Scarlet Killers - Attack of the HD DSLRs!

Nikon is claiming its recent release of the D-90 is the first HD DSLR camera. Plus there’s the news of Canon’s entry into the HD DSLR race, the EOS 5D Mark II as well as the Sony DSLR-A900. The combined pressure of these seemed to sink the much anticipated release of the Scarlet.
 
So why are these SLR form-factor camera’s making a scene? Well, lately it’s been about the release of Vincent Laforet’s HD film “Reverie” on the Canon website. The images are stunning and the entire project was shot on a 72 hour deadline with a budget of $5,000. So many people downloaded the movie that it shut down Canon’s video webserver.

Color Correction - Secondaries Video Tutorial

Here is a video tutorial - one of a series based on my book “Color Correction for Video,” out in December from Focal Press - showing how to do secondary color correction on a typical image. This footage is from Artbeats. In it, I “qualify” (another term for “select”) the color of the baseball jerseys in the shot AND the color of the grass in the infield and change it without affecting the other colors in the footage.

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Color Correction Video Tutorial

Another in a series of color correction tutorials from the upcoming revised edition of “Color Correction for Video” coming out in December from Focal Press.

In this installment, I show you how to sample colors on the screen in Apple Color to get numeric readouts of specific pixels in your image. (These same methods can be used with Avid or FCP or Color Finesse in Premiere or After Effects.) Using these numeric readouts can assist you in making corrections, especially if you can sample something that should be white, black or some other neutral gray tone. Any neutral tone should have the same numeric readout across all three color channels. (They can be off by a little.)

The samples in Color will continuously update as you color correct, which is very helpful. So, for example, is you sample a black pixel from your image and it says that the red channel is .085, the green channel is .088 and the blue channel is .025, then that means that your blacks have either a deficiency of blue or too much yellow (the combination of even amounts of red and green). So you probably need to raise the set-up/pedestal/black level of your blue channel to remove the yellow cast in the blacks. This will actually help balance the overall level somewhat, especially if you can balance the whites/highlights/gain using the same method. Grays will either fall into place, or you can adjust your gammas/midtones “to taste” by eye.

Color Correction Tutorial

This is another in an ongoing series of color correction video tutorials taken from the upcoming revised edition of my book “Color Correction for Video” (originally released as “Color Correction for Digital Video” co-written by Jaime Fowler.)

This tutorial shows how you can use the Geometry Room (one of the tabs along the top of the Color interface) to analyze your colors more accurately using the internal or external scopes.

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Avid Gems 6

OK, this won’t be a sexy tips week, but it’ll be useful. Sometimes sexy sells, but in economic times like these, sometimes you’ve got to say “Damn! Workboots, a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans is just what I need today.”

Creating Custom-shaped Vignettes in Apple Color

This video tutorial is one of more than two dozen video tutorials I created for the revised edition of “Color Correction for Video” which I originally wrote with Jaime Fowler back in 2002. The revised edition will be out in December and is almost completely re-written. I’ll be posting one of these tutorials each week.

We’re not really going in any specific order with these tutorials. I did a series of Primary color correction tutorials. This is actually a tutorial about creating custom user shapes in Apple Color to do secondary color correction.

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Avid Gems #5

Many of you know me from various listserves, and hopefully I have a reputation as someone who’s willing to help out people with problems.
 
Today’s Gem #1 is something I learned when I tried to help someone with a problem that I THOUGHT was going to be pretty easy to solve, but it turned out that I needed to learn some new tricks before I could be on any help at all.

Color Correction Video Tutorial

The latest in my series of color correction video tutorials is a brief departure from art to get to the nuts and bolts of installing color correction hardware.

If you are doing a lot of grading, there is no way to keep up with the “real” colorists doing work on dedicated systems like da Vinci unless you invest in a “panel” or manual user interface for Color or Color Finesse (or any of the other “software” color correctors).

The main two companies manufacturing units like these are Tangent Devices and JLCooper. They actually have very similar install setups. When I wrote “The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction,” I went around the country and sat in on sessions with the nation’s top colorists. For those sessions, I brought along a Tangent Devices CP-100. That unit was about $25,000. If you’re not quite that flush with cash (and who is today?) then you could try their CP-200BK or various combinations of smaller Tangent Devices boards that are meant to work together. Each of those boards runs about $6000. Tangent is also soon to release their even lower-cost unit, The Wave.

JL Cooper has the Eclipse CX, which is about $7,000 which delivers about the same functionality of the $25,000 CP-100. Originally, I was not a big JLCooper fan. The first versions I tried seemed rough and almost gritty. But the Eclipse I’ve been using for the last few months is a huge improvement over previous versions. The unit is good looking, feels solid and is a pleasure to work on. Also, with the new software it can be configured by the user to get the most efficiency from the way you like to work. I’ll try to get into that user customization of the JLCooper in another tutorial soon. But first, I’d like to show you how easy it is to get set-up and working with a new unit, fresh out of the box. You should be able to have this up and running in about the time it takes to watch this tutorial, especially if you have someone who knows computer networking. If you don’t have someone like that, don’t panic. This video will show you everything you need to know.

This video tutorial is on the upcoming revised edition of “Color Correction for Video” which I originally wrote with Jaime Fowler in 2002. The release will be out in December of this year on Focal Press. Please subscribe to the RSS feed to receive future video tutorials in this series.

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