How best to color balance?

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Trying to get the best out of old video - Hi8 at the moment - I often have recordings where the auto color balance of FCPX doesn't manage to give a good result. I may try to use many different frames for the balance, but they all have one weakness or another.

Then I go to manual color adjusting, and I tweak the 4 different color variables while keeping an eye on whatever is supposed to be white in the scene, trying to keep it white.

My question is does anyone have a good procedure here? I've tried starting going from shadows to mid tones to highlights, and I've tried it the other way, but so far not found a reliable method.

if there happens to be a correct procedure here, I'd be delighted to not constantly have this 'trial an error!

First, don't touch the Auto Balance, it is a waste on 80% of what you'll import.
Then, correct contrast first. That will either fix white balance or bring it much more inline.
Then, work with hue (color board).
Being able to read a waveform and vector scope will go a long way.

I have to say I'm very surprised there is no auto white balance in FCPX after all these years. No clue what Apple is thinking, but, well, there you have it. I guess they believe their target market is not interested in making images look their best in an easy fashion. There are white balance plugins on the market, I've tried most if not all, and not satisfied with any.

Pop on over to colorgradingcentral.com and check some of the information there.

Sorry I'm not more help. Just rushing through things during a short break.

I'm no expert on grading, some of the others here probably know way more than I do, but my Usual procedure is,

First open a video scope/s, (I usually use histograms because I know how to Interpret them but sometimes the waveforms
can be more useful, I have no idea how to use a vector scope,)
Then;

1. Adjust exposure,
2. Adjust saturation,
3. Adjust color starting with the most significant range, (usually hi-lights, but because of the limited tonal range of older
video it might be mid-tones) and work your way to the least significant (shadows).
4. re-tweak exposure and saturation if necessary

After an overall grade you may need to add a second color filter with a color mask to correct the skin tones.

There may be some tutorials out there online that might help you with this.

Hope this helps,
-Mark

looks like you question was already answered while I was typing,
I have bookmarked colorgradingcentral and will definitely be looking at their material in the future

^^^

Thanks, Ben and Mark!

I'm keen to take your suggestions and try them out this weekend. One thing I've also wondered about (but not tried yet) is to fine tune the color after making rough adjustments and applying a light amount of noise reduction (Neat in my case).

With these noisy old tapes I've noticed the colors are sometimes much improved when the noise filter has done its stuff. Therefor I've thought that it might give better results to noise-filter/export master file/reimport*, before trying to get the colors optimized.

(*going through that procedure since Neat otherwise constantly re-renders anytime you make a change)

CrumplePop recently added a new simple drop-on Auto Balance plugin that works pretty well. It's a bit over-priced for what it does, and for my taste the correction is a bit on the cool side, but it has a slider to quickly adjust the color temp to taste and the $79 cost (I got it at the $39 intro price) might be well worth it for many users. I don't think there is a trial version.

www.crumplepop.com/fcpx-premiere-auto-white-balance/

Hi Blackburn
See you are having some fun converting older tape tech. Unfortunately, Hi8 and DV tape has its own base level of resolution/exposure/etc… and Moore's law really applies here, but, your starting base will always limit the conversion. Today's tech is sooo much better.

Personally I would apply the noise correction last along with any other universal adjustments (Broadcast Safe Filters, , etc…) just my opinion

As to color correction, good advice here already.

I start with exposure. Generally, Hi-Lights>Darks>Mids readjust as needed. Depends on footage, but generally Color next then Saturation. Sometimes I reverse this to Sats then color, just depends on footage. Remember that as you go through CC, what you do later may affect earlier adjustments so adjust again.
Finally apply the "Look" you want. With the ability to add additional color corrections or even adjustment layers, I apply looks after getting all clips to the same levels without "Look" (or LUTS) applied.

Personally, I have never gotten good results using the built-ins like Color Match, YMMV.

Color Grading Central is a good place to start with training vids.
Other help can be found at places like Ripple Training, Lynda, and since I use scopes extensively, here is a Larry Jordan vid on using scopes.


