Video color correction

[Peter McGuinness]

I would like to be able to color correct my videos; I use photoshop to do this for stills but I have not heard of any way of doing it for video clips.

Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so which editing package can do it for me?

I am using DV content from a sony digital camcorder and from my canon A75.

thanks for any advice.

Peter

 

[ronrosa]

I would like to be able to color correct my videos; I use photoshop to do this for stills but I have not heard of any way of doing it for video clips.

Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so which editing package can do it for me?

I am using DV content from a sony digital camcorder and from my canon A75.

thanks for any advice.

Peter

Yes it's possible. Most of the mid level and high level editing programs can do this. Take a look at Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere and Pinnacle. Some of the entry level programs might also, but I'm not sure.

 

[Peter McGuinness]

Yes it's possible. Most of the mid level and high level editing programs can do this. Take a look at Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere and Pinnacle. Some of the entry level programs might also, but I'm not sure.

Thanks,

So does premiere work the same way that photoshop does? I mean, can I set up macros in the same way and maybe reuse the color correction technique I already have?

Peter

 

[Peter McGuinness]

Thanks,

So does premiere work the same way that photoshop does? I mean, can I set up macros in the same way and maybe reuse the color correction technique I already have?

Peter

I see that adobe allows a 30 day trial of premiere, so I'll give it a shot - all 160MBytes of it!

 

[Rick Inman]

I see that adobe allows a 30 day trial of premiere, so I'll give it a shot - all 160MBytes of it!

In Premier, use the After Effects that come free with 6.0 or higher to make your corrections, then save a clip in a file. From then on you can simply copy the clip, then past attributes, choose settings, then filters,and paste the settings into any other clip. With some video effects you can save your settings.
The program is not very first-time user friendly, and without some training you could spend hours working on something that should only take minutes. I spend about 40 hours per week editing in Premier, (60 hours in the last 5 days! Local PAX TV Christmas show) so feel free to PM me any time if you have a question. If I don't know the answer, I know people who do.

 

[diversteve]

I would like to be able to color correct my videos; I use photoshop to do this for stills but I have not heard of any way of doing it for video clips.

Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so which editing package can do it for me?

I am using DV content from a sony digital camcorder and from my canon A75.

thanks for any advice.

Peter

Pinnacle Studio 9 has the following cleaning effects filters:

Auto color correct - takes blue out - I've used this one with good(not great) results.
Noise reduction
Stabilize

And Color effects:

Brightness
Contrast
Hue
Saturation

There's others but they're mostly "fun" effects.
Things like blur, posterize, sepia, lens flare etc.

Steve

 

[ChrisA]

Many editing systems have this feature. I use "Cinelerra". (See here for details: http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3 ) It allows you to drag a video effect over a track. An effect can be something like "slow motion", rotate or crop or... Color Correction. When you right click on a effect that is "layered" on the track a dialog box pops up where you can adjust the effect. In the case of the color correct box there are sliders for the levels and a way to lock down the total luminance.

Tools are available to automate this. Many video systems alow you to save a video as a (rather large) set of JPG still images and then the load them all back in and re-create a video file. Reaon is so that you can use an external program (like an image editor) or the like on the stills with a script So you could even use Photoshop if you wanted.
However for frame by frame re-touch work cinepaint might work better http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/

I would like to be able to color correct my videos; I use photoshop to do this for stills but I have not heard of any way of doing it for video clips.

Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so which editing package can do it for me?

I am using DV content from a sony digital camcorder and from my canon A75.

thanks for any advice.

Peter

 

[Peter McGuinness]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I downloaded the trial version of premiere from the adobe website and I will start in on getting it up and running as soon as work pressures allow.

I took a quick look last night, and I anticipate that I will be taking up your kind offers of help!

Peter

 

[chuck e]

Peter

I've bought PPro recently and found this Adobe guide very helpful, particularly if you start with the trial version and don't have all the documentation.

http://www.adobe.com/education/curriculum/dv_curriculum.html

Chuck

 

[Peter McGuinness]

I have been able to play around with premiere, and after some good advice and guidance from Rick, I think I have the idea. Of course, more practice will make more perfect, but I have been able to get plausible results in a pretty short time.

Here is what I did:

First, I realised that I should analyse what is going on in the mandrake color adjuster (that's the photoshop action I used to modify the still image). Essentially, he is creating a luminance image, which displays in greyscale so it appears equally in all three channels, so he eliminates it from G and B then substitutes it back into the red channel. When this is displayed as a RGB image, it is not totally correct, but is close enough to look pretty good. A little bit of fiddling with the levels is enough to get a very close approximation.

A luminance image is (approximately) 30% Red, 60% green, 10% blue, so I plugged those values into the red channel of the channel mixer, then reduced the blue and green channel in an attempt to bring the total luminance back down to reasonable values - nothing fancy: I just reduced both green and blue to 75% - in the future maybe I should do a rough calculation to make sure I am in the right range.

After that, I used the levels editor to get an acceptable color balance. I was unable to get the level histogram to respond to the channel mixer in premiere, so I mimicked the whole process in photoshop and copied over the levels from there.

I'm pretty happy with the result; the colors look very close to what I remember and the luminance seems good - there is some burnout in places but that is actually in the original and I will try to find a way to get rid of it maybe by using the video levels tool.
I have enclosed some jpegs with an original for comparison.

Peter