Minor color conversion issue

farss wrote on 3/5/2005, 5:17 AM
Footage shot on DigiBeta, captured into Vegas from J30 1394 (yeah probably should have used the SD Connect but I was in a hurry).
Anyway the guy who shot this stuff for us did a great job, it does pay to pay for someone whose cameras and lenses have their own names if you get my drift.
Anyway one thing I have noticed, some of the rather extreme colors like dayglow orange and perhaps the lime greens look just a bit wrong (bear in mind most of this footage is of man made stuff, the footage of natural things e.g. skin tones and foliage, is perfect ).
White balance looks perfect and the levels are spot on. I'm guessing I could pull these errant colors back with the secondary color corrector or am I likely to do more harm than good, have I just hit the limitations of DV? Normally I'd just let this slide, I'm certain the client will not even notice much less complain but everything else looks SO good.
I guess the other option would be to have this stuff graded in it's native 4:2:2 before downconversion, would that be a better path to go down. I'm suspecting we're going to get a serious bill for that kind of work.
I'm monitoring this from a DVD I made from the DV footage, going RGB from the player to the TV, but it looked much the same same before encoding. If I can I'll have a look at it on our precision monitor going SDI from the deck into the monitor, I'm suspecting It'll look much better but that doesn't really help much.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 3/5/2005, 6:53 AM
Part of being "professional" is knowing when you're getting close to gilding the lily. Wanting to get things perfect is a ideal to strive towards, however. worrying obsessively chasing after philosophical idealism almost always is wasting your time. You said it yourself... the guy that shot the materal is good, he used good equipment and you further said the natural objects in the scenes are right on. My advice... leave it alone. Sure, you could try to tweak some thing using the Secondary Color fllter, but afters you may think that the natual objects then need adjusting as well and so on, and so on.
farss wrote on 3/5/2005, 1:38 PM
I'd agree with that. It's certainly not seriously broken. The places where's it's most noticeable though, the errant colors do occupy a fair amount of the screen and the only colors are white, silver and dayglow orange. Another shot(s) where the same thing is kind of noticable is of potatoe chips in stainless steel containers. These chips are a pretty intense yellow and they're coated with flakes of chilli, the very intense yellow / red boundary combined with the fine detail seems to throw things off a bit.
BillyBoy wrote on 3/5/2005, 2:20 PM
What I often do is tone down saturation just a bit. Not talking lots, maybe changes from the default 1.000 to 9.80 or so and/or cut back gain a little too if needed otherwise I really wouldn't change much else at the risk of starting down that slippery slope. I've been there, done that and everytime I did I could have kicked myself later in the end.
farss wrote on 3/7/2005, 3:03 AM
Friend of mine I think identified the problem. The dayglow dyes in various plastics and clothing get even brighter due to the UV from fluro lighting and video cameras are a bit sensitive in that area hence they have trouble coping with them. His advice was the same as yours, I'm likely to do more harm than good as everything else in the shots is spot on.