Well I've given it a good shot and I can't even come close.
I'd be real interested in seeing how anyone does this in Vegas.

I duplicated the shot onto two tracks and used the cookie cutter to isolate the RH frame on the upper track so I had an immediate A/B comparison and like I say this sure don't look easy to me.

Bob.

right re white balance, the one on the right was done in a panasonic gs120 3ccd consumer camcorder set to auto vs being properly white balanced... (lesson learned, just hire pro shooters w/identical cameras for my next event)... fixing stuff in post is so much more work than doing it right the first time...

-ken

Well, I think I have something for you Ken.

Making Right look like Left:

1} Better Matched Suit

2) Better Matched Skin tones - bit ruddy but I guess I could improve those?

3) Better Matched Shirt colour

4) MUCH better matched neck-tie

Interested?

I have screen grab and veg for you.

Grazie

Some tips in this article...
http://glennchan.info/matching/matching.htm

I tried extensively various combinations of Levels, Color Corrector, and Secondary Color Corrector on both images, but had no success, not even close. Then I tried Levels and Color Curves. The latter provide much more flexibility in a difficult case like this. This solution took less than ten minutes and produced a result that appears to me to be close but not perfect. Perhaps more fine tweaking of the curves would improve it.

Link

I've sat for several hours waiting for professionals to match three identical professional cameras. It's usually not the case these days, but if you've got paint boxes then there's a lot that can be adjusted, or gotten out of adjustment.

It's not always a sure-fire solution, but identical cameras would at least make matching a little more possible.

Rob Mack

Thanks very much, folks... it's great to see answers from everyone... superb job, LJA, that's much better than I could do on my own, tweaking it... thx much for the .veg.. and sure, Grazie if you've got one too, I'd appreciate it...(send to calhounken at hotmail dot com is fine)...

Interesting comments from everyone, it's very helpful to get your ideas on this, as it's my next "big release" and I really want it to look nice for everyone...

(also, if any of you who've posted here want thoughts/ideas on marketing/copy/site critiques, feel free to post links here and I'll share my thoughts on how to sell more, with whatever you've got, to reciprocate... I'm still learning all this video editing stuff, but I *do* know how to sell a lot online, so I'd be happy to return the kind favors you've all shared here, by giving a quick site critique, if that would be useful)

and thx Glenn for the article, I'll study it.

color corrections are sure challenging, next time I'll make certain to use same cameras and white-balance them first, and check via monitor, to get consistent signals...

thx all,

Ken

Had a little more of a play around with after a sleep.
Using the curves to reduce red gain and then using color correction is getting me closer.
From my feeble understanding of color correction step one should be to adjust white balance first then do the color correction and that makes sense with this problem. Not having a reference white in the shot sure doesn't help though.

Bob.

OK I haven't had a reply, so you ARE getting this inV7 - I need to sleep.

PLUS the "Ken Calhoun CC.veg" you also got 4 Chains to play with.

In essence I used a complex series of Colour Curves. PLUS I used the Saturation Adjust.

Grazie


. .oh yeah! It was also FUN to do.

VEGAS7 ROX! V8? C'mon! Bring it on!!!

so.... what is it SUPPOSED to look like? the only thing that's tipping me off is the blue's in the back but that could be due to lighting or moving the camera to some place else.

I gave this a try for fun -- looks to me like Color curves gives the best chance to at least get the biggest problems fairly close.

It's interesting to remember that objects have no color -- light has all the color -- no light and we would see the shirt as black. Less light and the blue darkens toward black. More light and the shirt lightens toward white. Different camera angles (even with the same camera with the same settings) will have a color difference if there is any difference in the reflected light.

I would adjust levels first, for both cameras.

Then find two shots for comparison that are as close to identical as possible -- especially the lighting. The example you've given us is difficult to work with because of the differences in luminance.

The shots should have some white in them somewhere, no matter how little, so you can use the techniques described above for white balancing. Once white balanced, use the Primary CC to begin moving colors in the right direction, then isolate specific colors using the Secondary Color Corrector and tweak them as much as possible.

Experimenting in Paint Shop Pro I was able to make most of the right-hand figure match the left except for the the color of the shirt. I did this just by using the Color Balance filter, which is pretty crude compared to the Vegas Primary and Secondary CC filters.

