It's day 5 here in Lembeh with the Canon 70D. Today I shot a mix of stills and video; I also squeezed in a night dive so not a lot of time to put video together tonight, I but I did manage to get some examples for the color correction described below.
Yesterday I mentioned that the clips I showed the past two nights were straight out of the camera, with no color correction or other manipulation. Some of the clips did need a bit of tweaking though, and one of the important things about a video file from a given camera is whether it can stand up to editing, especially color correction. Now, this is not RAW video, so we can't expect a large amount of headroom for color shifts, but hopefully it will allow a reasonable amount.
In yesterdays clip, The Blue Ring Octopus shot looked too yellow (warm) to me. I was using custom white balance and was set for a subject a bit farther away when this cool little octo showed up, and I didn't want to miss the shot by doing a white balance. The Porcelain Crab shot looks ok, but when I first started shooting it, my white balance was way too magenta and yellow. I noticed it, and given that the crab was unlikely to scurry off, I took the time to fix my white balance in the camera. This is a good example, because we thus have a reference clip to look at.
The Blue Ring Octopus shot was captured in the IPB format 1920x1080p at 30fps; the Porcelain Crab was shot at the same resolution but in the ALL-I format. The octopus shot weighed in at about 30 Mbps and the crab at 91 Mbps. The movie below shows the before and after of a quick color correction of each clip, and the last clip is the reference shot of the crab. I used Adobe Premiere Pro's Fast Color Corrector effect, moving the slider away from the colors I wanted to reduce. This could also be done easily in Final Cut or other video editors or color graders. As you can see, this quick edit, though fairly subtle, makes a difference in both images. When I have a little more time, I'd like to try it again with, say Premiere's more powerful 3-way color corrector, but for the purposes of demonstration this seems pretty good.
That's it for today, check back tomorrow for the last entry in this series.