cinematography Bad SD or good SD

W

wheatgrinder

This is not about if SD is good or bad, rather I want to know what good SD looks like. With so many display options I'm having a hard time knowing if I'm getting good SD or BAD SD.... All I keep comming up with is "It sure isnt HD" :no:

http://www.vimeo.com/8810055

Is that good or bad SD footage?

Seems it can still use some color correction, but as far as the quality of the underlying footage.. is it good SD capture or a bad one?

Thanks
 
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Will! HELP! I cant get my color any where as nice as your "simple" correction.. surely you can spare your "simple" magic... Just give me a hint! Is it all in color correction tools or do I do something with additional copies etc..

Mostly its the sky thats giving me fits!
 
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Well, I used colorista... but. Lift/Gamma/Gain for the main correction, and another layer with a rectangular mask going from bottom right corner to upper middle left, and wide enough to get her completely inside it, lots of feathering.. dropped exposure outside of that mask.

So it's basically a strangely shaped vignette. That layer in particular was what pulled more detail out of the sky.
 
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Here's a pretty similar result with only tools built into AE.

Did this in about 5 minutes, including grabbing and cropping screenshots.

4287405316_2e467ede18_o.jpg


Color Grading Settings (applied directly to the video layer in this example, should really be applied to an adjustment layer above the video layer on the timeline):
4286655647_71952ccdb3_o.jpg

I feel I should probably mention that tritone really isn't the right tool to use for pushing shadows and highlights toward a particular color, it just tints them.. which doesn't really give the proper result.

And this one is a big image, so click it to see it larger.. This shows the general shape of the vignette mask, and its settings. It's set to subtract with a feathering of 100px, and the adjustment layer its on has an exposure effect set to -1:
 
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Incidentally, basically everything that colorista does can be done with built in tools.. it just ties a couple of those tools together, and puts a nice interface on 'em.

It's primary feature is the lift/gamma/gain 3-way color corrector. AE has this built in, just with a crappy default interface, it's called Color Balance..
Aside from that it basically just has some mask features to replicate the "power windows" available on a davinci.
 
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Wow! Thanks for taking the time. The hint I needed before you went all detail crazy was masking.. I could get close on the everything but the sky would always be too bright..

Thank you, thank you, thank you..
 
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No problem..

I don't mind showing the settings and details because that's the stuff nobody ever seems to share, and it's what makes it all work. Having the tools is one thing, figuring out how to make 'em do what you want is a whole other ball of wax. :)


Oh, and if you do decide to throw an adjustment on to brighten her face up a bit, I found that a single point track tracking her nose will get you through about 3/4 of this shot before the track fails, leaving only a handful of frames that have to be keyframed by hand. Apply that track to a Null, then parent an adjustment layer to it. Throw an exposure +1 on that layer, and create a small elliptical mask around the face, feathered about 50px. Comes out looking halfway decent, for a shot lacking proper facial fill. ;)
 
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I guess its like any other art.. never actual done, you just stop working on it..

Ill put down these crayons and grab a new piece of paper! Need to grade the other shots and cut the sequence together.
 
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Will I wanted to ask you about this comment

"I feel I should probably mention that tritone really isn't the right tool to use for pushing shadows and highlights toward a particular color, it just tints them.. which doesn't really give the proper result"

What would be the "proper" tool in AE?

Thanks
 
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Thanks again, I download that preset from that article and it gives a little UI to the color balance tool I tried it out last night on another shot. Faster results then tritone and I can see what you mean about tinting vs shifting..
 
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Hmm.. I couldn't get that preset to work for me.. granted I didn't play with it long enough, so I'll have to give it another shot.

Perhaps, when I have a bit more time, I will think about putting together some coloring tutorials. Not that I have all the answers, but I think I've got enough of them to help people grasp the basics. :lol:
 
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A small bug in the preset.. when you first apply it, ALL THE SETTINGS are selected. So if you change one color, you change them all.. you have to click on some other FX in the panel, then you can single select the lows, mids and highs.. threw me for a while..
 
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Since this has become kind of a Color Correction/Color Grading tutorial/show & tell kind of thread, I figured it's a good a place as any to post this before & after shot from some footage I'm working on from a recent promo shoot.

This was shot in standard definition with a canon gl1.. there seemed to be a bit of noise in the image, so I applied a small amount of noise/grain removal (0.15 I believe was the setting) as well as some basic color grading.


(click for larger version)

and here's another before & after from the same project. This was shot on a different day, with an XL1:

(click for larger version)


The first image is not the same frame in the before & after shots.. the second image it is the same frame before & after. This is probably obvious, but I guess it's worth mentioning anyway. :)
 
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