Help with Day-For-Night shot.

Jaime Valles

Jaime Valles

Veteran
Hello all. I'm trying to turn an exterior shot of a building into a night-time shot via Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and possibly Motion 1. It's DVX100, 24pA. The problem is, no matter what I do to the picture, I get all these blocky artifacts on the image, and the more I push the colors, the worse it gets.

Here's an example of where I'm going with this. It's very dark on my computer screen, but looks right on an NTSC monitor. Click on thumbnail for larger version.



Below I'm attaching the original image.



Any advice or help with turning this into day-for-night without all the artifacts showing up will be gratefully appreciated!
 
welcome to the wonderful world of dv compression ...

Try the Nattress filters ... they may help ...
 
You will definitely want to use something like "Color Finess" which works in a high bit color space to eliminate the blocky artifacts as much as possible.
 
Thanks, all. I think I got it as best as I could now. The main problem before wasn't so much that blocky artifacts showed up, it was that the artifacts were moving around a lot. Very distracting in an otherwise still shot. It was the movement of the blocks that drew a lot of attention.

So, I imported the clip into Motion, added stars and a moon and the streetlights and changed the colors, and then exported the shot as 10-bit uncompressed. I then opened it in a FCP timeline set to 10-bit uncompressed, and LO! No moving blocky artifacts! There are still some artifacts there, but not many, and, more importantly, they aren't dancing around. That makes all the difference in the world, because your eye isn't drawn to the moving colored blocks.

I knew going into this that the DV compression would be a killer when doing color correction, but I wasn't expecting it to be THAT bad. But thankfully the 10-bit uncompressed made the artifacts static. Thanks all for the suggestions!

Man, I can't wait for the HVX200! 1080/24p 4:2:2 color!!!!!!
 
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