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DWAM  
#1 Posted : Tuesday, January 10, 2017 7:58:19 AM(UTC)
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Achieving the proper color balance and exposure for multicam video can be very challenging.

Professional broadcast cameras can be associated to a CCU for live adjustments but it is often reserved for high budget live productions.

A cheap but very efficient solution is to use "X-rite ColorChecker Video" in post-production associated to a supported NLE, like Resolve, FCPX, etc...
http://xritephoto.com/Filmmaking
http://www.xrite.com/cat...orchecker-passport-video

I have the feeling it wouldn't be really difficult to implement in vMix (it works a little bit like the auto white balance) and once set it doesn't require a lot of CPU power like LUTS for instance. It's very easy to use and provides good results. You simply shoot the color board and the RGB + HSL values are modified to match the reference colors.

It'd be great if it could be used for live video in vMix (which lacks solid features for color matching).

Thanks,
Guillaume
Harty  
#2 Posted : Saturday, January 28, 2017 9:40:49 AM(UTC)
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+1 for this!
IceStream  
#3 Posted : Saturday, January 28, 2017 10:06:48 AM(UTC)
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+ 1

I don't know what the best solution is but I agree there is a need within vMix to quickly and efficiently to balance multiple camera feeds.
I bring this up whenever I notice it, which most recently was on the January edition of the "vMix Fun Time Live Show". Although basically a 2 camera show (without counting the "desk cam"), Martin's camera was obviously flatter than the main camera, not by much, but enough that I noticed (which is an irritant to me).


Ice
DWAM  
#4 Posted : Saturday, January 28, 2017 10:51:26 AM(UTC)
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Quote:
I bring this up whenever I notice it, which most recently was on the January edition of the "vMix Fun Time Live Show".


I had noticed your comment Gregory. Glad to share this concern with other users. This issue of color matching is really THE weakness in this wonderful world of vMix-based multicam productions.
X-Rite gives very good results in post-prod even with very different camera types like Sonys or Canons. It's easy to use, affordable, compatible with all cameras or webcams without exception and though it's not a solution for realtime correction for dealing with light changes or lenses aperture specs (it is not a CCU), I wish I could use it for initial balance of multicam projects.
usmedia  
#5 Posted : Monday, January 30, 2017 8:28:55 AM(UTC)
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+1

I think you mean the function like Newtek Connect Pro color adjustment. http://translate.newtek..../connect-screen-left.jpg

You can adjust one camera itself or set one to the master and the other three to slave.

It is actually not easy in moving sports production to use this function but it would be great when it will be integrate in vMix.

Those who want to try it. You can rent the Connect Pro app monthly.

Jan

DWAM  
#6 Posted : Monday, January 30, 2017 9:51:26 AM(UTC)
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Thanks Jan

I never tried this feature in Connect Pro. Looks like a traditional CCU, like the one for BMD Atem & cams...

X-Rite ColorChecker is a tool that helps shooting better video in prod and so far correct colors in post-production. It'd be great to take advantage of it for live production.

More details :
https://www.xritephoto.com/filmmaking

(commercial)

(shooting tutorial)

(shooting + post-prod with Resolve tutorial)

usmedia  
#7 Posted : Monday, January 30, 2017 11:01:24 AM(UTC)
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Thanks for all the examples Guillaume.

It is also with CCU not easy to calibrate cameras. I worked also with Grass Valley LDX 80 system cameras with CCU. There are so many different settings (RGB in white areas and black areas, Skin tone, pedestal, color gammas etc.) The right light in the right situation is the key for good quality pictures. When you have a good light operator, use him. When the light in the production is manageable, the light operator can also change the RGB colors in light to help you. In fast changing situations, he is your ace.



I think with this x-Rite board it will make the adjustments faster. Also the skin tones are very interesting.

Jan

DWAM  
#8 Posted : Monday, January 30, 2017 11:35:20 AM(UTC)
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Yes for sure it's difficult ! When I have the budget to hire a vision operator and rent CCU + CCU compatible cameras, I do it for sure.
BTW it's not often and most of the time, even when the lightning conditions are good or even excellent, there are still adjustments to make so that the cameras match correctly, even when you use identical models.

I've got 3 Canon HFG30/25 (they match quite correctly), 1 FS7, 1 A7s and 1 RX10III + GoPros. Having the FS7 match the rest of the equipments is a real pain in the ass. Reds and greys are totally different even in between all 3 Sony cameras, not to mention the Canons. Even when we have a lot of time to make adjustments, it's quite impossible to get a satisfying result.

With X-Rite, we have pretty good results for "not live" videos with the same equipments in a few seconds. In post-production, with Resolve or FinalCut. It's worth the money for sure.

X-Rite is not a solution for realtime adjustements during the live production (like a CCU can be) but it could be very useful when setting up the production, just before it starts, so that at least, despite the changes in lightning, you have a good starting point.
boris9831  
#9 Posted : Tuesday, February 21, 2017 6:20:24 PM(UTC)
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+1
Ittaidv  
#10 Posted : Wednesday, February 22, 2017 6:38:50 AM(UTC)
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+1 We struggle a lot with colors. Even when using the same camerabrands, or some of the same family, often colors are off. Last time we mixed an A7s with a fs700, a fs7 and some fs5. It took me 4 hours to set them all on more or less the same colors. For big gigs we now ask to have the exact light which we work with up front, so we can tune our camera's. It's not really practical.

