C100: some c100 Canon C-log color correction advise needed.

icicle22

Well-known member
So the long and the short of it is that I was shooting an actress for a series of short interview questions for an interactive virtual presenter. She was wearing a short sleeve polo shirt that is basically a very bright neon green...very similar to a chroma key green. Because of the bright lights I shot this using C-Log to retain as much info as possible and it worked out very well. The color of the shirt is a bit of a problem as it is super desaturated and looks a bit more like a pastel green now.

I need to be able to easily isolate the color and change the tone....basically take it back up to neon green to match the companies corporate colors. I accomplished this last year using Davinci Resolve but it was a single clip then. This year it is a series of 40-50 short 10 second clips. I'd prefer to accomplish this in After Effects or better yet in Premiere on my PC if possible as I already have all the clips laid out in the timeline.

Can anyone advise on how to accomplish this? I know this isn't exclusively a Canon c100 issue, but this is not the first time the C-log has recorded colors inaccurately and I need to fix them. I have followed several tutorials on how to change a color to another, but I just want to be able to isolate the green tones of the shirt and then apply color correction to just that.

Any help here would be great.

Thanks. (oh....and the footage is ProRes 422 off of my new Ninja Blade.....)
 
I use Colorista II on my pc (Premiere pro)...it work's really good. Te HSL Wheel would certainly do the trick.
 
I have Colorista II on my home workstation but I didn't realize I could isolate a color. I use power masks all the time to make changes to certain defined regions but I have never used it to selectively choose a color to modify. Am I understanding you correctly?
 
On the HSL wheel you could move the green dot one way or the other...it should do the trick. You can increase or decrease the saturation with the same green dot.
sorry if my explanation is not that good...french is my native language.
 
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Just to make sure, because I'm getting a strange vibe from this question - you're saying the shirt is still a desaturated pale green after you've "un-logged" the C-log footage? (meaning you've somewhat substantially increased both the contrast and saturation of the entire image, as log footage is not meant to be viewed/outputted without color correction).

If so, yes, Colorista, Resolve, the color board in FCPX, and most other color applications/plug-ins have a selective color feature that should do the trick, especially with such a vivid and distinct color. The HSL wheel in colorista is a particularly quick and easy way, but nothing beats Resolve for accuracy, and I wouldn't think that 50 clips should be any problem for using Davinci - you can basically copy the grade from one clip to the others (given identical lighting).
 
Indeed the color is off after color correction to get back to record color space. This may be less of a c-log issue and more of a sensor issue. Last year I shot the same footage for this client with the Blackmagic cinema camera and it couldnpurplerately record this green color either. I have also experienced this with certain purples looking blue.
 
It's pretty easy to copy/paste nodes in Resolve(even with tracking data). So if you have clips that are essentially the same, it shouldn't be a problem at all. I would recommend to learn Resolve - it's a fantastic tool, pretty straightforward and it's free!
 
It's pretty easy to copy/paste nodes in Resolve(even with tracking data). So if you have clips that are essentially the same, it shouldn't be a problem at all. I would recommend to learn Resolve - it's a fantastic tool, pretty straightforward and it's free!

The problem is that I do most of my work in the Adobe Suite and I am switching back and forth from Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop and Audition constantly and then render my final clips out via h.264 (final delivery). With Davinci Resolve I lose the convenience of that but more importantly when I export my final clips I cannot choose ProRes as my codec as it is not available on the PC. I can decode it only. So even if color corrected all the original source files before talking them into Premiere, I wouldn't;t know what codec to use when exporting from Resolve. I used to use Cineform but I have had some bizarre issues with it lately. Any advise? Uncompressed is just not an option.

Thanks.
 
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