Jump to content

Help for image treatment in a short film !!


Recommended Posts

Hi ! I , will be shooting a short film in 15 days, in Hd, using the Sony HDV-Z1 ... It will an interior with tungsten ligths... I want to give the imagen a brown color... asi in Delicatessen or Anything else ( Woody Allen) So, I was thinking to use tobac filter in camera... The thing is, that I am going to loose 1 stop? o 1 1/2 stop? or what? ... My question is... What happens if I manage to get the same colour in post production... so I dismiss the filter... I think it's better using it in camera , always... but I think I will need that stop... and another doubt... If using the filter... how others colors react? what do you recomend me to tell the vestuarist for example... well thanks !!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would recommend doing the color correction in post. If you've got 15 days till your shoot and if you can get the camera, try doing a test to see what the quality of the correction would look like and what you'll need to protect in the way of highlights or shadow areas. In a way it's like film - shoot a fat negative so you've got the room to manipulate it later.

 

Your other option (and I don't generally favor this one) is to white balance with a particular filter in so that it corrects for that filter giving you the look your after. For example, to approximate the look of a Tiffen Chocolate #2, you'd white balance with a Tiffen 82C + Tiffen Cyan #1. After the white balance, don't forget to remove the filters you used. I don't recommend this because I don't generally favor manipulating the image in camera - too much risk of mudding the image and also not having the ideal conditions in the field to judge the image.

 

Here's a list that Fotokem provided for their grey cards (as always, test, test, test):

(white balance with filter) -> (give you)

#85 Filter -> Harrison Blue #5

#81EF -> Tiffen Cyan #2

Tiffen Coral #2 -> Harrison Blue #5

Harrison Coral #2 -> Tiffen Cyan #1 & Harrison Blue #2

Harrison Coral #3 -> Harrison Blue #5

Tiffen Straw .3 -> Tiffen 80C

Tiffen Scraw .6 -> Tiffen 80B & 80D

Fries Tobacco #1 -> Tiffen 82B

Fries Tobacco #2 -> Tiffen 82C

Fries Tobacco #3 -> Tiffen 80C

Fries Tobacco #4 -> Tiffen 80C & 82B

Fries Tobacco #5 -> Tiffen 80B & Cyan #1

Tiffen Sepia #1 -> Tiffen 82B

Tiffen Sepia #2 -> Tiffen 80C

Tiffen Chocolate #2 -> Tiffen 82C & Tiffen Cyan #1

Edited by Eric Gustavo Petersen
Link to comment
Share on other sites

i recommend doing as much as you can in camera, since hdv falls apart quickly in post. the z1 supports color phase and level corrections as well as wb shift in your picture profile, play around with that, and the white balance of course. i like to white balance on the blue sky if i want the tobacco filter look. as for filter vs digital you probably lose about the same number of stops. if you shift the white balance towards orange you're underexposing the blue channel the same way the filter cuts the blue light.

 

/matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
i recommend doing as much as you can in camera, since hdv falls apart quickly in post. the z1 supports color phase and level corrections as well as wb shift in your picture profile, play around with that, and the white balance of course. i like to white balance on the blue sky if i want the tobacco filter look. as for filter vs digital you probably lose about the same number of stops. if you shift the white balance towards orange you're underexposing the blue channel the same way the filter cuts the blue light.

 

/matt

 

If HDV falls apart quickly in post, could it be related to using firewire in rather than the more robust component pathway with a higher quality codec?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The falling apart is just as true when you tweak the image too much in camera. Again, test, test, test. Which is going to be the lesser of two evils given the format you're working in. Some have suggested capturing your footage and then upconvert it to a higher format for color correction. Never tired it on HDV but I did with DV25 with marginal success. I don't know how viable it is for you but it might be worth testing. If you need the stop because of limited lighting resource then your decision might already have been made for you. Just make sure you'll be give the ability to do your color correction under appropriate conditions.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

after writting this post, I tried a few effects, with the photoshop.. and the best result I found was using 2500 K lights , and setting my camera at 5500 K . The result, an orange image. When I desaturated this image, It became brownish... so I thought, I can do this while shooting... to set this in the hd camera ... what do you think? I will also test this with the camera, next week... cause I`d never use it...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

There's another way to do it in camera as well. In lighting ! I would agree with those that say the problem in post is that with HDV, you have no room to move as far as colour correction. You have tog et it right in camera. Eve if you upsample the image to another codec. Think about it. if the information is not there....it's still not there in a larger file ! If you try to grab a secondary colour in a grade, you'll just get macro-clocks and cubes rather than a smooth gradient of colour. Try it at home !

 

Now, you could put a filter in front of the camera, but that's just going to give you a tint or wash. You're far better off doing it with your lighting, because then you'll have more subtle control. there are some great chocolate and tobacco gels. I also like one called super white flame which is a sort of brownish gel that was orginally used for correcting the older arc lights before HMI's came in.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree if you have the time test it. It can't hurt either way and it gives you room to experiment and understand the environment you're working in. Personally I would shoot it without anything in camera and adjust it in post. The other thing to consider is that if you get into a situation where you need that stop you will have it. So a potential solution would be to shoot as much as you can with the filter in cam and then (assuming you know when and where you may need the other stop) shoot without. This has the advantage of giving you control footage to compare to and adjust your post tweeked footage so that you can match them more effectively.

 

Let me know how that works seems like a worthwhile experiment!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
The falling apart is just as true when you tweak the image too much in camera. Again, test, test, test.

