Adding 5600 to 3200 color correction for shooting monitors

[Charles Papert]

Hey: I have a few things coming up where we need to play back source footage on a monitor that will be in shot. In the past we've color corrected on the day via the 3-way color corrector in FCP but it's a slightly inexact science and takes a little time on set. Does anyone know of a FCP7 plug-in that would simply add the proper amount of correction to existing footage (essentially adding a 5600 to 3200 correction onto properly balanced images, giving them an orange look to eye)?

[Daniel Epstein]

Hey Charles,
You should be able to use paste attributes from one clip to another if you find a good color correction you like. Still a bit of a force as your monitor on set will have something to do with your adjustments. Also if your clips have different footage you might not find the same amount of correction works equally well. Can't you put an 85 filter on the monitor screen? I have also been using daylight sources when shooting monitors and people in scenes which seems to give me good results.

[Charles Papert]

Hi Daniel, thanks for the suggestions!

Applying 85 to the monitor is a PITA--have done it in the past when there is no alternative and taking the time to do the precision cuts and potentially getting reflection issues isn't really the way to go. As far as whether a global correction will work for all clips--if the clips were properly balanced in the first place, then yes, it will work. I recently had an old SD CRT on set for a period piece and we brought in the old school sync box, hadn't seen that in at least 10 years. It had a dedicated button for processing the 5600 to 3200 function and it worked perfectly.

For yesterday's work we ended up putting a grayscale clip on the monitor, pointing our camera at it and my DIT colored the feed through his setup. And yes, he had to jockey the settings on the monitor as well, but that was more of a function of brightness and contrast than color. I do believe that there is a global correction (as proved by the old sync box) but at least we have the LUT from yesterday if it comes up again.

Finally--yes, shooting with daylight sources at 5600 will also solve the problem but that's not practical for me in many instances where this comes up (this was a bar set with many practicals).

[Daniel Epstein]

Charles,
I agree these issues do use up time and there is no perfect solution at the moment. Your grayscale method actually sounds pretty good. Shooting at 3200K or lower and expecting a 5600K source or higher to look great just by feeding it a biased signal doesn't sound perfect although it can work. Also what is good or passable depends on how much of the screen is in the scene. Some time has to be spent since there aren't any monitors I know which actually output 3200K even though some of them had or have a preset that is called that.
Regardless building a preset Color correct seems like a useful thing to do if you are going to use it. It may be simple enough you can write down the numbers instead of trying to do the color wheel look and keep them somewhere so you can rebuild it if you don't have access to it. The reason I don't consider it a global correction is different monitors have different display colors so if you look at three different monitors you would probably end up with similar but not quite correct results. Kind of like matching cameras in reverse. At least you will be in the ball park.