white balance its a tricky thing.

first, don't use the "white balance" filter of vegas. it does not work as it should be.

second, its very easy to clip channels when white balance is off, cause cameras show zebra based on luminance, meaning the blue channel for instance may be already clipped in the highlights, and the camera does not show the zebra on it. (imagem luminance may look "ok", but is clipped)

if you have something neutral in the scene, white balance on it also may be wrong, if a channel is clipped on it.

the best way, of course, is to do WB on every scene, every location change, or at least, film something neutral (i use whibal) to do MINOR fixes later.

the other tip is if you don't have something to do WB, make sure the image is DARKER than is supposed to be. (1 stop maybe). using a "near" WB (like camera presets) its enough to be close to the correct, and not clipping channels, you can fix 100% in post.

if you do a normal exposure on wrong WB, 80% of chance that some channel will be clipped, and later you will be unable to do a proper WB (mid-tones may be correct, highlights will be horrible).

Color Corrector filter is very good for general WB fixes. but i prefer the "invert/correct/invert" trick, as vegas lacks a proper exposure and logarithmic color-corrector filter

another thing, is if you have a video where some channel is clipped, the "least worst" way to do a WB may be clipping the others channels as well. you will have a over-bright scene, but with better colors ;P

Oh, I never use the white balance filter. Except for a few situations, it's very inaccurate. I always use the 3 way color corrector, but sometimes the results look unnatural.

Color Corrector filter is very good for general WB fixes. but i prefer the "invert/correct/invert" trick, as vegas lacks a proper exposure and logarithmic color-corrector filter

I don't know what's the "invert/correct/invert" trick you're talking about. Can you explain it?

Here

6 posts below.

to do WB using this way, add Invert, Levels, Levels, Invert.

put both invert to 100%.

in one levels select "red" channel, and the other select "blue" channel. green remain untouched.

adjusting the gamma slider, you compensate the gain on each color channel. using the "in/out" sliders, you can fine-tune blacks and white point of each channel.

Again, this thread highlights the value which Vegas can deliver. The toolsets available to us aren't, and often have't been, well presented to us. Latterly there have more of a hands-on approach with respect to tutorials and seminar material. And speaking for what I see officially, well done SCS. But these more remedial and corrective approaches still remain the pursuit of the few, fired/initiated by the frustration of others.

Getting back to the actual content of this thread, I'd like to add a comment about the valuable use, while doing correction, of the Scopes, and here the Histogram while adjusting Levels.

For me Histo gives me numbers and brings home to me educative awareness of WHAT happens WHEN I adjust to reach a middle ground.

Great thread.

Grazie

Just a couple of thoughts;

1) The Auto WB FX in Ppro is pretty darn impressive. I imagine its the same code as used in PS. Shouldn't be too hard to export an image sequence and process it with PS if you don't have Ppro at hand.

2) Don't forget the color curves, easy to overlook that you can alter the R,G,B curves indiviually and that seems to me a better way to avoid clipping channels.

3) More directly related to what Grazie is saying. The Channel Blend FX is a very powerfull tool that I believe is the same as the Matrix control in the better cameras. Unfortunately it is bewildering complex to fathom. I've seen similar controls in high end color grading apps that are much easier to use, just turn a wheel to rotate the colors.

One last thing. When WB'ing a camera ideally you should use a genuine white card that is well exposed to just under 100%. I bought a set of Kodak 18% grey cards. The other side of the grey card is white so you can use one side as a poor mans exposure meter to read incident light and the other for WB'ing.

Bob.

Malowz, that is absolutely brilliant insight!! I don't know how you figured out that the gamma function in the color corrector (and I suspect the levels gamma as well) is not symmetrical about the upper and lower range of values. Once you figured that out, I really appreciate the "ah ha!" moment you had of placing the invert functions before and after the gamma in order to "flip" the curve. While Bob (farss) is right that you can achieve the same thing (eventually) using color curves, that fX can be a b*$!# to deal with, and it often takes a long time to tweak things correctly. By contrast (pun intended), this is quick and should achieve good results in many situations.

Bravo!

I am going to create a preset with these fX, and name that preset "malowz."

I find the RGB Parade is a far more useful tool to work with while doing post-white balancing. That was one of the wonderful take-aways from purchasing some good reading material over the holidays last year. My CC skills came up by factors of 10 after getting through that stuff.

