Color Correction for Cave Diving

WOW this thread still going

Thats allot of work you are doing there to cut it up.

I just

1. Suck it in as 1440/1080 HQ AVI in real time.

2. Add colour correction/keyframe in realtime....up to 9 tracks in realtime.

3. Watch it at full res as it plays on the timeline on LCD monitor or low res 720/576 TV.

4. Render out to whatever with a few clicks.

Have a bourbon.

As I said HDV is highly compressed so no point in really going over the top with it trying to edit it. KISS

Progressive DVD's do work but they can look abit funny on normal interlaced TV's for some shots.

But sometimes you don't want the camera to WB to the correct setting underwater as you don't want it to look exact like is is down there so a slate or colour chart would be no good for me.

Have a bourbon.

Wagsy, I knew that even though you edit on a PC with Edius and I use Final Cut on a Mac I figured there were some similiarities between the workflows and indeed it is the most important part

bourbon is horrible sweet stuff

vodka is the only way

WOW this thread still going

Thats allot of work you are doing there to cut it up.

Hey, you guys are the Pros and I am just the Joe...

As I said HDV is highly compressed so no point in really going over the top with it trying to edit it. KISS

Progressive DVD's do work but they can look abit funny on normal interlaced TV's for some shots.

I hear you. I just don't have a switch that says, "This is only xxx, no need to really give it your best." Everyone either gets my best, or they get nothing. Someday, I hope I'll be working with something besides HDV, but for now it's the best I have, and I give it my best effort. I think there are people out there who still appreciate working with others when they know they are going to get their best effort every time.

But sometimes you don't want the camera to WB to the correct setting underwater as you don't want it to look exact like is is down there so a slate or colour chart would be no good for me.

I prefer to shoot accurate color whenever possible. This gives me the widest range of possibilities later to work on the footage. If turnaround time was important, as it likely is in commercial work, then I'd certainly try to get most of the look in-camera.

bourbon is horrible sweet stuff

 

vodka is the only way

They all have their proper place. For instance, editing footage from Moscow? Vodka. Mexico? Tequilla.

A word of caution though, if you visit alot of countries during one trip, editing can become difficult.

Color correction to alcoholicism... sigh.

I prefer to shoot accurate color whenever possible. This gives me the widest range of possibilities later to work on the footage. If turnaround time was important, as it likely is in commercial work, then I'd certainly try to get most of the look in-camera.

Perrone, I believe what Wags is saying is that over correcting so it looks like air creates an artificial look. The medium is water so a little green/blue tint is a good thing.

Your suggestion of desaturating color incamera and boosting in post is adequate if you are shooting almost monochromic environments like caves or caverns. It is not a good solution for other kinds of scenes, especially reef wide angle.

This thread has become a color correction thread. I've split it into the Post subforum.

Color correction to alcoholicism... sigh.

Perrone, I believe what Wags is saying is that over correcting so it looks like air creates an artificial look. The medium is water so a little green/blue tint is a good thing.

Your suggestion of desaturating color incamera and boosting in post is adequate if you are shooting almost monochromic environments like caves or caverns. It is not a good solution for other kinds of scenes, especially reef wide angle.

This thread has become a color correction thread. I've split it into the Post subforum.

Thanks for the split Drew.

I don't think it possible to correct so that it looks like air unless the tint of the water is very slight and/or the subject to camera distance is very small. Even in the VERY clear water of the caves, long shots tend to take on the tint of the water and there is nothing you can do about it.

I am curious why doing a desat in-camera is a poor choice for reefs. I'm not disagreeing, I am curious what makes it different. This is all VERY new to me and I am trying to learn from the more experienced here.

A chart would only be of limited use because it's going to look different depending on how far it is from the camera (because of the different amount of filtering water that the light is travelling through). So if you have a scene with stuff 0.5m away in the foreground, and other stuff 10m away in the background, where do you put the chart? Same goes for a white balance slate.

In my opinion the pics you posted are a little over-corrected. The one of the divers is a tad purple for my taste and if that was mine I would knock the red back a bit. But this is all a matter of taste. Do we want everything to look how it would if it was lifted to the surface or not? I admit am very sensitive to over-red footage, having delivered a sh1tload of it over the years. My taste these days is to leave things a little more toward the blue/green side. White balancing on the palm of my hand rather than a white fin helps a little in this regard.

