Need Help Color Correcting this camera in a shoot

S

sigpikul

Member
I shot a concert film with 3 EX1s (which were amazing) in addition to my own XHA1. Btw, besides the annoying and buggy workflow the EX1s are phenomenal, especially now that I am in post and I'm dealing with trying to make the footage from the XHA1 look half as good as the EX1 footage.


Here is a 2 second Apple Pro Res clip of the trouble camera, the footage was originally shot in HDV and is too dark and completely lacks color. right click and download (20mb):

http://www.kseraband.com/rumorsaboutarevolution/AnthonyGreenCC.mov

Here is a picture of the best look I've gotten so far after CCing the ex1s, this is what I am generally trying to get that XHA1 footage to look like. ps: if anyone has any advice on tweaking the ex1 footage as well, let me know! Right click and download:

http://www.kseraband.com/rumorsaboutarevolution/Anthonygreenccpic.png


I'm new to using apple color, and I cannot afford a colorist as the budget is spent. It seems that no matter what I try to do to the xha1 footage it looks gross, especially since it is too dark.

Any help, pointers, advice, or if anyone wants to take a crack at color correcting that clip and posting their findings, it would be very very very much appreciated.
 
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ps, this is my best attempt thus far:

Untitled.jpg
 
anyone? any advice or attempts.

i know i'm not the only person that has had to deal with the deficiencies of the xha1's low light sensitivity and ran into problems with the HDV codec when trying to correct that. I've only been using color for a few weeks and steve hullfishe's book is on the way from amazon, but i'm really looking for some help on this one, this is the biggest project and shoot i've been in charge of so far and unfortunately this camera looks the worst, but is in the best camera position and got a lot of the best shots.
 
I couldn't watch the clip but I messed around with the picture for a few minutes in photoshop. What kind of look are you going for? Natural skin tones?

Anthonygreenccpic2.png
 
Ya I'm looking for preserved skin tones, dark-blueish background. I really like where your going with that image, it seems like my skin tone when i try it is getting too pinkish/orangish compared to yours.

Here is the links to a psd of the original frame grab, that will make things a little easier for everyone:

This is the trouble (HDV) camera, uncorrected:
http://www.kseraband.com/rumorsaboutarevolution/AGHDV.psd

This is the good camera uncorrected (the one you already worked on, the one you worked on had already had some CC done to it):
http://www.kseraband.com/rumorsaboutarevolution/agex1.psd

How would you go about getting that look from these two different cameras?
 
Yea that hdv is gonna be hard. I messed around for a bit but couldn't get anything matching. It doesn't look "bad" once you cc it but so far I couldn't get the two to match up. I'll mess around with it more tomorrow if I have time.
 
The best I could come up with:

AGHDV7.png


It doesn't match really but it looks light years better than before it was cced. But that was with a LOT of tweaking. Good luck. I like messing around with other peoples work cause my ass isn't on the line. :)
 
wow, that looks incredible compared to what I was coming up with, thank you so much for taking a shot at it.

if you don't mind taking the time to respond, what did you do/what can i start doing on apple color in order to get results that look closer to what you came up with. I'm a novice at cc, and as i speak i'm only 30 pages into the art and technique of digital color correction. it seems that all of my attempts really botched up the skin, parts look washed out, parts look too saturated, any ideas?

thanks again for taking the time to put perspective on this, after seeing your results I'm much more confident that I will be able to make that camera "work" overall. which is a big relief since I can't reshoot a concert video.

I think one lesson (of many) that I learned out of all of this is that the next time that I'm faced with doing a multi cam shoot in a low light concert, to force the budget to cough up the $400 for an extra ex1 rental so we are all shooting the same camera with the same light sensitivity.
 
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