Color correcting a 1980 recording.

A. Grandt wrote on 5/11/2010, 3:01 AM
Just out of curiosity should I ever come across something similar myself.

A Danish pop band apparently just discovered an old, forgotten and never released "music video". And released it on their YouTube page. The recording is from 1980 and it shows, the colours are horrendous.

I assume it was originally made on 16mm or similar film material.

In this case getting rid of the green overtones is easy, just adding white balance or colour correction. But that still leaves the picture kinda matte and dull.
In this case that is kinda ok, as it is from the 80's and it doesn't matter that it shows, to an extend imho. However what if it was not?

Assume that this is a holiday video that someone wanted digitized, and this video was the output from that process, how would a professional go about correcting the colours to something more, contemporary?
Just adding a bit of saturation seems to blow the skin tones out of proportion. Vegas have a Film Effects FX that includes an 80's template, could be nice if that came with an Inverse setting :)

The video, in case anyone are courious.
Note: The band are generally using humour and satire to address relatively serious topics.

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Comments

Richard Jones wrote on 5/11/2010, 3:50 AM
I'm afraid I haven't had time to look at the video but, apart from the White Balance correction, have you tried playing with Levels and Colour Curves? If the presets within these two FX don't do the trick , try making manual adjustments using both the overall as well as playing with the individual colour elements.

Although I haven't worked with stuff this old I have used these techniques on work done in the early 1990' with a mixed but overall reasonable degree of success.

Richard
LivingTheDream wrote on 5/11/2010, 11:15 AM
"...how would a professional go about correcting the colours..."

I'm not a professional but I try not to let that keep me from responding to posts on the forum. So far, so good.

In between doing projects for other people, I've been copying my old home movies onto my computer and making dvd's for family members. They're mostly on vhs tapes and go back to 1987. They used to look a lot better than they do now but the tapes have aged, so I'm running into problems similar to what you described. Plus the old vhs camcorders I used to have didn't do such a great job with colors and white balance at times, and some of those times were due to operator error.

What I've found to be effective is to adjust for skin tone so it looks as good as possible using the color correction tool and then boost it a bit along the axis (whichever way you're mostly adjusting) and then use the saturation slider to decrease saturation until it looks more natural. It might sound odd to do it like this but for some reason I get better results on the really old footage this way rather than using only the adjuster on the color wheel.

I like to focus on skin tone and not worry so much about the color of other things in the video. It's the people that matter most, just like in life (Oooo...I got a bit philisophical there. Sorry). Anyway, once skin tone looks good then all other colors should be pretty close to what they should be.

I also use the levels or color curves with this (as was already mentioned). Using those to get a more full range of contrast can help improve overall colors and make them "pop". Use the waveform monitor to check your progress as you adjust the high and low ends for contrast. An external monitor (even a basic tv) is also helpful. Too much adustment at either end can be bad.

As for using a tv set as an external monitor, I use an inexpensive 19" HD LCD tv. I use an ADVC-300 box (same one for capturing the tapes) to also ouput the timeline via firewire to the tv. It displays the timeline only in SD but that is still very helpful. You can also put one of Vegas' broadcast color bars on the timeline and use it to help adjust you adjust the tv set's color, contrast, and brightness. I find this is helpful because sometimes (and in some cases many times) what I see in the Vegas preview window will look quite different when played back on tv.

I've found the eyedropper tools in the color corrector to work pretty good, especially if there are suitable light and dark areas in the shot. I'll start with the middle color wheel and drag one eyedropper over a white area and then drag the other dropper over a black-type area. Sometimes that will be enough and other times I'll manually refine it a bit.

Good luck with this, I know it can be frustrating trying to correct some footage to get a decent look.

Steve