Color correction revisited

[johannesj]

Whi not just use a monitor with firewire input ?

[DMS Video]

Tingsern, Mike, SoundFreak and Johannesj,

I thank you all for your input and help. I have tried every combination suggested and others that were random. I have to believe that there is something wrong with my laptop. The integrator thinks there is a problem so I'm sending the laptop back. I never knew just how much I needed an external monitor. I burned a copy of the production I'm working on and some of the color (white balance) was off. It was just about impossible to color correct on the laptop. I took some of the bad footage into Adobe Premier and had the color right on the money in a couple of seconds. Then I had an idea. Why not color correct the bad shots in Premier, output an avi, bring it into my Edius laptop and simply replace the clips. As my ordeal continues, that avi now lost saturation and contrast and I can't fix it because of the original reason for this post. It's almost ridiculous at this point. I think I need a vacation or (and I can't believe I'm saying this) switch back to Premier until I have this (hardware issue) figured out. Maybe my first Edius system should have been a desktop.

Thank you.

[NakedEye]

Hi DMS

It seems like you are trying to get Edius to output your timeline to an external monitor conected either to the laptops SVideo or DVI port......unfortunately this is not possible with GForce 8 graphics chips.....if your posted specs are correct then your laptop has a GForce 8 graphics chip & support for overlay out finnished with GForce 7 chips.

I believe Premiere and Vegas are still able to get a preview output from thier respective timelines via internal programing....Edius however does not have this ability with GF8 chips.....in any case you will be seeing an RGB overlay, not very accurate for CC.

You may well have an issue with your graphics chip....especially if you are getting no output what so ever not even a desktop....but even when fixed you will not get the Edius timeline output to TV HDTV monitor.

Please ignore this post if I have completely missed the point.

Regards

Dave.

[DMS Video]

Dave,

Thanks for your post. At this point I'm trying to output in SD. As far as I know (and have been told) this is possible. However, as you stated, I know I will not be able to output HD which we recently began shooting but I haven't edited as of yet. Does this sound right?

Best

[pjsssss]

Hi David,

Now you know why I have the Sony external for SD and the Dell 24" for the HD mopnitoring. ;-)

You really would be better off to go with a desktop and one of the GV hardware cards for the external monitoring. Once you use it, it is very hard to do without one. You may have to go with the route we do...capture to an external HD in the field and do basic edits there until we can come back and hook it up to the main machine and go from there.

[tingsern]

Same for me. I record and capture in the field on P2 cards, play it back for rough checks (stuff like in case a tree grows on somebody's head, etc) ... using my Lenovo's T60 Thinkpad, but, do serious stuff (colour corrections, etc) on a workstation using Panasonic Broadcast monitor plugged into Canopus NX card.

I never trust a computer monitor (LCD or CRT) to be able to reproduce SD or HD signals correctly. RGB versus YUV.

[DMS Video]

Which Panasonic monitor are you using? I'll be in the market for one very soon, lol.

I have my EX1s in to Sony to update the firmware. In the meantime we are slowly making our way from SD to HD. Of course there are still a few bumps in the road but I'm looking forward to the change.

[tingsern]

You can see from my signature - 2 of them. One is 17" and the other 8" which I bring it along for field monitoring usage. Both are HD-SDI and component - The 17" is what I use for connecting it to my EDIUS NX card.

[SoundFreak]

Maybe my first Edius system should have been a desktop.

I think this is not related to Edius, but any NLE for that matter.
In my opinion a laptop is / can be very useful when in the field or a long adventure / holiday to capture and store your valuable footage from HDD Cam or any form of solid state storage , of course when working with tape this is not an issue.

To do some rough cuts to safe time it's great, but when it comes to color correction, effects tuning, audio sweetening etc. there is only so much you can do with a laptop .........

For a main Video NLE System to be used in a studio environment a laptop should never be considered, just my 2 cents .............

There are however many external interfaces for (portable) audio for the pc / mac platform, and recently an interesting SD / HD video & HD audio interface from MOTU, but at present it only functions with a handfull of NLE software (not Edius) but features some impressive input / output for both video and audio.
The main beauty of this unit is that all video output, being it SD or HD, analog or component are allways real time, all the time available on every connector.
SD will scale realtime on a HD monitor and vice versa, some thing for Canopus to look at me thinks.

http://www.motu.com/marketing/motu_products/v4hd/

[DMS Video]

SoundFreak,

I agree that you really need a desktop. My initial intention was to buy a laptop to learn how to edit with Edius. I come from the Adobe Premier "days" and all the way back to linear crash editing. I have been able to pick up Edius pretty fast. I've been considering (and experimenting with) different workflow options using a laptop in conjunction with a desktop. It turns out (apparently) that what you said is very true. I still hope I can figure something out.

Best

[DMS Video]

Tingsern,

I'm going to take a look (no pun intended) at your monitor. Thanks.

[tingsern]

David,

I don't know if those Panasonic broadcast monitors are out of production, replaced with a new model, or may not be available in your country. Panasonic might have equivalent models to those I have.

The 17" I have is 1280x720 - which is exactly what I used for filming my HD videos. I don't use "Full HD" (1920 x 1080). If you intend to use "Full HD" - you might want to consider a larger monitor - which allows you to see the entire view without scaling down the picture.

[DMS Video]

Thanks,

I'm early in my search so it's a great starting point.