TrueColor HD200/250 available!
 

Hi all.

TrueColor for the HD200/250 is finally available. This configuration took a considerable amount of time and effort. I wanted to be absolutely sure that this was the most accurate reproduction of colors that I could obtain with the HD250. It took several different approaches but it's finally available. I wrote, like I did for the HD100, a complete walkthough of the process and there are images that can be downloaded and examined independently to verify the results presented.
All the material is available at my site: http://www.paolociccone.com

Enjoy!

Thank you so much Paolo. So many of us have been waiting for this. Tantissime grazie!

True Color Questions
 

Paolo,
first of all I like to thank you very much for your work. I liked your settings with my HD100 and now I will enter the data into my new HD200.

I have three questions:
1. You propose to set BLACK to NORMAL. Underneath this parameter there are two further settings, i.e., STRETCH LEVEL and COMPRESS LEVEL. To which values should the latter two be set?

2. With GAMMA you propose to set NORMAL. In my camera the values for GAMMA are: OFF, CINEMA, FILMOUT, STANDARD. Which value shall be set here, and which value shall be assihgned to LEVEL of the GAMMA setting?

3. Which value shall be set to COLOR GAIN ?

I would be pleased to get your answers.

BTW there are some difficulties in your web-pages with text which overlaps other text.

Best regards,
Joachim

It doesn't matter because the black is not stretched nor compressed. Those values are to be modified if you find yourself in a situation where you need to modify the interpretation of black because of specific lighting conditions. As TrueColor is designed to produce an image that is as close to reality as possible, blacks are not stretched or compressed.

My bad, it's meant to be Standard. Typo.

No gain.
Hmm, can't see it, except for the copyright notice at the end tht should be now fixed, together with the corrections that you mentioned. I tesetd it both with Firefox and Safari and they render it right. If you can provide a screen grab and information about your browser (name and version) I might be able to reproduce the case and put a workaround for it

Take care.

I think you must mean NORMAL gain. No color gain would render a B & W image.

So setting the gain switch on the side of the camera to "0 dB" should give you a black picture, right?

This setting has positive and negative values. "No gain" means no positive gain. To get a B&W picture you need to set the gain to negative values, in effect desaturating the image. Hence "no gain" means no increment or decrement, just keep it normal.

Thanks
 

Paolo - thanks for spending the effort and the time to post these settings.

I have been shooting with several variants for a while now, and can honestly say that your settings and others like them make the camera worth sooo much more.

I'm really glad that you and Tim and others are pursuing excellent color - those of us with JVC cameras can be especially grateful!!

Thank you Jeffrey and thank you for testing the intermediate versions.
As much as I think that it's a good thing to have readily available versions of camera configurations I invite everyone interested in knowing more about the cameras to spend the time to read the article in its entirety. I tried to make the process as clear and as transparent as possible. Altough I verified the results many, many times I invite everyone to challenge and verify the results.

Paolo,
You are great.
E

Corrected True Color Values
 

Paolo,
thank you very much for your clarification. I have set the Camera as you proposed and will see the results soon, going for vacations to Lake Garda, Italy.

The problems with the text in my browser will be reported by e-mail together wit a screen shot.

Best regards,
Joachim

CSS-P workaround in place
 

Hi Joachim.

Thanks for the email. I can't test my pages on IE8 but I found out that Opera on the Wii has the same issues. Both browsers have bugs related to the treatment of CSS-P elements. I converted the page to use the less precise but widely implemented tables and now it should display correctly. I'm posting here so that all people affected are now aware of the fix. I still suggest to use the more capable and standard-compliant Firefox.

Thanks for the help.

Thank you for TC Paolo!
I've been waiing for this.

(hahaha, I also have a Wii)

Interesting; I'll give it a shot on my friend's HD200.

heath

Ciao Paolo, im very happy i can use TC3 on the HD200, im looking forward to the next project, thanks i really appreciate it!

Thomas

Thanks paolo, now i can use true color 3 in my hd251e

Thanks very much here also Paulo. Quick question....On your other posting on the DCX site you seemed finally happy upgrading the settings from version .9 to 1.0 and pronouncing them available for trial to others. But master black there you have at -1 vs -3 here. Did you adjust further after those posts?

