Needing shadow, highlight, midtone tips for colorfast.

[Mikenet82]

Any general tips and rules of thumb for colorfast would be great, but the thing I'm wanting the know the most is what color saturation levels are common for shadow, highlights, and midtones. I realize that each video will be different and require various increases and decreases based on how dull or vibrant the colors already are so what I'm wanting to know is how to change them relative to each other, or what are common increases for your average dull video which has lost some color.

I'm working on old VHS tapes so all of them will need the color to be more vibrant due to the settings of the camera when these were recorded and based on video degradation happening over time. Common increase settings for shadow, highlights, and midtones will help. What settings would be best relative to each other would be even better. In other words is it common to increase the saturation of the highlights more than the shadows, or vice versa? A range of settings could be used so it seems complicated to me.

Right now I have it set to boost the color in this way...

Highlights- 15
Midtones- 20
Shadows- 25

But perhaps it's common to increase the Highlights more than the shadows, I'm still fairly new so wouldn't know other than by guessing.

Any tips on that would be a great help, and I'm open to other general rules of thumb in colorfast as well.

[Ken Berry]

I confess I have never used the NewBlue Colorfast filter, so I can't offer any sensible suggestions. But I assume that none of the presets which comes with that filter -- and in your case, especially the Old Home Movie preset -- don't provide a basis for further experimentation.

Hopefully, though, someone who uses that filter might be able to offer something more useful...

[aljimenez]

Just a general tip about the NewBlue filters. They all default to using key frames, and the dialog box presents one key frame already added right in the middle of the video clip. This was always a source of irritation to me. Now I immediately remove that middle key frame, and move the position to the beginning of the video clip to start out.

[asik1]

I think it was reported that NBcolorfast = render slow.

[tletter]

I'm working on old VHS tapes so all of them will need the color to be more vibrant

You might want to try out either the "Video Tuneup" or "Video Tuneup Plus" filter.

[Mikenet82]

Thanks for the help so far everyone, I'm really hoping to have this plugin make my videos look better. It seems to be one of the most powerful all purpose color filters out there, it's just been a struggle figuring it out.

tletter

Hopefully, I don't need the extra plugin, I may check out "Video Tuneup" anyway but as of now I seem to be able to fix some of the imperfections with desnow and denoise filters by using keyframes to up the settings on the bad parts. Right now color and brightness settings are my primary focus, if video tuneup works on that perhaps I could get some use out of it, but I'd want control over various areas in the video.

asik1

Newblue filters really do slow down the rendering process, especially with keyframes where the program has to calculate changes. It seems the more you do to a video the longer it takes Corel to figure it out. In my experience, the same thing happened in the Powerdirector video editing program.

aljimenez

I hear you on the keyframes, I had to learn things like that with trial and error myself. I've still got a long way to go, but have come to like the keyframes due to the power to edit certain scenes separately. I'm not sure if you know yet, (probably) but if you have a keyframe at the beginning of a video, the settings will taper off if there's not a keyframe further down with the same properties. I'll usually either turn keyframes off or have two identical keyframes at the start and end of the video if the whole video will have constant settings.

Ken Berry

I'll have to check closer to see if there is a good preset for VHS tapes that'll help. Also, thanks anyway, I'm pretty patient so I'll check back here periodically to see if anyone knows about Shadow and Highlight settings. Maybe I'll get lucky, video editing has been hard to learn on my own, a lot of things I find out by accident.

[lata]

Hi Mike

I assume you are aware that we can add several filters, 5 I believe. (deselect Replace last Filter)
In the past I have used the Auto Levels + Auto Exposure which seemed to work for me.
The order you use/add the filters will change the effect.
Obviously each video may need a different treatment and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

[Mikenet82]

Lata

I'll experiment some with those as well if I don't get colorfast figured out. I do use multiple filters and have some already in place, unfortunately, but if I end up needing to try something else I could perhaps remove one of the ones I have set (probably colorfast). The reason I've been wanting to use that one is that it's highly customizable.