Any advise will be greatly appreciated.
 
That DV for ya, horrible with the reds. When ever I shoot someone wearing a bright red sweather, the edges get really blockly and very obtrosive.

Post a grab so we can get a better idea of bad it is.
 
Do a search on this, you will find lots of results. Basically, there is an easy fix, don't change in camera settings, get the colors you want, and then run a chroma blur filter in post, it works like a charm.
I really don't know how many times I have answered this question, but whats one more.
 
DV handles reds horribly. With your chroma level boosted that high; I don't doubt that you are getting bad compression artifacts. I would say that your camera seems to be functioning normally.

Edit: Wow, three replies at the same time. There is some response for you...
 
Scharky, many thanks! I tried the chroma blur in Vegas and it did subdue the blotchy streaks: 1.5 setting for horizontal pixels blur appears to get most of it.
 
Any tape format that I've ever seen has a hard time rendering reds. The nature of CCD's is such that they just don't like red. In fact, as far as I can tell, CRT's don't render red well either.
 
Yeah, lots of solid red definately isn't DV's best friend, but I've never really had many problems with bright reds. Just watch out for you chroma levels and color temp.
 
I recall Barry saying that CineMatrix bumps up the magenta. Couple that with a low pedestal, and you've got an attack of the killer tomatoes.

Raising the pedestal will help.

When I use Normal Matrix and a low pedestal (-10), my reds run wild!

-a
 
There must be a way to fix this.

In premier pro 1.5 i never had an issue with reds regardless of the in camera settings, color correction, nothing.

I just started on my new macbook pro, final cut pro, and the reds are blocky as ****!

how and why is this happening in one and not the other? What is needed to fix this problem?
 
I edit in FCP. Now I just got shake a couple of days ago and tried to use it to solve the problem. This is what I tried:

convert to colorspace yuv
blur only the b channel (which is now v) by 20 y-Pixels
convert back to colorspace rgb

Works like a charm. :)

Would be nice if this was possible in fcp directly.
 
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does this process affect the quality of the footage? Or just fix this red issue?

im also just really surprised how this never happened on pp 1.5

i thought fcp was the superior program
 
Well, it blurs. I'd say that's an alteration of quality. The trick is to make the blur as invisible as possible. That's why I'm only blurring the 2nd chroma channel where the reds are and only in horizontal direction in my example.
 
I'm pretty sure that Nattress has a chroma blur plugin for FCP, you should try that. I have used Premiere pro 1 -2.0 and have always had the same issue with pixelated reds, not sure why you never had them, maybe you just never noticed, but I have seen plenty of issues that people have had with that when using ALL Nle's. The only exception would be Avid, as it has a chroma blur filter applied automatically to it's version of the DV-AVI.
 
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