Colour Grading with the HV20 

Drive - Before
Drive - After
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.

Walk - Before
Walk - After

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.

 
 
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Tuesday, October 9 2007
 
Filmmaking
 

Daytime camera test 


More pointless test footage, this time during the day. Figured out how to do proper slow-motion too without fancy plugins. Always a handy thing to know. High-res version here (24.8MB, .wmv).

 
 
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Sunday, October 7 2007
 
Filmmaking
 

Film is now at my fingertips 

OMG yes! Okay well not film per se but perhaps the closest damn quality at an affordable price. Yes I’m talking about the quality of digital video and the little gem that is the high definition camcorder - the Canon HV20. This amazing piece of equipment records film like images in full HD (yes 1920×1080!) and for the film lovers (hello!) it can record at 25p. Other great features of this camera is the ability to alter and monitor sound levels on the fly, manual control of shutter and aperture (there are tricks to do a manual gain adjustment) and record images at 3.1 megapixels. Essentially for the ultra-budget filmmaker who isn’t making films as a career choice (right now) but still wants exceptional film-like quality from a camcorder, you can’t beat it for price and features. I’ve even seen people make homemade steadycams with terrific results.

Now I’ve only done one test so far but you can’t really appreciate the quality of an online video so here’s a 720p HD version for you to enjoy (36MB, .wmv). I plan to shoot a few more tests hopefully over the next week with ample light to hopefully showcase what this puppy can achieve. Hang tight.

 
 
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Tuesday, October 2 2007
 
Filmmaking
 
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