Color Problem- need advice

MIKE P wrote on 8/10/2007, 10:19 PM

Hey all. I'm a lurker (I love this place) and this is my 1st post. I have been slowly getting started with VMS, using VMS8P. I have just taped an event using my Panasonic GS300 3 CCD cam, and I borrowed a JVC miniDV of some sort from a friend to use a camera 2 for some audience cuts during Q&A. Anyway, the JVC has some serious issues, but I still need to use some of the footage.

I have a link below to my youTube site, where I have 2 clips. One from my panasonic, and one from the JVC. If you look at the JVC clip, you can see the two "modes" it was recording in.

By modes, I mean the bad part and the horrible part. At 8 seconds in, it switches from bad to horrible. About half of the two hours of footage are bad, and the other have is horrible (the really washed out stuff as seen after 8 seconds in on the JVC clip).

I need to resurrect footage from both "modes". I am looking for two bits of advice:

1- what sort of color or other corrections to both of the "modes" would you recommend to get the JVC video as close as possible to the Panasonic video using the color correction in VMS8P?

2- less urgent- what ideas do you have on what might be wrong with the camera, or the footage from the JVC camera? The owner said that it had just recently started doing that (and I really wish he had told me this before I tried to use it. I thought I might have screwed it up for a whole day, and I ended up with some junk footage).

Thanks so much in advance.

Mike

You can find the clips here (these are pretty accurate representations of the color in the original DV files)--->

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=mpetrucco

The pana3ccd clip is there for comparison to what the real-life colors looked like.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 8/10/2007, 10:46 PM

Difficult to get anything back... Try playing with contrast, gamma and saturation.

Ivan Lietaert wrote on 8/10/2007, 11:50 PM

Seems to me that the jvc cam is faulty and on its own shifts from one preprogrammed exposure setting to the other. If possible, set the whole cam to 'manual' and see if it still does that.

As for a possible correction method, I'd opt for the Color Curves or Contrast and brightness. Play around until you have a satisfying result. Don't forget to give the settings a name and save it, so you can use it again and again, so that your b-roll footage has a uniform look.

I think the first 8 secs are actually normal footage for the jvc cam. A huge difference with your own 3ccd cam, but you'll have to do with just that.

MIKE P wrote on 8/11/2007, 5:06 AM

Thanks for the input. Can any of you give me any ideas on what to actually do? I have already done what you have suggested, and gotten some improvement, but it was total trial and error, since I have never done this before. Do you have any tips you can give based on what you see in these?

Eugenia wrote on 8/11/2007, 11:01 AM

Well, we can't give you the ultimate numbers for each filter because we don't have in front of us the actual high-res source video. You must play around and use these contrast/brightness/saturation/gamma/curves filters and find a point where the picture starts to be acceptable for you and use that. Don't expect miracles though.

Eugenia wrote on 8/12/2007, 5:04 PM

I just wrote a mini-tutorial about color-correction here:
http://eugenia.blogsome.com/2007/08/12/color-correction-with-sony-vegas/
Please note that depending on the look you are after and techniques, there are a multitude of ways to get color balance, but I just wrote there what works for me.

MIKE P wrote on 8/15/2007, 9:47 AM

Thanks. That sheds a lot of light on it. I had done something similar through trial and error and had some improvment. I am going to try and tweak it a little more next chance I get.