OT: black and white

Hey, just filmed a bunch of stuff with the knowledge that I was going to turn it all black and white. Therefore, I paid no attention to the color, I just made sure I used pretty harsh lighting.

It was all shot on min dv tape so I didn't expect it to look super nice. To my surprise, it looked pretty darn good. I looked at the raw footage and saw that everything was pretty red (some shots were intense red).

Has anyone noticed that the color of the original footage effects how the black an white will look?

I think that the red, coupled with the harsh lighting, just produced a higher contrast range that effected the black and white version.

Any thoughts?



"A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh."

<<<(some shots were intense red).>>>

Not balancing the camera may have been a mistake. Because of the way NTSC works, a bright red picture or scene reduces the white or luminance level. In extreme cases, the black and white parts of a red scene onlly amount to 30% of what you'd expect to be there. This is one of the reasons red text never looks right, and videos of theatrical productions are always terrible.

Many books have been written about how to properly expose black and white for maximum beauty and artistic expression. It's not always easy because your eye has to be trained to "think" in black and white.

I bought a copy of Woody Allen's "Manhattan" because even though it's not a very good movie, the visual production values are terrific. It's in black and white. You can freeze on each of his New York City shots and take notes for ten minutes on composition, luminance gradients, lighting effects, and shadow values.

So, no. If you actually had a black and white camera, you would only have to worry about exposure and lighting. Since you're starting with a color camera, you have to produce a good color show first, then decolorize it.

Koz

Hmmm...interesting. That's a good idea.



&quot;A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh.&quot;

By the way, you have stumbled onto an old photographic trick.

Ansel Adams a thousands after him put colored filters in front of the black and white film camera to enhance the scene. A yellow (Wratten 15) or red (Wratten 25) filter will give very dramatic skys with vivid clouds.

If you shoot the show in color, you can use the color corrector to produce the same effect *in post*.

Try it. Pick a normally exposed day scene outside with blue sky in it. Apply the two (not three) way corrector and unbalance the whites toward yellow (or red), then decolorize the scene.

Koz

Hey, thanks.
Before I got into editing, I was a photographer. So I knew about enhancing images using red or green filters (I didn't know about yellow). I knew it worked with black and white film, but would have never guessed that it would have similar effects on a digital format such as mini dv footage. Pretty neat. Thanks.



&quot;A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh.&quot;

Wratten 6, 9, and 15 are the three yellows in increasing intensity, and everybody knows what Wratten 25 is.

I think it's Wratten 6 is the filter that's suppopsed to trim black and white panchromatic film stock to more accurately reflect what your eye sees.

<<<but would have never guessed that it would have similar effects on a digital format >>>

You couldn't have spent much time in a smelly darkroom. Everybody knows you can print a Kodachrome to that special black and white paper and get the dark skys by applying the camera filters under the enlarger. By extension, you can do that anytime you go from color to black and white.

Wanna buy a darkroom?

Koz

Your right, never was in a dark room. I would have all my photos developed pretty cheap. Then I would take all the good picture's negatives and take them to a high quality developer.

I admit that this was a pretty terrible method. It got pretty frustrating at times.



&quot;A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh.&quot;

<<<I admit that this was a pretty terrible method. It got pretty frustrating at times.>>>

I had just the other problem. All my stuff went through my fingers and I probably still have negatives that I should have printed but didn't.

Since I had the first color darkroom in the neighborhood, I had to develop (pun intended) interesting proceedures. When somebody would dump off a bag of vacation film, I would insist that they stay there with me--in the dark--to help me "color correct" each print. That usually only happened once.

Koz

Wow, must have been pretty fun.



&quot;A man that does not reply to his own thread after receiving help truly sucketh.&quot;