When working with CCU's, you also need camera's which are shadeable (is that a word?). Blackmagic has some cheap ones, but then you also need to use the ATEM or a SKAARHOJ, all machines which don't work well with vmix. So, except those procamp options we have right now, it would be cool to have this xrite solution.

Peter B  
#11 Posted : Thursday, February 23, 2017 5:47:26 PM(UTC)
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vMix really needs RGB for black and RGB controls for whites. Having only one set isn't that useful as the blacks become painted very quickly.

A luminance gamma would help at lot too. A colour wheel instead of RGB faders would be more intuitive and I find the faders too coarse for fine tweaks. If these could be finer by default and hold down shift for faster changes.

An alternative would be applying a lut to the camera source, this could be generated as a global offset for each camera type. The free Resolve will create luts from live sdi and then all fundamental grading tools become available if only once prior to the show. A few different preset luts could be switchable for each camera.
DWAM  
#12 Posted : Thursday, February 23, 2017 6:23:15 PM(UTC)
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Hi Peter

X-Rite is also used in Resolve to match colors prior to applying LUTS. It's really quicker and more efficient than trying to do the color match manually unless you are a color grade specialist (I guess).
LUTS in vMix is obviously an option but I'm wondering if it is not too much CPU intensive for a multicam setup in realtime. Post-production and live production both require power but not the same way. I'm not sure about this and Martin is a magician for realtime video.
Another option would be to use LUTS in the capture board as a hardware processing. I saw that AJA Corvid 88 supports 1D Luts but still making the LUTS for many cameras is not that easy. And this card is very expensive.
thanks 1 user thanked DWAM for this useful post.
rowby on 5/2/2018(UTC)
tesn  
#13 Posted : Friday, February 24, 2017 5:08:00 PM(UTC)
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+1

Same problem. It drives me insane trying to match colors.
Ittaidv  
#14 Posted : Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:01:14 AM(UTC)
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DWAM wrote:
Hi Peter

X-Rite is also used in Resolve to match colors prior to applying LUTS. It's really quicker and more efficient than trying to do the color match manually unless you are a color grade specialist (I guess).
LUTS in vMix is obviously an option but I'm wondering if it is not too much CPU intensive for a multicam setup in realtime. Post-production and live production both require power but not the same way. I'm not sure about this and Martin is a magician for realtime video.
Another option would be to use LUTS in the capture board as a hardware processing. I saw that AJA Corvid 88 supports 1D Luts but still making the LUTS for many cameras is not that easy. And this card is very expensive.



I think vmix now uses the built in procamp controls of the capture cards, so i'm not sure if any colors are really changed by the software itself.

If you could set a LUT on each input, but only apply it when the camera is in program, it would only require 2 cams to be processed (when fading).

Da vinci resolve can do realtime grading on a sdi input as well, but that only make sense if all cameras are already matching.

Another solution is the lut box from AJA, where you would apply a lut via this box, but again I see no practical use for that in a production.

Best would be indeed some kind of x-rite, although more manual controls would already help. I can match many camera's by eye with lumetri in premiere for example. It takes some training, but once you get used to using those controls it's easy. Too bad we can't do it during a multicam..


Peter B  
#15 Posted : Saturday, March 4, 2017 6:32:28 PM(UTC)
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Ittaidv wrote:
DWAM wrote:
Hi Peter

X-Rite is also used in Resolve to match colors prior to applying LUTS. It's really quicker and more efficient than trying to do the color match manually unless you are a color grade specialist (I guess).
LUTS in vMix is obviously an option but I'm wondering if it is not too much CPU intensive for a multicam setup in realtime. Post-production and live production both require power but not the same way. I'm not sure about this and Martin is a magician for realtime video.
Another option would be to use LUTS in the capture board as a hardware processing. I saw that AJA Corvid 88 supports 1D Luts but still making the LUTS for many cameras is not that easy. And this card is very expensive.



I think vmix now uses the built in procamp controls of the capture cards, so i'm not sure if any colors are really changed by the software itself.

If you could set a LUT on each input, but only apply it when the camera is in program, it would only require 2 cams to be processed (when fading).

Da vinci resolve can do realtime grading on a sdi input as well, but that only make sense if all cameras are already matching.

Another solution is the lut box from AJA, where you would apply a lut via this box, but again I see no practical use for that in a production.

Best would be indeed some kind of x-rite, although more manual controls would already help. I can match many camera's by eye with lumetri in premiere for example. It takes some training, but once you get used to using those controls it's easy. Too bad we can't do it during a multicam..




Hi Dwan, Ittaidy,

I like the x-rite / colour match idea but it must be applying a grade or lut upstream in Resolve so a similar thing would be required in vMix.

