Milky Shots
 

I have 16+ years of professional shooting under my belt. I’ve had my XL2 for about 3 weeks. I shot about an hour of footage before shooting my nieces wedding last weekend. The footage looks horrible. No color hardly at all. The sky was a vibrant blue and the trees were very green, but not on tape. The shots all look milky. I white balanced for each scene etc… I was shooting 24p with the settings just touching the (cine look) with the blacks crushed a little. I did not shoot in 30p. Should I have? I’ve shot with the Panasonic 100A and have gotten great shots without a lot of effort. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks, Got Milk?

Which program mode were you shooting in?

Hi Chris, I was in the M (Manual) mode the entire shoot.

Test the camera while it is hooked up through an s video cable to a reliable and fairly color correct tv. Try adjusting the Custom Preset settings, including the saturation level.

Douglas

Ya, Guess I just need some more tapes run through this thing. More buttons means more chances to mess up. Well, at least it was a free shoot I did it on.

The film look may have contributed to this as well. However, you should be
able to punch the colors up quite a bit in post with a good color corrector.
Did you try this already?

Rob,
No not yet, just looked at the raw. I just expected more. I'll work on it, and bring a monitor next time.

Just as a one-time experiment, try shooting in the "A" Automatic mode (it's basically a Program AE mode) and take a look at the results you get. I'd very very curious about how that looks to you.

David,

Some food for thought here at:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=32223

and accompanying footage at

http://homepage.mac.com/barrygoyette/FileSharing24.html

chow

Barry

I have had very nice results so far on my XL2.

I think the XL2 is much more accurate to real colors. I truly believe we are so used to watch over saturated footage on TV's where the color is cranked up all the way or film that is more saturated than real life. And I think this is good !

If you really want more colors , you can always do that in post or crank up the saturation on the cam. But I like starting from reality and go to where ever I want to in post.

Frank

Yes, the colors seem to be more close to reality, but I prefer the more vivid colors inherent to the XL1 and XL1S. I've tried to mimic that in the XL2, but hav'nt been able to as yet.

Michael Hamilton

I experienced the same thing. We shot a series of interviews with a dvx and the footage came back extremely saturated. When we shot the second set of interviews with the xl2 I was shocked at the difference in color. The XL2 was very cold and not very vibrant at all. It was very easy to fix in post. The colors you want are there you just need a little tweak of the saturation. And I agree with one of the previous posters that we are all too used to viewing oversaturated video. The XL2 shoots very true colors and I will wager if you had a monitor there you could have adjusted in camera to get the look you want.