Colour difficulty
 

Hi, all,

Had my XL1S for a couple of weeks and shot tons of vid on different settings to test. When I burn it to DVD and watch it on the TV, it looks a bit washed out compared to the broadcasted programmes. I have both analog and digital progs on the TV and the digital stuff seems less saturated than analog. Is this due to the MPEG2 compression? I have shot with colour gain set 3 notches up, white balanced with a Warm Card and shoved up the saturation in post. When I get a colour match with the TV, the skin tones always look as if the people have been lying on a beach for a week. Am I expecting too much from the camera or am I doing something basically wrong? I must have read every post on these forums but no-one seems to have posted anything similar.

Any and all guidance appreciated.

Mpeg2 compression/decompression doesn't change saturation nor does it change the white balance or the color matrix. How do you connect yr DVD player and what do you mean by the digital programs on yr TV, DTB? Satellite?. If faces looks redish instead of normally tanned when you crank up saturation you should correct this by the hue setting.

Hi, Andre,

DVD player is connected to TV via SCART. I'm in UK, so get analog terrestrial and digital FREEVIEW. FREEVIEW BBC1 and Terrestrial BBC1 are a whole different game when it comes to colour. The analog is much more vibrant. Unless I'm smoking too much :)

Can't you connect through components in order to avoid the Pal encoding which enters the game when you connect through conposite or Y/C. Normally PAL shouldn't result in "fried" faces, this is an NTSC problem, but yr DVD Pal encoder could introduce some shortcommings. Testing yr problem on a different installation could refine some conclusions.

I think what you are saying (hopefully) is that it's not the camera. I'm using the native Premiere Pro encoder for DVD. I'll have a closer look at what's happening downstream and hope I get a result. Many thanks for the advice.