Re: What's so good about Color

This thread is intended to launch a general discussion about the strengths and weakness of Color, rather than a specific quest for help.

I am doing an HDV underwater video project that will be distributed nationally to a large audience by DVD (~10,000 copies). So I wanted to get the color perfect. I figured Color was the way to go.

So I spent a few days getting the hang its not-exactly-Mac-like interface. The feature I really wanted was in the Secondary room. Some of my footage had great foreground color but greenish background color (e.g. sandy patches seen behind and through coral heads). I wanted to isolate the background areas, even when it occurred in the tiny spaces between branches of coral (way too many to select manually), darken these areas and give them more of a "underwater" bluish cast.

After several attempts, I was still struggling to get it right. The secondary room adjustments often had "flickering" problems. The secondary adjustment would look OK in Color but, when rendered and viewed in FCP, the adjusted areas seemed to "flicker". I assumed this has something to do with the way Color selected the adjustment areas through the remainder of the clip. And, no, I did not have any conflicting filters in the FCP timeline.

Add the flicker problem to the cumbersome, round trip workflow and it's strange interface, and I eventually gave up on Color. I found that I could do all the secondary adjustments that the footage needed with the "limit" controls on the 3-way color corrector in FCP. With its "soften" and "edge-thickness" sliders, I was able to avoid any "flicker" in the background adjustments. And I could see the result after only a quick "render select". I actually felt that I had better control in FCP.

Is the secondary room "flicker" a common occurrence with Color secondary room adjustments and how can it be avoided?

But my main question is: Am I missing something? Were my problems with Color due to my inexperience? Does Color have some magic stuff that I am not seeing? Should I persevere with Color? Or, is mine a common experience? Am I better off always doing all color correction in FCP?

Regards
Peter

Peter,

While I have only browsed through Color, I do think it is very powerful. I would say your inexperience is part of your trouble. Walt Biscardi has an outstanding DVD on using color, it can be ordered off the Creative Cow site. You should look into it.

Chris

Hi Peter,

What are your FCP sequence settings ? Do you work natively with HDV or did you capture using the ProRes codec ?

Best wishes,

Ronny

ronny courtens Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Peter,
>
> What are your FCP sequence settings ? Do you work
> natively with HDV or did you capture using the
> ProRes codec ?

I am working natively with HDV. FCP does not seem to have any problems with HDV. With my new MacPro, Renders are very fast and Compressor can output an good quality mp2 in about 3 hours from 30 minutes of HDV sequence.

My only concern about ProRes is the general availability and longevity of this codec. I always keep an eye on archiving. I like to think that, one day in the future, some historian may want to migrate some of my work into the current format of that time. After all, with global warming, some of the coral reef stuff that I am capturing now may not exist in 100 years. Given the broad usage of HDV, I can assume that, in XX years time, there will still be an HDV codec. Not so sure about the longevity of Apple ProRes, which is Apple specific and filling a "temporary" requirement...

Regards
Peter

Hi Peter,

The longevity of Apple ProRes should be no concern. As you say, it is an intermediate codec just used to allow you to work in the best possible conditions within Apple pro apps no matter what your original footage is, and no matter what your final delivery format is. Avid does the same with its Dnx codecs. None of them are delivery formats, they are just made for editing.

Once your edit is finished you can easily output the edit to any delivery format you wish. For future-proof archiving purposes you can output to Uncompressed on DLT and data DVD. And after all, you always have your original HDV tapes to go back to.

Best wishes,

Ronny

There is a very thorough DVD on working in Color that I highly recommend and so far its been a great success. Mostly I recommend it because I wrote it :)

Its called Color Grading in Color and is found at rippletraining.com

Seriously, I do think its valuable to get some good training to work efficiently and really fully understand its pros and cons, what its good at, and what its not- and more than anything else, understanding the workflow. It is a very powerful program, but it was written with colorists in mind, not the casual user. So someone coming from a colorist background will be more at home quicker.

But the DVD I wrote gets everyone up to speed, whether you're completely new to color correction or an experienced colorist. It is very extensive (6 hours) and covers all aspects of Color. Color is not an application you can just dig into without some kind of learning process if you really want to get the most out of it and avoid aspects that appear to be a problem when its really just about understanding how Color works.

If a task is approached incorrectly it can definitely be frustrating, but if you know what's going on, Color can be extremely rewarding. I love the secondaries room, its so flexible, quick powerful- for vignettes, isolated corrections with vignettes, user shapes and definitely not to be overlooked- the curves controls- which are often a better way to select a color than the eyedropper approach. Its all quite friendly once you understand the workflow.

Andrew Balis

Andrew Balis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There is a very thorough DVD on working in Color
> that I highly recommend and so far its been a
> great success. Mostly I recommend it because I
> wrote it :)
>
> Its called Color Grading in Color and is found at
> rippletraining.com
> ......
> ......
> Andrew Balis

Hi Andrew,

I do have a copy of your training and have been through it thoroughly. I found it excellent.

But, when I hit the "flickering" problem caused by the secondary room adjustments, with a deadline approaching, I gave up and went back to FCP 3WCC. Maybe the problem was caused by the HDV codec.

The responses to this post have encouraged me to try again. Next project, I will transform to ProRes and try Color again.

Regards
Peter

Peter,

I'm glad you've enjoyed our DVD.

I just wanted to chime in and add that I completely agree with everything Ronny mentioned.

Your problems are most likely linked to the HDV color space (4:2:0) and the 8-bit depth of that material. And I agree with the potential issues that can come up with interframe (temporal) compression.

As for ProRes- there's a few things to mention here. First, working in that codec will most likely yield better results, but since your material originates in the HDV color space, be aware that there will still be limitations on secondary selections.

As for longevity, I would actually think that ProRes will be around longer than HDV. HDV is the manufacturers' attempt to give the masses HD video at SD costs. Compression is constantly getting better, and I would be surprised to see a format based on MPEG-2 Long-GOP compression lasting very long.

H.264 compression is starting to make its way into lower-end consumer cameras (AVCHD), and higher end cameras (AVC-Intra), and H.264 handles lower bit rates better than MPEG-2. I'm sure we'll soon see a prosumer camera bringing in a quality somewhere between AVCHD and AVC-Intra.

Also, never trust any format longer than 5 years. I always go back to any masters sitting on my shelves too long and re-transfer them. If any tape format sits around too long, it will degrade. So even my Digi Betas get re-dubbed occasionally. I would look at the same philiosophy for editing formats as well. After substantial time goes by with a format stored as digital files, I would re-encode to the next generation codecs.

Also, about edges on secondary corrections, don't forget about the Key Blur option in the secondaries room. It seems to have improved in Color 1.0.2 and you can push it further without artifacts. Also, any secondary corrections should be checked out during playback to look for noise "flickering" or a shimmering type artifact. Turn off Update UI in the User Prefs to get the best playback you can to look for these problems.

Good luck.

Andrew

Thanks guys for the excellent feedback and comments.

I will definitely take a new look at Color for my next project.

I guess that I also need to think about moving away from HDV. But, how to find an underwater housing and camera that is good enough quality and yet compact enough that it does not take the pleasure out of diving...

Regards
Peter