Learn how to use the scopes as well as your eyes.
Under Yosemite and FCPX 10.2.x you can see up to 4 scopes at once which I find helpful. Given differences in monitors, I trust the scopes.
Practice lots, make and use presets, use lots of secondary/tertiary/and shapes color corrections. After you think it is as good as it gets, take a day off and then review again. Takes lots of time. Big productions send this out to specialists, but now we have amazing tools to do it ourselves.
Happy Editing have fun!

Hope this helps, Greg

@Blackburn. Ditto on just about everything that has been mentioned here so far regarding grading. We do a ton of media conversion projects for clients, including film transfers and one thing that hasn't been discussed here is how you are getting your Hi-8 media into FCPX. 8mm tapes, Hi-8 and Digital 8 can be problematic particularly if they are very old. Dropouts, stretched tape and the like can make for difficult transfers resulting in overall poor image quality. We have set up 2 separate edit bays just for media conversion due to the volume we do. Our playback deck for the 8mm tapes is run through either the Canopus ADVD500 or ADVC300 bidirectional converters (now owned by Grass Valley). We monitor the playback on a hardware Textronix waveform and Vectorscope rack and we are able to make adjustments to color, setup levels, etc. as well as apply noise reduction prior to the converter unit feeding the FCPX import. The signal is also stabilized prior to being digitized upon import. We have observed a direct tape playback monitor showing jumping, lines and video breakup before processing, but the FCPX import window shows a stable, solid image (not in all cases to be sure, but generally a much better signal than if no pre-import processing was being done).

The point of all this is to consider how you are transferring your media. There are many ways you could be doing this, and most likely many of those ways bypass any video signal processing which in turn makes your original digitized media that more difficult to color correct. If the transfer is from a composite video signal, that's a worst case scenario. S-video, obviously a bit better but still not ideal. A decent analog/DV in and out converter with some control, tbc, levels, etc. will give you a better, more stable signal to work with. AND..... Obviously, the quality of the original tape likely makes the most difference. SP is good, LP is evil!

Blackburn wrote: ^^^

Thanks, Ben and Mark!

I'm keen to take your suggestions and try them out this weekend. One thing I've also wondered about (but not tried yet) is to fine tune the color after making rough adjustments and applying a light amount of noise reduction (Neat in my case).

With these noisy old tapes I've noticed the colors are sometimes much improved when the noise filter has done its stuff. Therefor I've thought that it might give better results to noise-filter/export master file/reimport*, before trying to get the colors optimized.

(*going through that procedure since Neat otherwise constantly re-renders anytime you make a change)

I think the best way there would simply be to apply the Neat Video filter to see if you can get good noise reduction, then just disable the filter until the end. That way you can play with the edit etc, at the end just enable the filter and render.

Simon

If I remember well I learned to Color Balance with FCPX on colorgradingcentral.com Denver has very good tutorials there and they are free.

There is a also a plugin from Ripple Training that helps you to crop the image on a white part and then balance just that part, then uncrop.

Concerning noise reduction, the author of Neat states on its website that it doesn't make a difference if you apply before or after.

Hi VidGreg,

I watched the Larry Jordan presentation, and I look forward to learning how to use these curves!

Everyone's advice about color correction helped me greatly improve several Hi8 recordings which I'd spent too much time trying to haphazardly work on - one consequence was that I found I'd been much too timid re. altering exposure, and suddenly some poor-looking recordings were greatly improved when I for example reduced the mids 20-30% - to my surprise.

I guess I spent too much time trying to get 'balance color' to work on the Hi8 recordings, on account of several times when it did work, like magic.

Secondary and tertiary corrections are something I'll google to figure out what they are I've used presets so much that my list of them is unnecessarily long; I've not been able to discover how to erase unwanted presets.



@dgwvideo: You clearly have an excellent setup for conversions! My pedestrian method has been to borrow another Sony Hi8/digital8 camera functioning better than mine, connect S-video to a Canopus 100, then firewire to FCPX. There were happily only a couple of tapes which lost a frame here and there during playback, and overall the results are better than I had dared hope beforehand. The Hi8 color difficulties I had were in strong artificial light sometimes, all the outdoor stuff in good light looks terrific.

