Color Matching in Final Cut Express

Here's the dilemma.

I have some footage shot with two different cameras (one SD and one HDV) at the same time in the same place.

However, I manually white-balanced the HDV camera way too red, and the SD was left on "auto"

Now, of course, I'd like to use both sets of footage back to back in a Sequence (one set is a diver filming a diver filming and makes quite nice cut-backs etc)

obviously the switch from one clip to the next is quite bad as in one the colors are all reddish/brown and in the other green.

The green footage looks way better than the red (even though it is SD).

I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions for filters/settings in FCE to bring the two close enough together so it will look reasonable, or if I just need to give up and either erase the whole lot or just try to fix the reddish/brown.

here's a couple of screen grabs

You can see the kelp is the main problem (red in one, green in the other) -- looks quite ugly at the transitions.

Any help would be gladly received! (I can also post clips if that works better but I didnt want to chew up people's bandwidth)

The only way to match them is to color correct. I'm not familiar with FCE so I don't know what they left out but 3 channel correction should fix that problem easily.

The only way to match them is to color correct. I'm not familiar with FCE so I don't know what they left out but 3 channel correction should fix that problem easily.

Thanks for the reply. I was kind of hoping for some guidance that was FCE-specific (i.e. what video filter would work best and which values are best to adjust etc.)

I have tried the RGB filter but having a hard time matching it up

Here's a piece on using "match hue" in Final Cut Pro 5 by Andrew Balis from Ken Stone's great Final Cut Pro website that may be applicable to FCE (I hope?!) "Match Hue" is found in the Color Corrector 3-Way filter.

Mary Lynn

Here's a piece on using "match hue" in Final Cut Pro 5 by Andrew Balis from Ken Stone's great Final Cut Pro website that may be applicable to FCE (I hope?!) "Match Hue" is found in the Color Corrector 3-Way filter.

 

Mary Lynn

Thanks so much. Gonna check it out.

Hmmm, on first glance the match hue seems not to be in FCE.

However, I found a laymans approach. Add a video filter of type Quicktime/RGB

set red to 60, green to 110-150 and blue to 130-150

Seems to do a reasonable job (well, good enough to convince me the footage is saveable. I will tinker with the exact params later during editing)

Have to check it still looks good in large size also, but I am hoping it will.

still, thanks for the info.