My workflow is a bit dependent on what the video looks like when it comes in. Usually I drop shots on the timeline and take a quick scrub of the timeline to tell me if I am working with well exposed video or not.
I get an idea of whether I've got crushed blacks, blown highlights, oversaturated colors, etc. If I have none of these things then I thank my lucky stars and do a happy dance!
These particular videos came in with crushed blacks, blown highlights, NTSC illegal colors so I couldn't go to DVD with them as is, and the colors were also out of legal band. The titles were too. But this is the nature of shooting on automatic with many cameras.
I changed workflow 3 times but I'll give my final workflow.
1. Place video on Vegas timeline.
2. Render out to 1280x720 29.97i AVI file Cineform AVI.
3. Open new file in Virtualdub. Do de-interlace, de-noise, desaturate to about 70%. Deblock if necessary. Render to lossless AVI.
4. Open new AVI on fast render machine, and render out to Cineform again.
5. Open AVI from virtualdub while Cineform is rendering, and cut video by scene.
6. Evaluate each scene for color balance, tonality, and exposure. Keyframe all changes per scene. Filters used were mostly "Brightness and Contrast, Color Balance, Sony Saturation which lets you adjust saturation in the mids, highs, and lows seperately.
7. When all keyframes are done, do a replace media with the Cineform AVI file.
8. Render master AVI after rendering sample and checking final color.
9. Render 720p mpeg4 for upload
10. Render 480p for DVD production
On rare occasions I used the 3-way color corrector. It's a great tool for correcting small issues, but I find the color balance MUCH faster if more crude. With no reference chart to work to, I saw little reason is trying to finesse the colors. I made a best guess for an overall "look" and then corrected similar scenes to that look.
Some of this workflow is dictated by the fact that I can only create Cineform files from Vegas, and that Virtualdub cannot read mJpeg files. So it necessitated rendering back and forth. I kept much of the re-rendering lossless so as not to cause degradation of the signal beyond the original.
The video came in 1080i, which was just too much for my machine to push around. And I wasn't using Cineform originally, so I created lossless proxy files at 640x360 to cut on. That worked nicely for the most part, and I wouldn't mind working that way again.
The most difficult aspect of this project was that Auto White Tracking was on, which shifts colors constantly as lighting changes. This necessitated a lot of keyframing. In the open water sample Wagsy gave me, I created one keyframe for exposure, and one for color balance. That was it. Since the lightsource was constant, no other changes were needed.
I cannot even BEGIN to describe how helpful it would be to shoot a set of colorbars or other reference underwater at the beginning of scenes. It would allow you to color correct PERFECTLY every time with very little trouble. White balancing is a very gross tool. It helps, but shooting a chart, Macbeth or otherwise, from scene to scene would guarantee accurate color renditions when the file got back to post. Also particularly helpful is to turn the colors WAY down in the camera. Take out so much that the image looks nearly black and white, then come back a couple of clicks. Bringing the colors back up in post is quite simple, and you won't blow any color channels out doing things this way.