Never ever used LP


SImon! I'm beginning to regret that I mentioned my silly notion of de-noising Hi8 and then running 'balance color' on a reimported denoised copy. It was just that 'balance color' worked quite well now and then on some of the Hi8 recordings, and it was then so nice to fix everything with just one click

I'll just have to study the tutorials and learn a better way to deal with the cases where there is too much yellow, or red, or blue, or green etc. etc.

Hi Blackburn
You're welcome to any help I gave. This is a great site to receive some kindly advice which I come to for answers so if I can give back, makes me happy.
My wife and I have been doing family movies, our own and helping others to create scripted, costumed mostly multi-cam shorts and feature length films. Lots of amateur talent including cameras and lights. This creates lots of post work for color corrections. Still learning myself all the time.
Just to clarify, when I mentioned primary/secondary/tertiary in FCPX I meant that in FCP10.2.x you can easily add multiple color corrections (CC) and then even change the order they are applied. My own workflow is evolving to take advantage of this by using separate CC to address problem footage. You can even rename the CC to something descriptive like Window Mask to a shape mask that either reduces Super whites that blow out a scene, or in reverse, blur the scene outside a window. You can even track via keyframes such masks. Applying CC in a mask can really resolve lots of problems in clips. Personally, I find by using more than 1 CC I can then tweak something without messing up my 1st primary correction. You can also then turn these corrections on and off and try something else. Hope this makes sense.
I have found that taking a few especially problematic clips and creating a project and then just playing with the CC and effects teaches me a lot.
I used to use an old CRT based Studio Monitor, but gave it away and now use my rMBP so scopes is the only way to really judge what the output really is. Really, learning how to use scopes is very important and well worth the time.
Best of Luck
Hope this helps, Greg

VidGreg wrote: Hi Blackburn
...

Just to clarify, when I mentioned primary/secondary/tertiary in FCPX I meant that in FCP10.2.x you can easily add multiple color corrections (CC) and then even change the order they are applied. My own workflow is evolving to take advantage of this by using separate CC to address problem footage. You can even rename the CC to something descriptive like Window Mask to a shape mask that either reduces Super whites that blow out a scene, or in reverse, blur the scene outside a window. You can even track via keyframes such masks. Applying CC in a mask can really resolve lots of problems in clips. Personally, I find by using more than 1 CC I can then tweak something without messing up my 1st primary correction. You can also then turn these corrections on and off and try something else. Hope this makes sense.
I have found that taking a few especially problematic clips and creating a project and then just playing with the CC and effects teaches me a lot.
...
Best of Luck
Hope this helps, Greg

I've been able to make big improvements on the quality of my Hi8 recordings, thanks to help and advice so far!

Very often I had shot things against the light (an old preference) and if the light was also inadequate - or too strong - it produced results which I've always thought were hopeless to do much with. But that was incorrect!

For example, temporarily cropping away a bright background, to balance the darker foreground, can be very useful. Using the histogram has been very useful because the Hi8 played back with incorrect contrast which reduced fine details and shadings, and a far better image appears when I correct this.

Then I've also experimented some more with my whacky theory about noise-filtering: I took a couple of problematic scenes and balanced everything as well as I could in FCPX. Then I applied a 'low level' of Neat filtering (usually somewhere between 2 and 3); exported an H.264, AAC copy, and reimported it. It definitely seems to me as if FCPX's 'balance color' function has been able to make improvements to those filtered copies which it was unable to make from the original 'grotty' tape. Trying 'balance color' on one frame or another of these copies has given me further color improvements that I'd not been able to work out myself (with my admittedly limited expertise).

I think it's really wonderful to be able to salvage good stuff from these old tapes...

Hey Blackburn, good for you.
It is fun when you can really see improvements. Amazing what we can now accomplish with just a computer and a few hundred dollars of software. This used to take high end speciality equipment.
I sometimes restore old photographs. Amazing to see before and after. Not only removing scratches, blemishes, color correcting faded photos, but also reconstructing missing sections. Tedious, but rewarding.
Glad to hear it is working out for you.
Happy Editing, Greg