I did some speed tests with Resolve rendering with no LUT at 93fps, then applied a lut and it's was around 92fps. I think that luts are a simple transform that would be well suited to gpu processing. I tried some more complex grades via the lut and no difference. It's amazing the subtle and radical colour grades that just a lut can achieve and you can still use Resolves colour match tool to automate the process for those new to grading.

Being realistic, implementing more powerful adjustable colour support could be a complex art and therefor not likely. Luts make use of Resolve and other dedicated tools already available with decades of experience in colour. Lumetri may export luts too. Sure this would be aimed at high end users with good hardware but it's really this level of production that see and need these tools.

Switching between a set of preset luts per camera in vMix could enable the following making them more suitable for live work eg various colour temps, +3,6,9 db of gain, gamma stretch and crush, highlight knee etc. These supplied presets could also be overridden by user luts. It could fun trading luts like football cards, a lut for an in set monitor feed in the studio - or getting arty - day for night ?

I don't think the correction we already have is done in the capture cards as it applies to file sources. I was thinking the same thing that the luts only need to run with the `air' cameras so should be possible with a decent system but I doubt luts are very computationally demanding unless Resolve is magic code.

There are few ccu capable cameras in the lower price range, BMD and JVC are the only ones I know of making such a feature more relevant. I'd happily pay $500 for lut support - now if your could `effects dissolve' between luts. It's easy being an armchair software engineer but I think this would be a killer feature for more high end work that vMix is proving it's capable of.

Peter
DWAM  
#16 Posted : Saturday, March 4, 2017 7:26:37 PM(UTC)
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Hi Peter

thanks for the input. I fully agree that anything that'd give us better color matching in vMix would be great. I'm not an expert in color grading, just trying to find solutions.

However, I also did tests with LUTS in Resolve and it appeared to me that applying an SLOG2 LUT to a FS7 or a RX10 does not really match colors the same way. The look of the image is the same but not the colors. It's difficult for me to explain this in english but I have better results with x-rite when I want exact same reds for example (reds are pain in the ass with Sony). Then applying a LUT after x-rite color correction allows to adjust the look equally over all footage. I think these 2 solutions are complementary but not really alternatives to each other. Might be wrong, I don't really know.

For LUTS, here's what I use : https://luts.iwltbap.com/
Notice that the creator of these LUTS also uses X-Rite

Let's hope vMix have these options someday!
Ittaidv  
#17 Posted : Saturday, March 4, 2017 9:45:16 PM(UTC)
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LUTs are great, but imagine this situation:

You're shooting an outdoor concert, which starts during the day, and ends at night.

You use all the same camera's, but also a few ptz and a gopro.

Once it becomes dark, you have the golden hour, before it's really dark.

During the golden hour, you have to tweak the cameras continiously with small incriments, and fix small color variations untill night falls for good. The LUT that seemed perfect in daylight, might make your cameras look totaly different during night.

In such situations either manual controls over color, or have some kind of accurate xrite kind of control to do it quickly.

If you don't have this, you will see, that you just can't have enough LUTs to keep color in balance all the time until it's completely dark.
DWAM  
#18 Posted : Sunday, March 5, 2017 5:09:05 AM(UTC)
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@Ittaidv

Well for this magic hour situation I'm pretty sure X-Rite wouldn't help either, and only a fully CCU-capable production kit is able to manage this.

X-Rite requires all cameras to shoot the "passport" board for initial quick setting. If the light changes, you must do it again. So it is not an option if we need to go on stage at the end of each song! lol!
Peter B  
#19 Posted : Sunday, March 5, 2017 11:56:16 AM(UTC)
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Dwan, funny you mention Sony post luts as we were recently discussing this at work. I have found them pretty useless and usually just make a base grade myself. My colleague had similar issues when processing camera originals at a huge post facility in London. I initially thought this was just me.

Ittaidv, I agree this is far from the ideal live solution just a good start that may not be that hard to implement. It would allow you to correct fundamental colour differences between brands and then have a few warmer / cooler versions. The Sony ccu cameras allow you to link multiple ccus and then globally apply offset corrections since the lighting changes would affect all cameras equally. Dream on.

I have a few old JVC 251s that have ccu options but at $US 3800 per camera that wasn't happening. I've been able to hack the protocol and now have DMX lighting control of most parameters. They burn 16 channels per camera. It's cool being able transition between presets over time.
http://au.jvc.com/pro_ca...ohd_camcorders/rm_lp25u/

This looks ideal, check out remote camera control -
https://www.blackmagicde...s/blackmagicstudiocamera

RGB white and RGB black painting would also be very welcome.
There's so many good affordable cameras but no ccu options.
Ittaidv  
#20 Posted : Sunday, March 5, 2017 4:36:40 PM(UTC)
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DWAM wrote:
@Ittaidv

Well for this magic hour situation I'm pretty sure X-Rite wouldn't help either, and only a fully CCU-capable production kit is able to manage this.

X-Rite requires all cameras to shoot the "passport" board for initial quick setting. If the light changes, you must do it again. So it is not an option if we need to go on stage at the end of each song! lol!



We often do this IRL :) Most of the time it's 1 or 2 cameras, and I operate them than myself during the golden hour and constantly tweak them in camera until the sun goes down..
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