Black and white with Agdvx100a

ron white · December 8, 2004

I'vwe had the camera for a couple weeks and wanted to try using a black and white feature which i assumed would come with the camera, icant seem to find it nor do i have any clue as to how to achieve this effect with the camera...can anyone shed some light?

Jo Laurits Aksdal · December 8, 2004

No, there is not such a feature, but you can adjust the chroma level slightly.

Billy Summers · December 16, 2004

No, there is not such a feature, but you can adjust the chroma level slightly.

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Shoot for contrast, if possible, use a monitor and turn down the chroma.

Then you De-Saturate in Post (drop the chroma)

December 16, 2004

On the 100a you can however change the viewfinder to black and white - Under display function or options the last choice is EVF COLOR ON/OFF. How close this is to a desaturated images in post i'm not sure.

Some kids I know recently just shot a short using the 100 and desaturated the whole thing in post and from what I have seen it actually looks rather ugly. But I guess there are loads of variables effecting the footage I saw.

adam

Phil Rhodes · December 16, 2004

Hi,

Depends how it's done. Some software naively assumes that V=max(R,G,B), meaning that you just get whichever RGB value was largest. This shows up compression artifacts terribly. Better, you can get software that actually processes in YUV, which should just zero the UV channels to give you mono. Better still, some software will give you an average of R,G,B, maybe or maybe not offset with the correct 601 weightings. This is what I'd prefer, especially since you can then get creative with an RGB matrix filter before the desaturation, to allow moment to moment creative control of effects similar to the use of deeply-coloured filters on black and white film.

Anyway, the point is that the derivation of mono from a colour image is not always straightforward.

Phil

Vivian Zetetick · January 5, 2005

Out of curiosity, Phil, do you have a personal method or recipe you have used to pull a black & white DV image from a color DV image in order to preserve quality? I just shot a short movie in B & W using the DVX100a & simply applied the "desaturate" effect to every clip on the Final Cut Pro HD timeline. FCP did not need to re-render anything when I did this, and it was all just as sharp as the original.

Phil Rhodes · January 6, 2005

Hi,

Look for a colour matrix option in FCP; fiddle with this before decolourising.

It's not about quality, it's about being able to do interesting effects such as you might achieve with coloured filters on monochrome photography.

Phil

Mike Donis · January 7, 2005

Tagging a question on though...

Would it not highten quality to drop the chroma channels, and only keep the luma?

That way, it's essentially an "uncompressed" image file, no channels have compression - when dealing with 4:1:1 video. It would (effectively) make it all 4:4:4, if only in a theoretical sense, no? You'd have no colour, so technically there would be no "1:1" of the ratio, but what you would be left with would be uncompressed, black and white video.

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nchopp · February 8, 2005

Tagging a question on though...

Would it not highten quality to drop the chroma channels, and only keep the luma?

That way, it's essentially an "uncompressed" image file, no channels have compression - when dealing with 4:1:1 video. It would (effectively) make it all 4:4:4, if only in a theoretical sense, no? You'd have no colour, so technically there would be no "1:1" of the ratio, but what you would be left with would be uncompressed, black and white video.

?

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