Vivid Colors and Saturation

[Guest C.L. Washington Jr.]

Hello. After watching certain hip-hop videos, particularly videos directed by Hype Williams and Jesse Terrero. The vivid colors and wonderful color saturation is beautiful. Does anyone know how the colors were achieved? I'm a digi man, can the same be achieved with a mini-dv cam? Thanks for your expertise.

[Chris Keth]

Hello.  After watching certain hip-hop videos, particularly videos directed by Hype Williams and Jesse Terrero.  The vivid colors and wonderful color saturation is beautiful.  Does anyone know how the colors were achieved?  I'm a digi man, can the same be achieved with a mini-dv cam?  Thanks for your expertise.

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Sure, color's easy to work with in digital. Any good editing program should have some good color correction capabilities. In there you'd easily be able to manipulate about anything related to the color you might want.

[Michael Nash]

Music videos use a massive amount of color correction, usually during the telecine session. Sometimes they are also shot with fairly color-saturated film stocks and exposed and processed in such a way that deliver a "rich" negative to start with. And of course colorful production design helps also (it's hard to saturate a color in post that's dull to begin with).

 

With Mini DV, basic color correctors like those found in Final Cut Pro or After Effects will let you boost the overall chroma of the image, or tweak colors more selectively. But you're also up against the limitations of the compression inherent to that format. If you go too far with the color correction you'll begin to reveal artifacts of the compression that will appear like noise or color-banding. The music videos you've seen get around this by starting with a film image, and transferring and color-correcting in a higher "colorspace" (higher bit-depth and also higher image resolution).

 

In MiniDV you can experiment with colorful production design, colored filters for an overall color tint, and in some cameras you can inchrease the chroma saturation via the camera menu.

[Justin Hayward]

You can start with a polarizer.

[Greg Gross]

Justin,

Can you give us an example please, about how you have used the polar-

izing filter?

 

 

Greg

[Justin Hayward]

I did something a while back that took place in very vibrant green woods (middle of summer). We dressed the actors in red and had a polarizer on the whole time. It turned out kind of nice. If anything, it was very saturated.

 

I use it pretty often (especially on video) unless we plan to desaturate.

[Wendell_Greene]

Shooting with film on hip hop and r&b videos where you most of the time the talent may have darker skin I find it best not always to use a polarizer on exteriors, especially in medium or closeup-- since the last thing I want is to lose the reflectance of their skin and for it to go matte. I find that using ND grads to tone down the brightness of the sky in the scene [or rotating a second grad in the matte box to take down the bounce of a white sidewalk in the foreground] and then working with the colorist in telecine gives me much more control and more options.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

On the contrary, I much prefer to take the shine out of faces as much as possible on video, if only because it's going to be much more visible as burnt white specularity. A polariser is standard equipment on my video camera.

 

Phil

[Wendell_Greene]

Notice first, I said "film" and two, even when shooting mini-dv you can keep some glow or sheen on black skin without it going nuclear.

[Brett B]

You will never be able to get the rich look of film colors on mini dv. Its color space just does not allow it. If you want bright colors that pop you really need to shoot film and a choose the right film stock. You can, like others said, bump up the chroma in final cut but it will never give you the real look. You may also want to look into doing a tape to tape color correction. That will give you even better results than final cut. Hope this can help.

[Justin Hayward]

C.L. Washington Jr. said he is shooting mini dv, but I agree with you Wendell. Sometimes you need sheen, especially with darker skin tones. It's just using good judgment. Or whatever you prefer.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

There's no reason that tape to tape colour correction would intriniscally look better than anything you could do in final cut, aside from speed and the skill of the operator.

 

But really, the thing to remember on video is to do what you want to do as much as possible before it gets compressed, so consider renting a good midrange camera such as a DSR-570 (which you can still cut on your desktop computer) or, better, an SDX-900, in which you can make colour changes to the image in the camera's electronics. The cost of doing this should be quite reconcilable as a business expense.

 

Phil

[Greg Gross]

Phil,

Are you using just a circular polarizer or a warmimg polarizer?

 

 

 

Greg

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

It is a circular polariser, although there's no reason for it to be anything other than a straight pola (People tend to want to sell you circular polarisers for video because they assume you're using autofocus, perish the thought, and there are types of autofocus which are confused by polarisation.)

 

Warming filters only really work on exteriors on sunlit scenes, otherwise it just looks rather obviously like you're trying to warm up an overcast day. Can't get away with it really.

 

Phil

[Guest Jon Armstrong]

Shooting with film on hip hop and r&b videos where you most of the time the talent may have darker skin I find it best not always to use a polarizer on exteriors, especially in medium or closeup-- since the last thing I want is to lose the reflectance of their skin and for it to go matte.  I find that using ND grads to tone down the brightness of the sky in the scene [or rotating a second grad in the matte box to take down the bounce of a white sidewalk in the foreground] and then working with the colorist in telecine gives me much more control and more options.

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Pola filters are great but its worth remembering what they do. Basically they remove reflection s within a limited angle of view. This makes them difficult when using wide lenses since the Pola works on one part of the scene and not the other. Digitally speaking, an intersesting one is to use a Tiffen glass enhancer with a soft grad to control the highlights. This will look seriously magenta. Now do a white balance.

 

Its interesting

 

Jon Armstrong