Purple Looks Blue (GL2 Camcorder)

[Stephen Shabazz]

Hello Every One:

I Recently Bought A Canon GL2 Camcorder And Have Done A Couple Of Weddings With It (In Automatic Mode). Yesterday, March 24, I Had A Reception To Shoot. The Decorations Was Purple And White. My GL2 Was Displaying Blue Instead Of Purple...I Switched It To Manual Mode And Went Down On The Color Phase...(Still Blue Instead Of Purple). I Now Have 3 Hours Of Footage With The Purple Decoration Looking Blue, And Some Of The Women Who Wore Purple Dresses, Are Now Wearing Blue Dresses According To How I Recorded It.

What Did I Do Wrong? (HELP)

This Is My First 3 Chip Camcorder And I'm New To All Operations. Reading The Manual Have Not Been A Big Help.

[Ron Evans]

You needed to manually white balance the camera for the lights in the hall. THis is done by pointing the camera at a white sheet with the manual white balance setting and holding the button until the camera is set. I do not have a GL2 but I am sure this is covered in the manual. You can probably recover this video in editing by re-white balancing. Unfortunataley this will mean that all your footage will have to be rendered!!! Make sure you have at least 3 times the hard drive space or do the editing in pieces or you will need about 100G free for source and rendered video. If you have Canopus or Matrox realtime cards they will output without the need to re render and save you the hard disc space and time. Do a search for white balance and you will find a lot of information on using different types of set up cards.

Ron Evans

[John Britt]

Stephen

This seems to be a not uncommon issue, and while white balacing may have a little to do with it, WB may not help entirely. See: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=15032 -- especially Ken Tanaka's comment (third one down).

EDIT -- and concerning Ron's 100GB comment: there is no reason to color-correct all the footage. If you plan on editing down to a 1 hour final product, for example, simply edit your raw footage and color correct the edit. You'll need 39 GB for your source footage (3 hours X 13 GB) plus 13 GB for the final product (if the final product is 1 hour long). If you are going to color correct within your editing program, there really isn't a need to create an intermediate, color corrected file (if you don't have the space) -- of course, it will save you some time (you won't have to keep dropping your correction effects into your individual edits) if you do have an extra 13 GB of space to export your edit before color correcting, but even then you'll only need 65 GB total. Of course, if you are happy with your edits, you can always delete the 39 GB source file once you create your 13 GB, edited version. You can then import the 13 GB version for color correction.

[Ken Tanaka]

This is normal. Most shades of purple are nearly impossible for nearly any video camera to record accurately.

[Bill Hardy]

Did you white balance before the shoot?

Also it may be possible to change color tint in post editing. I know Final Cut Express has a tint altering feature.
Send me a full video frame if you want and I will see if Final Cut can bring out the purple without radically changing skin tone. You should have a face in the shot however. I would not know how to extract a frame via PC but by simply dragging a video image from the movie on a Quicktime player to desktop you can get a frame.

bhardy3@mac.com

[Gordon Briggs]

I had this problem with my new XM2 so I fitted a good UV filter and that seemed to do the trick. I shot a wedding last Friday and did WB for all the indoor shots, some with mixed lighting, and my purple bridesmaids dresses came out purple.

The pictures by the way were stunning.

Gordon.

[Stephen Shabazz]

Thanks Everyone:

I Think My Problem Was That I Did Not Use The Correct Filter For The Different Lighting That Was At The Wedding/Reception.

Plus I'm Still Learning The GL2. Do Anyone Know Of A Good Video Or Book (Beside The Manual) That Would Be A Companion To Learning The GL2? Also, Would You Use A 1 Chip Camcorder As A Backup To A 3 Chip Camcorder?

Thanks.

[Bill Hardy]

I personally bought a second 3 chip cam which is as inexpensive as some of the higher 1 chip cams depending on where you buy it; the Panasonic PVDV953. Though the resolution does not match the GL2 indoors (I have not tried it outdoors) the purples do seem to come out purple even without white balancing. Colors will be richer than a single chip. My 953 cost $1079 U.S. (about half the cost of a GL2) But if you can afford a second GL2 thats the best solution.

[Steve Iacono]

well the only thing with that is what if you film in frame mode and go to composite both shots into some sort of project you got 2 different qualitys 2 compltely diff picture types

[Bill Hardy]

The PVDV953 shoots in frame mode and it has manual audio among other things. I am pretty sure I can get a pretty close match. In fact I may post a clip where both cams are shooting the same scene this evening. Hope you can view MP4.

[Steve Iacono]

did not know this i dont really know anything abotu that camera

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

> This is normal. Most shades of purple are nearly
> impossible for nearly any video camera to record accurately.

I have also observed this problem. Even proper balancing doesn't get purple to work in many cases, and it is such a nice color. It seems to be a common problem. It's one of the differences I can see with film. Any ideas on solutions?

[Ken Tanaka]

Interestingly, higher-end cameras seem to be most affected. I am not a video technician, but I suspect the effect is somehow mitigated by the RGB filters used on 1-chip cameras. Also, certain shades of purple seem to render far more accurately than others.

Here in the U.S. the Minnesota Vikings professional football team wears purple uniforms. I remember being stunned seeing them play in-person for the first time. I had only seem them televised...where they appeared to be wearing royal blue! So television networks seem to have resigned themselves to the problem long ago. (BTW, the Vikings still look blue on the small screen.)