A thank you to BillyBoy

farss wrote on 12/13/2003, 5:45 PM
After reading your tutorial on removing color castes I got inspired to try correcting the cast on some of the old 8mm stuff I work on. The results are visually quite dramatic. Getting the brides dress to look white, the snow to look white makes a huge difference to everything in the image.
The grain is still there along with all the other defects BUT if you can get one aspect of the image close to being right the eye seems to forgive the others.
It's about the first time my wife even noticed something I was doing!

Now the downside is the client isn't paying me anymore for the extra effort but what the heck, it's Christmas and they're going to be looking at these DVDs for years to come.

Of course CC isn't the panacea for all the ills of old 8mm, I usually just fins a setting for the whole roll that on average gets it looking better. Oftenly these are 400 foot rolls made up of different stock with different processing and ligting. Ideally I should chop it all up and grade each roll or each scene but not for the oney they'll pay.

Anyway thanks again BB.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 12/13/2003, 7:04 PM
Glad it turned out for you.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/13/2003, 7:07 PM
> The grain is still there along with all the other defects

Whenever I do an analog capture, I run the AVI files through VitrualDub with the Dynamic Noise Reduction 2.1 filter and it cleans up the noise up a lot. You might want to try it and see. VirtualDub is free. Even if you don’t want to take the time to do it for your client (who isn’t paying you for the extras) but you just might want to take the opportunity to test it on a small sample and see if you like it for future projects.

But you’re right about BillyBoy; he is an asset to this community and I’ve enjoyed and learned from his tutorials too.

~jr
farss wrote on 12/13/2003, 7:25 PM
John,
now that I've got the ADVC-300 and having finally caught up with the workload I'm going to see if I can find some setting in it's 2D noise reduction that'll help.
It cartainly does a good job cleaning up the noise from the CCDs when the film is very dark. I'm also working on getting some more light through the film and new CCDs for the Telecine.

I've downloaded VD and some of the tools as well. Problem is time. I've got to keep turining out product to make things at least cover costs. If the workload justifies I'm going to build a farm of PCs with SATA drives in modules. One machine for capture, one for render and one for PTT or DVD authoring. If any part of the process becomes a bottleneck I'll just throw more machines at it.

I've also just invested in SF7 and NR to work on audio as well so I've also got to find time to do another RTFM, to say nothing of prinitng the manual out in the first place.