The footage I shot on an overcast day with my Sony X70 using the standard Picture Profile 4 looks flat and lifeless to me, especially skin tones. Anyone have any suggestions how I can bring out skin tones and overall make colors pop a little more?
Try the free Sony Catalyst Browse tonadjust color or even convert the footage.
Hi, OldSmoke, thanks for that, I'm familiar with Catalyst Browse though not the tonadjust color you suggest. I'll check into it. Not sure what you mean by convert footage?
Sorry if this is too elementary. PP4 is already relatively flat profile and you've got low contrast lighting. So basically your footage is supposed to look like that. Theoretically a flat profile captures the most information and gives you more latitude in post to get the final look you want. Disappointing if you're used to the popping color you get out of your $200 handycam or iPhone. You can dial flatter or higher contrast/saturation in camera, but currently you're in the universe of color correction/grading. Google, including on using the Vegas scopes. Or did you just want "raise the blacks, lower the whites, drag color towards red/orange"? A quick way in Vegas (apart from OldSmokes' suggestion) is Hitfilm and LUTs, outside Vegas, Resolve does it best. I'm sure if you post a grab you'll have many people on this forum posting specifics.
Rainier, yes elementary I agree but needed confirmation. Thanks for providing it. OldSmoke's suggestion is simple and working but may want to delve deeper into the realm of color grading. Any thoughts on using Logarist for color grading in Vegas?
Hi Geo, color science, the more you learn the less you realise you know. Sorry, I don't use Logarist, don't know why it wouldn't be OK. I'd very highly recommend looking at balazar's site, http://www.jbalazer.com/aces-in-sony-vegas. I'm still on Vegas 14, so no built-in LUT access. I do have the VisionColor OFX Plugin (which you can get for free and apparently legal from https://suggestionofmotion.com/blog/sony-vegas-pro-lut-workflow-visioncolor-lut-plugin/) and a collection of LUTs, but over time I've mainly played with the color corrector and saved my own presets.
Hi, OldSmoke, thanks for that, I'm familiar with Catalyst Browse though not the tonadjust color you suggest. I'll check into it. Not sure what you mean by convert footage?
The XAVC-L codec from the X70 plays better in Vegas when converted to XAVC-I which is also decoded in Vegas as 10bit. Since you may already do color correction/grading in Catalyst, render the footage to XAVC-I format for further editing. Also note that XAVC-I does smart render in Vegas.
OldSmoke, by XAVC-I you mean XAVC-Intra?
“OldSmoke, by XAVC-I you mean XAVC-Intra?”
Yes.
This is in regards to a7s, and SLOG, which I'm not sure if that is what your camera shoots or not, but it should work similarly in your case as well. There's also a LUT included in the description on youtube that you can try to apply to your video. This tut uses premiere, so you won't find much use there, but you can still try the LUT.
Here's a quick tutorial on how to do is in Logarist, so you don't have to leave Vegas at all!
In the video below, he only uses brightness and contrast to do level adjustments, I would have used levels and color curves as well to get more fine control of the darks and highlights. It would have been possible to properly expose the wall he is talking about while still retaining the detail and proper exposure of the foreground objects. For more advanced stuff, you can use masks to only grade parts of the image, making that task even easier and higher quality. For more advanced color grading, you can buy Mocha for Vegas and use it to motion-track objects, then apply individual brightness and color adjustments to each scene element, even ones in motion.