*I find the RGB Parade is a far more useful tool to work with while doing post-white balancing*

Ditto here. I'm colorblind, so CC is a challenge. The RGB gives me a little more help.

BTW, anybody else here colorblind?

nope, but i was tone deaf before becoming almost deaf ;-(

that used to cause me no end of headaches doing sound mixes......

I can imagine.

BTW, anybody else here colorblind?

Yep. Have to chalk the brown ball, and have a hell of a time with red/green LED's on guitar stompboxes. Funny, I had a machine shop years ago and had little trouble telling the difference between 304 and 316 stainless steel just by the color --most folks wouldn't notice.
k

Perrone, what reading matter? Care to share? I'm very keen to deepen my knowledge of this stuff.

Malowz, thanks for sharing your discoveries. I too now have preset effects chains "Malowz CC" and "Malowz Gamma" :)

I started watching online coloring tutorials from Stu over at Magic Bullet. And I started seeking information from guys like this:

http://www.finalcolor.com/

Learning tricks like this:

http://www.finalcolor.com/bleach.htm

Checking book lists:

http://www.finalcolor.com/Booklist.htm


And for Christmas, treating myself to this:

http://www.amazon.com/Color-Correction-Video-Second-Desktop/dp/0240810783/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

One of the best books on the market to learn about doing color work. Totally changed my approach to color after reading it.

Thanks Perrone. I'll check them out. I have a related question. I routinely work on both FCP and Vegas. I use the same monitor on both as I have one machine of each (don't ask, to be able to get work with other video people I need to have FCP around) and use the monitor switch to toggle between both. But I notice that FCP is giving me better color rendition on the same monitor. I can't tune the blacks as well nor get the range of tone that I'm getting in FCP. I have a high end dedicated graphics card in both. Has anyone seen this? Seen less dynamic range and color saturation? I'm happy with both displays and cards, but I'm baffled why Apple routinely seems to give a better color rendition on the same monitor. I have a 1 GB video card on both machines. It's my impression that it's harder to tune color on Vegas because of this. I get sort of washed out colors from the Windows 7/Vegas machine.

Here are two examples same concert, one edited in Vegas one in FCP no changes to the camera, exposure, or lighting:
First one, done in Vegas.

Second song, done in FCP. Please get past the opening intro, where I had to manipulate the contrast.

What you should notice is darker darks and a better contrast range. I spent a lot of time on both of these color balancing and this is best I could do with Vegas (the first one). my impression is that FCP is better at this than Vegas.

Or is it just me? Operator error?

i have no answer for you - and yes, there's a definite difference between the two, but i'm pretty sure the vegas footage could be made to match the fcp without too much trouble....

my first instinct would be to question the monitors colour calibration from each output with a spyder, since you can't guarantee the outputs matching on both cards.

btw. what monitor are you using?

as an aside, are the cards both digital output (dvi) or analogue? i had an interesting experience a few years back when running two samsung lcd's from a nvidia card with one dvi and one analogue output - not too dissimilar to your samples - and was baffled by the difference till i got a dual dvi output card and then my monitors matched (as well as any tn lcd's are going to match...)

Perrone, thanks very much for that. I'll check them out.

Alf, If it was just on the display that you were noticing washed out colour, I would suspect your Vegas Preview Device settings. I worked with these incorrect for ages before I set them correctly:

Preferences
Preview Device (tab)
Device: Windows Secondary Display
Check "use color management"
Check "Use Studio RGB (16 to 235)"
I don't think it matters which monitor color profile you set. Mine is set to "sRGB Color Space Profile.icm".

But this seems to be a rendering levels issue rather than a monitoring issue. I can see from those 2 examples that the FCP version is darker in both the blacks and the highlights. The musicians' pants are blown out in the Vegas version.

There have been a number of threads over the last year about levels of YouTube videos. In particular have a read of this one and this one. Also take a look at Glenn Chan's CC tutorial.

Also Alf, what format were you rendering to for YouTube, and what settings?

I suspect the issue may have something to do with how Vegas's pipeline and FXs work. They all "assume" black = 0 when it generally doesn't. Every other app I've tried (AE and Ppro) doesn't have this problem. You can maybe work arount this by shifting levels going in/out of the pipeline. I also think this might explain another long standing issue I've had with compositing in Vegas.
I should check both of these out at sometime.

Bob.