If you're not familiar with Billy Boy's color tutorial, it's worth a look. You'll find it at
http://www.wideopenwest.com/%7Ewvg/tutorial-menu.htm Much of it addresses the very problems you're having.

Good luck,

Jack

http://glennchan.info/Proofs/forums/kcalhoun/multicam-match.jpg
Here's my whack at it. It uses a different approach than what I talk about in my article, since the secondary CC doesn't work so well in this case. It is good at isolating colors... but when the brightness varies, it is not good at replacing colors. So you could workaround that by using the compositing modes and using another filter to replace colors with what you want (e.g. the color corrector). Does anyone want a .veg?

2- The second camera is slightly overexposed and the white balance is off, which messes with the colors and you can't really get them looking perfect.

I do, I do. I've got a project where something similar happened, and I need something to fix it and this looks like a very good way to go.

Curious why you guys didn't set them to show in the forums (the images that is).

Dave

Wow Glenn your match looks great. Last time I had to deal with such a big difference was when I was handed a two camera shot one using the Sony HD1 and the other a SD Cannon. I had lots of issues in lighting, balance and resolution. Lucky for me it was a creative piece and I just went with black & white! Even matching that was hard.

http://glennchan.info/Proofs/forums/kcalhoun/multicam2.veg

Explanation of what I did (hopefully I explained it right):

Mute the parent/child'ed layers. You will see that one pair of layers handles the flesh tones, another pair the suit.
The bottom most layer is the overall correction. The color corrector in there handles the overall white balance. The secondary CC in there handles the blue backdrop thing in the background.

The layer pairs for the flesh tones and the suit:
In each pair, there is a parent layer and a child layer. The parent layer is where the isolation comes from / it generates the alpha/transparency/knock-out/mask. The filters in it help manipulate the isolation. A secondary CC is used to isolate based on color. The gaussian blur and convolution kernel muck with that isolation. The convolution kernel expands the mask... this helps fill in little holes. The gaussian blur... blurs the mask. You could potentially use the color curves + mask generator to mess around with edge gradients... I did not do this (for the color curves to do anything, enable the mask generator + luminance).
I really hope that makes sense.

In the flesh tones, I believe I pretty much end up replacing the color. A color corrector de-saturates to remove color. Then the other color corrector adds it back in.
The color curve in there tries to bring detail out of the highlights... since they were slightly overexposed.

In the suit, the suit is too bright so "gain" in the color corrector brings the brightness down. (Note that gain sometimes gives wrong-looking results if you don't touch the saturation slider; to fix that, make gain and saturation the same number.) I de-saturated the suit to replace its color (it should be very slightly blue??).

-- Issues: I did not try this on the original footage. Boiling, weirdness may be issues / you might see noise on the edges of flesh tone and the suit. You might have to muck around with the isolations to get them working right. To deal with boiling/noise, you need to blur the alpha. A combination of color curves and convolution kernel might get the edges sharp again.

The suit isolation also picked up a lot of other stuff with it... this may be bad.

Glenn will never be asked to write a "Dummies" book. = ]

Glenn, thanks very much for the veg, you did a superb job on this; I had no idea how complicated color correction could be... the parent/child settings are right on target and did a solid job of bringing out the right contrasts and colors. Much appreciated!

That would be a good idea for an info-product from you, or Grazie, or Spot, eg a "how to use Vegas' color corrector to fix video in post", as a for-pay DVD or downloadable video tutorial ... (just an idea there!)... as I'm sure there's many of us using vegas who don't know how to do all this, which dials/wheels to tweak, and how ...

Very well thought out .veg, thanks for showing how it's done. Grazie also did a super job with his; thanks so much to both of you, and everyone, for your thoughts and help. I will remember! Also maybe if you could email me w/rates/if you guys can do this type of thing for me, editing support work, as I've got lots of dvds on the way and need help with it, throughout '08 and beyond.


thx,

Ken

One step ahead of you... ;) VASST has a DVD on that. It has a chapter on matching cameras on multicamera shoots like this. It doesn't go over the method in my .veg in this thread, which is way more complicated. It does explain the little ins and outs of the Vegas interface for doing such work.