Also quick observation with them. When I first got my 200 a couple weeks ago I was concerned that manual white balance in direct sun kept taking at 4300K instead of around 5600K where I would have expected, with intermittant 5200 at times. Though footage seemed OK with a little undersaturation of color. But FAW in direct sunlight was way too blue. With your settings (from that prior posting, master black at -1) now FAW in sunlight seems correct. Still need far more shooting and testing but colors seem really nice.

Ron.
Yes, I have changed the settings from what I thought it was the final version because I did yet another setup and adjusted the lights a last time and found that the lighting used before was causing an incorrect value for the blacks. That's why it takes so long to get this kind of configuration right. You need to verify the results several times with different kind of lights in order to be able to reproduce the conditions that brought to a given result. If you cannot reproduce the results then something was wrong in the original setup.
The white balance that you found is consistent with the fact that sunlight changes colors temperature during the day. Also, the presence of ND filters can alter your reading. What did you use for balancing the camera?

What did I use? LOL....white top of cooler I had outside with me with beers in it. :) And ND 2 with shutter up to 500 to knock down the light.

All right, the cooler might be neutral white but then again, it might be not :)
The different bias in each surface can account for different reading. That's why I insist on using the DSC chart, it's been verified to be neutral by spectrometer analysis so the reading is the based on the precision of the camera.

Idealistic, but impractical for real-world shooting. The world doesn't stop for you to set up a chip chart. The time you spend white balancing is time spent not shooting, and it can mean the difference between getting the shot and getting there just a little too late. The beer cooler gets you in the ballpark and lets you get on with shooting. The people at home won't see the difference.

Stephen, not everything is a run-and-gun situation and Ron didn't specify that that was the case. He asked about different color temperature as expected, I analyzed the possible causes. I'm not talking about what you should do or shouldn't doon the set although there are many situations where the proper setup is doable. case in point, last thursday we shot an interview with M.David Mullen, with three HD100 and it took a couple of seconds to show the chart in front of each camera. The person in charge of the slate does that and at the end you have a reference point that allows you to do color matching in post in a few seconds.
Different situations, different solutions.

Funny that there's plenty of time to bring a cooler full of beer, but not enough to properly white balance. Well, actually, that pretty much sums up my life.

LOL! But if you ONLY had time to bring one - which would you bring, anyway!?

Paolo.

A long shot enquiry.

Are you ever likely to stick a P+S Technik Mini35-400 or the new Mini35 "Compact" on front of your HD100 and HD250 and do a true-colour scene file for the combination sometime in the future?

A silly question but are your scene files valid across NTSC and PAL or are they NTSC only?

Hi Bob.
I actually worked with the Mini 35 last year with the HD100. We used a Cooke zoom and shot 3 commercials. There was no need to change the configuration for that setup.
The config files are created by testing the colors in the 709 color space so there is no dependecy with either NTSC or PAL. The frame rate and/or resolution don't really mater.

Hope this helps.

Paolo.

Thanks for your response. I'll pass this on to the JVC driver I have enquired on behalf of.

Question,

One of our crews loaded Truecolor 250 . They were on a golf course shooting and immediately noticed it looking very contrasty.

We noticed you have the master black set lower than 0 and you are using standard gamma instead of cinema. Would it be advisable for us to adjust those black settings how we like, or will it effect color output as well?

We were pleased by the look of the gamma on Truecolor for the 100 and it actually looks great using those settings on the 250.

Thanks

Dave

Dave - I'll jump in and say that the first things you should consider adjusting to suit a particular situation is the black stretch/compress settings.
Midday in open sun is challenging for video of course anyway - and 20x20 silks or HMI lights don't always respond when I call....
Pumping up black stretch will help, and working with exposure/ composition of course...
Customizing for high contrast scenes would be possible, but I don't think cine gamma would be the best move. If you need a more dramtic effect, look at gamma settings and master black. The color procces settings stay pretty true to the eye with black adjustment I've found, but this is without scopes or critical monitoring.

Dave, please look at information about TrueColor from my website as that is my favorite way of supporting it. Different light situation can create different requirements, try bringing the Master Black to 0 and using the Cinema Gamma

If the settings don't work for what you're shooting, why are you practically asking permission to change them? It's *your* shoot, *your* camera. However good Paolo's settings are, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use them exactly as they are.

Can someone post some footage with this new scene file using either the HD200 or 250, perhaps a scene where there are alot of colors, that would be awesome..... it would be great to see examples of the scene file in action. Thanks