Color Correction Conundrum SOLVED!

Many thanks to all the PVC readers that responded to my anguished plea for color correction help!  You can see the before and after results above.  Not perfect, but good enough for my purposes.  Five readers (if you include Chris Meyer) offered ideas, but Eric Addison was both timely and pretty damn good.  He even set up a small Premiere Pro sequence to be downloaded, unzipped and opened.  Once the sequence was loaded, it was no big deal to save the color correction preset and re-use it in my four-camera HDV concert coverage.  As you can see, the yellow was exiled and the shot was saved!  Thanks, Eric!

And a tip ‘o the bike helmet to PVC readers Portishead, Jim Hines and PerroneFord for sharing their ideas too!

A Color Correction Conundrum

Hey folks, remember I mentioned that one of my first big projects with the CS5/nVidia Mercury/CUDA combo is a choral concert?  Well, it is time to cut that puppy.  I recorded the concert with 3 Canon HDV cameras, which look great, and my brand-spankin’-new GoPro Hero HD camera.  Problem is, I didn’t have time to white balance the GoPro (in fact, I’m not even sure how you would go about it.  Gotta re-read the manual.)  In any event, I clamped the GoPro to a light stand and pointed it at the piano keyboard.  Blind, of course, since the GoPro has no monitor, but I had a good feeling about the framing.  What I didn’t count on was how far out the white balance would get.  You can look at the thumbnails on this page, or go find full-sized .TIFs of the GoPro shot and a reference from the back of the church at these Flick addresses:

The wide shot from the back of the church

and

the piano shot.

Honestly, I’d be happy just to get the piano shot *close* to the wide shot, but at this point I will take what I can get.  BTW, I would suggest you give tips using the basic PremPro color-correction tools, like 3-Way Color Corrector and such.  I’ve gone through a dozen interations, sometimes stacking different CC filters, but so far no luck.

I’m just a simple country videographer - all this color-correction stuff isn’t in my native skill set.  See what you can do and educate us all!  Fame awaits (in ot her words, I’ll post the names of the folks that come closest.)

Thanks in advance!

Nature Photography Gone Wild!

Check out this behind-the-scenes video from PBS’ “Nature” series on how the producers captured ultra-close-up, ultra-slo-mo footage of hummingbirds for an upcoming show.  Absolutely fascinating!

AdobeCS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions Part 2.1

If you have been following my ongoing Adobe CS5/nVidia shakedown cruise (here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 2) you might have read my whiny cry:

Adobe CS5 and nVidia: First Impressions Part 2

Sorry about dropping from sight for the last couple of weeks, but when the day-job calls, it calls with a vengeance.  I also apologize for the lack of photos, but I just didn’t think to do screengrabs at all the right times.  Bad editor!  No doughnut!

As I was saying…

Adobe CS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions

I guess once you break the big rules, you get used to it.  You may remember my mini-series from last January, when I replaced a several-year-old Dell Pentium-D workstation with a fire-breathing HP Z-800 eight-core Xeon box.  At that time, I installed my existing Matrox RT.X2 video accelerator card and an ATI Radeon HD4870 video card, to work in collaboration with Adobe Creative Suite CS4.  The system ran pretty well, but it wasn’t a month later that the news started leaking out about something big on the horizon - something called Mercury and CUDA, to be included in the new version of Adobe Creative Suite - CS5.

April brought my yearly trek to Las Vegas for the NAB Convention, and one of the first places I went to was the Adobe booth.  The demos of of the Mercury engine running with the nVidia CUDA cards were incredibly impressive.  I knew instantly I wanted to torture-test this combo.  A few phone calls by the PVC brass brought to my door (eventually) an nVidia Quadro FX4800 video card and the Adobe CS5 Master Collection. As what seems to be the lone member of PVC that edits on a Windows box, I intend to use this combo for ongoing torture tests for PVC.  But first I had to see if it could even be installed in a calm and controlled manner.

NAB2010:  The Story Of The Number “3” And The Letter “D”

I would have posted this last night, before NAB2010 actually started, but I refuse to pay the extortionate $13/day that hotels here think is their God-given right to collect for the same (or worse) Internet access that is free virtually anywhere else.

In making the rounds of the Panasonic and Sony press conferences on Sunday, I was just dumbfounded to hear the breathless fawning over what is at best nascent 3-D television technology.  In a country (the US) where only about 40% of people have invested in HDTVs so far, the cravenness of manufacturers expecting people to rip it all up and buy new equipment already is breathtaking.  This is not to say that 3D can’t be compelling - in the right hands, and with the right content, the effect is impressive - but let’s not kid ourselves.  It is just an EFFECT, after all.  Have you have seen the recent Samsung 3-D TV ad where a dad cuts a block of water out of an aquarium, takes it home, pushes it into their HDTV and then the family is suddenly awash (ahem) in fully-immersive 3-D fish?  That spot verges on fraud, IMHO.  The 3-D effect is limited to the inside of the monitor’s bezel.  And lets face it, not all that much content out there deserves hi-def treatment, much less 3-D.

Here’s hoping that consumers recognize this latest gimmick as just that - a gimmick - and send the gear manufacturers (and their junkie enabler, the Consumer Electronics Association) the 2x4 to the head they so richly deserve.

So am I too much of a curmudgeon?  What do YOU think?

Intriguing Mac Rumor…

I’m no Mac guy, but I have admired Final Cut Pro from a distance for many years now.  I was always under the impression that ProApps was a main leg of the Mac stool, but as others have pointed out, there’s been no DVD Studio Pro update in a long while.

Now a Twitter post portends an interesting turn:

What does it all mean?  I sure don’t know.  What do you think?

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