I'm shooting a scene next weekend where the video turns from black and white to color at a pivotal point in the story.
I want the color change to be really significant, but the scene I'm shooting - a wide landscape of the San Francisco Bay - is not quite colorful enough. Because it's so wide, there isn't a deep saturation of colors and it often looks like a haze covers the bay, even on clear days.
Is there any way to saturate those colors to make them really pop?
Ideally, I'd like it to have the feel of "Wizard of Oz" or other colorful musicals like it, but I'll take any improvement.
I've tried just upping the saturation in a given scene, but that often makes the video appear grainy and reduces all the other qualities.
Any suggestions would be very helpful.
Thanks.

Oh, I'm probably going to use FCE 1 mostly, but I should be able to get my hands on FCP 4 or Premiere without a problem if need be.

Try upping the saturation a little, and then upping the contrast. If it's not too bright already, play with the brightness a little as well.

well, here's a shot of SF that i found online and i messed with a bit. you said wizard of oz, so here goes.

first, i did some moderate color correction and made the picture a bit lighter and balanced the colors. then i took a contrast filter and made the contrast a little better. THEN in my secondary color corrector, i upped the saturation. it might be a bit overdone, but it reminds me of the wizard of oz.

good job paul, looks great...

if he wanted wizard of oz, then he needs to follow what you did. looks good!

Hey Paul i don't know if the site temporarily went down or what but the picture isnt showing up (i'm sure by the time you read this it will be back lol). Anyway, if you have magic bullet editors or anything of the sort, the color reversal look preset will do a good job of it. You could start with that and adjust it to your needs. Here's a still before the effect:



And here it is after the effect:



Has a tendency to pull the shadows down and the highlights up, which can look kinda cool. Hope that helps.

its back up now. no magic bullet, just vegas 5 color correctors

Thanks for all the help guys.

Paul, for some reason no link shows up for the shot you did. It may be because I'm using a mac, I don't know. Anyway, if you get a chance, could you put the url up so I can just copy and paste it. I'd really like to see what you did.

Thanks again.

I gave it a shot just using FCP (since you said you have that available to you). I think I could do it the same way in FCE, but I don't have it on this computer. It's very similar to what paul described doing in Vegas. (although I can't see his pics either)

Before


After

sorry about my image not loading. here it is on another site, but its lower quality.

Cool. Thanks a lot. Both of those are exactly the kind of change I'm looking for.

When you do the oversaturation, just check really quick on the waveform/vectorscope monitors to make sure the colors aren't over the limits, because playing stuff like that on monitors over and over again can actually damage them.

One thing that you guys forgot to note: jacking up the saturation can be a great filter to apply to almost every shot done on DV....

however...what if it's not what the story calls for? If you want to express dark and despondant, you DO NOT want the saturation pumped. Imagine trying to do day for night and pumping the saturation up....turns out like a film that I made last year called "Hunter in the Night" everyone looks like they are swiming in the ocean. In certain situations....LESS saturation is what is called for.

But it's a good way to get a good look with any shot of video...and alot of people DO NOT realize this.


btw...props to paul for being a Sony Vegas 5 user! There arn't many of us out there, and the non-Vegas (as in Premiere users) don't know what they are missing.....but FCP and AVID XPress Pro 4.5 kills Vegas. :P