Anyway, regarding the workflow, that does sound like an awful lot of renders to get the job done. Personally now I'm just capturing native m2t HDV in HDVSplit, dumping it on the Sony Vegas 8.0b timeline, doing my cutting and correcting right there in native m2t, then doing the deinterlacing/resizing/encoding or whatever after that, often in external tools (virtualdub/avisynth/CCE etc.) via the Debugmode Frameserver.

p.s. wtf just happened to all those other posts?

Nick,

I would view a chart much like a white balance. Just a starting point. It's no doubt that the stuff I posted was a bit red. I didn't even look at it on my monitor before I uploaded. I just looked at the scopes and did a best guess. I also did the correction in about 2 minutes. I'd likely spend more time on it if it weren't just a quickie for testing purposes. If you notice in the cave videos, I let things fall more to blue/cyan than overcorrect the red. This is what the client wanted. In order to do this, I had to desaturate because the colors were blowing WAY past legal if I didn't pull them more red. Had the original footage been shot with less saturated colors, I would have had more options.

It is a lot of renders to do. But only because of my choice of tools. Vegas de-interlaces poorly and de-noises poorly. So I use Virtualdub for that work. Virtualdub can't read motionjpeg files which is how the video was shipped to me. So the video had to be pulled into Vegas first, and then rendered out so I could even get started on it. I master to Cineform, so I can't finish my masters in Virtualdub until I purchase Cineform. So I have to finish back in Vegas where I have the free Cineform codec.

Regarding the other posts, they were split off.

Nick, would you PM me? I have a question for you.

-P

A chart would only be of limited use because it's going to look different depending on how far it is from the camera (because of the different amount of filtering water that the light is travelling through). So if you have a scene with stuff 0.5m away in the foreground, and other stuff 10m away in the background, where do you put the chart? Same goes for a white balance slate.

 

In my opinion the pics you posted are a little over-corrected. The one of the divers is a tad purple for my taste and if that was mine I would knock the red back a bit. But this is all a matter of taste. Do we want everything to look how it would if it was lifted to the surface or not? I admit am very sensitive to over-red footage, having delivered a sh1tload of it over the years. My taste these days is to leave things a little more toward the blue/green side. White balancing on the palm of my hand rather than a white fin helps a little in this regard.

 

Anyway, regarding the workflow, that does sound like an awful lot of renders to get the job done. Personally now I'm just capturing native m2t HDV in HDVSplit, dumping it on the Sony Vegas 8.0b timeline, doing my cutting and correcting right there in native m2t, then doing the deinterlacing/resizing/encoding or whatever after that, often in external tools (virtualdub/avisynth/CCE etc.) via the Debugmode Frameserver.

 

p.s. wtf just happened to all those other posts?

PM sent.

There is a smart deinterlacer that plugs straight into Vegas. It's the VirtualDub one adapted by Mike Crash and it's before "edge directed interpolate" was introduced in the VirtualDub filter but many people prefer it over Vegas' standard blend or interpolate.

Mike Crash Vegas plugins

By the way did you know you can update Vegas' standard Cineform codec by installing the free Neo Player? Well worth doing. After installation make sure to set the desktop playback mode you want from it's "tools" menu.

Now then... denoising. I've never denoised video in my life. What filters and settings are you using exactly?

I use the Smart Deinterlacer. I just use it inside VirtualDub. Didn't know it was available for Vegas, but I'd still have to run VirtualDub anyway to get the other tools I need.

I have upgraded Vegas' Cineform twice. First one worked well after a slight tweak. The latest one broke Vegas and I had to remove it. I was able to get support quickly as a member of a different forum. Good people over there at Cineform.

Denoise and deblock are some pretty cool tools. I typically use the MSU Denoise, but it's rather slow. Sometimes I use a different one and we can chat about the various options. If you visit the MSU page, you can download a PDF comparison of some of the better ones and compare results for yourself.

They have helped tremendously in some of the low-light videos I've had to rework. Including some stuff I shot this week.

-P

PM sent.

 

There is a smart deinterlacer that plugs straight into Vegas. It's the VirtualDub one adapted by Mike Crash and it's before "edge directed interpolate" was introduced in the VirtualDub filter but many people prefer it over Vegas' standard blend or interpolate.

 

Mike Crash Vegas plugins

 

By the way did you know you can update Vegas' standard Cineform codec by installing the free Neo Player? Well worth doing. After installation make sure to set the desktop playback mode you want from it's "tools" menu.

 

Now then... denoising. I've never denoised video in my life. What filters and settings are you using exactly?