Cool vs Warm Video

[Steve Anderson]

I've been fooling around with manual WB on the GL2 - Used Photoshop to print a 10% red fill on a piece of 8.5 x11 paper. It produce a rather warm looking white/pinkish page out of the printer. I WB the GL2 to it - I thought hey, fool the camera into thinking the lighting is slightly more red than it actually is - and it seemed to produce cooler (more towars blue) looking video and there are times I like the cooler look.
Not knowing a whole lot about color temp ect. i'm sure there are bettter approaches to cool down GL2 video than my experiment. I've seen professional Warm/Cool cards for sale. Certainly don't need the warm cards the GL2 is already fairly warm (towards red) but the cool cards could be interesting to try. This company sells them.

http://www.studio1store.com/warmcards.htm

they sell a coupe of Cool Cards but there's a catch they want you to purchase the WarmCard Max System for $112 which includes several warm cards a green card for florescent light and the two Cool Cards are included in this package only. Seems rather expensive for just a couple of cool cards. So I've looked around for other vendors but haven't found one yet selling Cool Cards separately. Is there a more accurate way to make your own other than my unscientific experiment?

Or maybe using a Cool Card is not a very bright idea at all and could cause grief latter.

Steve

[Rob Lohman]

I simply shift colors (use a white balance to get neutral colors) in
post (while editing) to have a more fine tuned control over the
end results.

[David Slingerland]

Colortemperature is all about temperature (Kelvin) :

reddish colours are usually 'low' ranging from 2800 to 3something.

Daylight is around 5600 K and tungsten around 3200 K.

You can warm or cool your picture by

1) mixing tungsten light (lamp for instance) with daylight (coming through a window)

Prosumer cameras have a maximum colortemp: it should say on the specs.

If you want to differ your temp by holding something in front of the camera you can buy gels for pro-lamps. They don’t cost a lot.

If you want a warm picture you can put a white paper with an 1/4 blue gel in front of your camera, should make it warmer, the same if you desire a cooler picture put an orange gel in front of it. Get your gels in 1/4, 1/2, so you can experiment with it.

I have tried doing it with my canon xl1. But it is difficult to get very satisfying results because of the light presence and the inability of the camera to handle green red and blue properly.

I bought a filter from tiffen : a "warming" filter combined with black pro mist. Gave it a warmer look and more filmic. (Blackpromist) That worked well.....

Nowadays I colorcorrect while editing it is better and you can do whatever you want...

Greetings

[Steve Anderson]

Thanks for the tips - I'll try a little color shifing in post.
Steve

is anyone color correcting in FCP? if so, what technique are you using to simulate the colors that white balancing to a warm or cool card with your camera would yield?

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

color correcting/shifting in post? doesnt that cause a lot of data loss when working with 8-bit video? Better to do what alterations to the color cast you can before truncating the data to 8-bits. Its hard to turn an image blue that is starts out with little blue data, that extrapolation creates extra noise.

[David Slingerland]

Everybody color corrects in post. There is now way you can shoot on different locations and times of day and end up with the same mixture of blue red and green. And yes you do not want to make something blue when there is very little blue data in the picture. But a little tweaking is no problem. 'Warming' can be done in fcp with any of the color correct filters.

[Steve Anderson]

I'm using FCE 2.0 but it has basically the same interface and color controls as Pro. believe me I'm no expert on this but it seems better to shoot video as close to the way you like it before post. FC has color correction but it still seems tricky (mostly because of my inexperience) to use and rendering can be lengthy - So if I'm going for a certain look cooler video for instance I'd like to shot it that way up front less hassles latter. So I’m experimenting with different types of not so white cards. Yet it seems I'm going against the grain on this every body does it in post. FCE manual is very basic bought a DVD tutorial covers some entry level color. No doubt I need to learn more (smile)
Like Noah though I’m a bit concerned about video quality after a heavy color correction massage.
David mentioned “Everybody color corrects in post. There is now way you can shoot on different locations and times of day and end up with the same mixture of blue red and green.” So I’m wondering if you have a tip or two – did you learn FC by trial and error, instructional material? Do you notice any video quality loss? How are your rendering times on larger clips?

Thanks,
Steve

The biggest room in the house is the room for improvement.

[David Slingerland]

I noticed when doing to much in post with FCP it shows... There are some really good but very expensive colorcorrecting tools on the market. FCP and FCE can colorcorrect but if you start out with 'low' quality video and use fcp software...well you will never get the results you see with films.
You should whitebalance when you are going to shoot. Shoot scenes under the same whitebalance. You must colorcorrect in post if you are going to mix scenes shot under different circumstances. With clever editing you can also 'hide' differences in color. So for instance I shoot a lot with preset on the camera. Outside 5600 inside tungsten 3200 kelvin. Sometimes I whitebalance to get a higher and more saturated look. Don't continually whitebalance, there will be to much difference in every shot and it makes colorcorrecting in post that much more difficult. I colorcorrect by eye or by looking at the scopes you have in FCP. I am not sure FCE has the same capabilities. Render times can be long when colorcorrecting, depends on your computer. Leave it to the last....