Colour Grading with the HV20
Following a few requests, I’ve decided to show some ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots from my recent HV20 camera tests with some colour grading . There was nothing fancy involved - just playing with the basic colour correction tools in any video editing application - brightness and contrast, colour curves, colour correctors and levels. Much like you would do with photography. The trick of course is getting the balance right for the type of scene you are shooting. Once you do, save your settings as presets to use for future projects. And sorry to those who thought the camera tests were straight out of the camera. Go have a look at the colour grading video on the 4 disc set of Fellowship of the Ring or the raw footage of nearly every music video shot in the past ten years. Even their original footage looked nothing like the final end product. Welcome to the 21st century! That said, the camera still gives you a great image to work that you can only enhance in post.
One thing I completely forgot about but am dying to try is Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended’s ability to import video and adjust it in there. Of course you can use After Effects but personally being more familiar with Photoshop, this should yield interesting results.
12 Responses to “Colour Grading with the HV20”
Thank you for posting the pictures up!
Thanks for posting it, I was able to reproduce your first pictures results on Sony Vegas using:
Contrast: 0.15
Levels: RED on Input Start 0.209
BTW, in the video world, when you change the colors of the image to be dramatic and different than in real life, it’s called “color grading”. When you try to change the colors to be closely to real life and especially the white balance levels, then it’s called “color correcting”.
Looks good, I hope we see more of your footage.
Timothy: No problem
Eugenia: Thanks for clarifying that and I’ve amended my post.
Where can I buy a one-way ticket to the colour-corrected AFTER world?
man, that’s so cheating. i’d NEVER EVER fix the colours in my pictures.
:)
I blogged about color correction here:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/08/12/color-correction-with-sony-vegas/
Color correction is important, just so you don’t end up with pictures that look like that:
http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2007-10.html#pango-cjk-1
As for color grading, it is important if you are an artist. It’s part of the overall work.
Camera footage looks awesome… when are we going to see some finished films?
[...] Check it out here [...]
Just curious what settings you were using on the test footage? 60i? Cinemode. 24fps?
Could you list the camera settings you used?
Brad
Brad: I shot at 25fps (PAL version of the camera) for most of the footage except for the slow motion which was 50i (again PAL).
I’d love to have the full settings (both from the cam, and the Vegas manipulations) for the second footage. Nice, nice look!
Great job!
I’d love to know the filters and settings you used with Vegas to get such a nice look.