Colour Correction

It's always best to white balance as close to what you want while underwater but sometimes it just does not happen so you are left with trying to fix it up in your NLE.

I thought I would share with you what I do.

Here is a pic to start off with but I will make a video clip on how I achieve it in realtime with HDV.

eeeuuuh, which of the two is the corrected one?

The bottom one is as shot.

Beautiful pristine blue water of Ningaloo....ha ha..

Here is the clip I slowed it down 50% and used two White Balance filters to fix it up.

First one hits the background water area while the second one I used to change the foreground.

All in realtime and you can see I turned the filers on and off as it played back in the HDV timeline.

1.5meg

As I'm slowly adding all my HDV footage to hardrives, I thought I would quickly cut up a clip to show the power of real time colour correction on HDV m2t now days that can be very easily achieved on your NLE.

It's always best to get the correct White Balance underwater but sometimes you just have not got enough time or are too lazy.

These were raw M2t 4.2.0 files and not the Canopus HQ 4.2.2. codec.

Remember I did this very quickly and if I was to take my time I could get them ever better.

Some shots had vignetting as well which I easily got rid of as well.

http://www.hdvundersea.com/view/102/white-balancing-hdv/

Great stuff Wagsy. You guys should think about pinning this for all the video neophytes. Good for the newbie photo guys too. It's a great WB 101 class. After saying that I'm wondering if there is an opportunity to make more "demo" wetpixel videos for both the still and video folks. "Your first dive with a P&S, ... DSLR", (setting up, what to expect on the boat, ....) "Getting Close", (you could show photographers getting images without damaging the reef, etc. maybe it's called "Taking pictures and leaving the reef". There are all kinds of ideas now that I think about it. A good place to start might be to answer some of the questions that continually get posted using the power of video. You could pin the links to your site in the appropriate forum. Fun to think about. The site is coming along very nicely by the way! Have a good one.

Steve