 

Well, up to a point. Depending on the camera, the bit depth of camera's signal processing can be more robust than that of the tape codec. A white balance or optical filter isn't as likely to produce artifacts as much as compression would, but matrix tweaking might. Filters and white balancing for the most part affect just the RGB levels.

 

But you're right; test, test, test.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey matias

I'd usually try to change color or add any FX in camera specially because always you will get a totally different image. Remember that in you situation is more than a simple color change, is light coming through a piece of glass....

 

Mi consejo.. prueba con filtros en camara, mezclalos e intenta llegar a tu objetivo, luego comparalo con lo que puedes realizar en pos... te llevaras abgradables resultados y una buena experiencia para tui coleccion

 

un abrazo

 

best regards (and excuse for this few spanish lines)

 

Rodrigo

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If HDV falls apart quickly in post, could it be related to using firewire in rather than the more robust component pathway with a higher quality codec?

no, it can't. firewire is the most "robust" transfer you can get since it's an error corrected digital protocol ensuring a bit for bit identical clone of what's on your tape. however if you're not shooting tape but outputting component live to your computer, you do get better quality since you bypass the hdv compression. some people do this on studio shoots and even on location, but the hdv codec isn't *that* bad. the whole idea of using a small hdv camera is to move fast, right?

 

/matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The falling apart is just as true when you tweak the image too much in camera.

not really, since both optical filters, white balance and other image settings are applied before conversion to video gamma and hdv compression. but of course *too* much tweaking is bad, that's why it's called *too* much.

 

/matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

not really, since both optical filters, white balance and other image settings are applied before conversion to video gamma and hdv compression. but of course *too* much tweaking is bad, that's why it's called *too* much.

 

/matt

 

Forgive me, I should have expanded what I meant. Tweaking the camera's internal menu color controls too much is where the damage to the image can be "bad". Using filtration on the lens won't necessarily degrade the image to an unacceptable level (you judge what's acceptable) so long as the chips aren't deprived of light to the point where noise creeps in.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Forgive me, I should have expanded what I meant. Tweaking the camera's internal menu color controls too much is where the damage to the image can be "bad". Using filtration on the lens won't necessarily degrade the image to an unacceptable level (you judge what's acceptable) so long as the chips aren't deprived of light to the point where noise creeps in.

i understood you just fine, but i still don't agree. tweaking the "internal menu color controls" does much less harm than doing the same in post, and compared to an optical filter there's not much of a difference in degradation either. the camera converts raw to yuv anyway, whatever setting you chose and even no setting is also a setting, just one selected by sony. of course you can't bring back blown out pixels, which an optical filter can, for example. which brings us to the wise suggestion above: test, test, test! ;-)

 

/matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
The falling apart is just as true when you tweak the image too much in camera. Again, test, test, test. Which is going to be the lesser of two evils given the format you're working in. Some have suggested capturing your footage and then upconvert it to a higher format for color correction. Never tired it on HDV but I did with DV25 with marginal success. I don't know how viable it is for you but it might be worth testing. If you need the stop because of limited lighting resource then your decision might already have been made for you. Just make sure you'll be give the ability to do your color correction under appropriate conditions.

 

Well, it's not true when using real betacam sp decks and a sony component color corrector. As long as there is a video level a lot can be done and the analog "generation loss" is basically invisible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

alex, what exactly is not true? i'm sure you know about s/n ratio and bandwidth, two entities that limit beta sp in *exactly* the same way as digital quantization and compression limits the digital formats. the artifacts when you push them to the limit look different, but the limit is still there, no cheating unfortunately.

 

what is this thread doing on the lighting board anyway. :-)

 

/matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

At the risk of belaboring the issue (and Matt, you're right, at this point it may no longer belong in a lighting board) yet another option is to decompress the footage and color correct that. Here's a clip from Tim Kolb's Creative Cow article on editing with HDV:

 

Ingesting HDV and decompressing it to uncompressed is the highest quality option, but also the highest cost due to the file sizes simply being immense and the disk speed and size requirements being substantial. For a television spot, this workflow might pay off in quality benefits, but for a wedding or event this workflow would require more resources than it would be worth in my opinion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

hdv is *always* uncompressed before color correcting. it's then recompressed if you're rendering back to hdv, but that's abother story. i like to master both my dv and hdv projects to uncompressed but converting to uncompressed before is just a waste of disk space.

 

/matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

SOOOOOOooo the best thing I can do , is to test, test, test before shooting like DoP's do ... but, I need someone to assure me that, when shooting, if I work to acieve a good and correct colour balance , this is, good or normal contrast, not burned highlght, not blacks with noise... then in post, i can do whatever I want? for example, I can achieve an image like the film 300? or delicatessen? or anything else? or whatever image treatment I want?? cause that what I need to know.. !! thanks !

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
SOOOOOOooo the best thing I can do , is to test, test, test before shooting like DoP's do ... but, I need someone to assure me that, when shooting, (edit) ... then in post, i can do whatever I want?

 

Think about what you just said: "I know I need to test, but I need someone to assure me it's going to turn out the way I want."

 

We can't assure you of anything-- that's the whole point of testing! You have to see for yourself how different techniques turn out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Applying a Tobacco filter to the camera or in post will make very little difference to the image quality. However, if you use a camera filter (particularly a strong one), and then try to remove the effect in post, you may well see the limitations of grading HDV.

 

All together now, TEST, TEST, TEST!

 

:-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...