Editing color in videos

February 14, 2010 3:12 PM

Is there any way to edit the color in a video after it has been shot in 'special color' (it is now mostly black and white)?

I shot a piece without noticing the 'special color' feature. Now I simply want realistic color. The only thing I can find in editing (imovie) is hues and themes. Not okay. Would Final Cut Pro have a 'revert to color' feature? Can I clip .jpgs from the film and edit them to real color in Photoshop?

posted by Surfurrus to computers & internet (10 answers total)

I'm not a movie editing expert, but I think it's pretty much impossible to go from black and white back to color.
posted by kylej at 3:18 PM on February 14, 2010

It's not impossible-- they colorize B&W films all the time. What it is is probably way out of the OP's budget, and certainly outside of iMovie's ability.

Find your local Final Cut Pro or After Effects nerd, Surfurrus, and ask him or her if they have some way of color-correcting your footage-- something like Apple's Color, or Red Giant's Magic Bullet Colorista. Expect them to want some form of payment, like a case of beer or a bottle of really nice bourbon. Go hang out with them and pick up the particulars while you guys demolish the case/ bottle.

Do not expect some sort of magic full restoration to original color; it probably won't happen. A good color geek might be able to give you a look you can live with, though.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 4:19 PM on February 14, 2010

Colorizing black-and-white footage is a giant fucking pain in the ass. It's a massively expensive process that requires a bunch of manual choices. In the past, it was literally done frame-by-frame with paintbrush. Now, you can certainly do it by dumping all of your video to jpg frames and editing them in Photoshop. Even in Photoshop, though, this process is going to require that you manually modify the color of each object in each frame of the video. This will take somewhere between days and weeks of full-time work for each minute of video, depending on your skill with Photoshop (30 fps * 60 seconds = 1800 frames per minute of video).

The last time I worked in video editing (about 5 years ago), there was absolutely nothing that would do this process for you automatically. As a computer graphics/vision programmer, I can't really imagine that it'd be possible with any significant fidelity. You could take the brightness as shade, but there are infinite many hues with the same shade as any given grey-level. Maybe with deep knowledge of the sensor used, something could be done. But, I really doubt it.

Colorizing black-and-white footage is painstaking.
posted by Netzapper at 5:46 PM on February 14, 2010

Yikes, sigh, argh ... oh well ... I didn't really have my hopes up. Live and learn.

The project is a small thing. Too bad I can't re-film - but, I really don't think I could find the acrobats again. I guess I have to do a work-around. Maybe I will put this section in slow motion and add effects to make it seem like I did it on purpose.

Thanks to all of you for your mana'o!
posted by Surfurrus at 9:26 PM on February 14, 2010

I guess I have to do a work-around. Maybe I will put this section in slow motion and add effects to make it seem like I did it on purpose.

Why do you need to do that? Just desaturate everything and do the film in black-and-white. Shooting in monochrome is an acceptable stylistic choice. And, in many instances, it can look far cleaner and less cluttered than a color shot. There's a reason people still make documentaries and films in black and white; and it's not just because they can't afford color reversal stock.
posted by Netzapper at 10:29 PM on February 14, 2010

I remember the case of a guy doing a corporate video. One part was an interview with a company honcho. The video of the interview got messed up and lost all color information. The guy was horrified and planned to fess up to the company. Before taking that step, though, he cut the video with with B&W footage and the company loved it. Artsy look, they assumed it was done on purpose.
posted by trinity8-director at 12:16 AM on February 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

I do professional digital-video color-correction for a living (for TV commercials and indie films...on O'ahu, coinkydinkly enough!), and I can safely say that for the most part, you're basically S.O.L...but not totally S.O.L. if you're willing to spend a lot of time and sweat on it.

It's basically impossible to automatically bring back all the "realistic color" from a B&W image, but it is possible to map certain key grayscale ranges to a new color, the most important range being the skintone range. Using dedicated color-correction software like Apple Color, or a compositing package like After Effects, you can "select" a range of luminance levels in an image (in a similar way that greenscreen keying works), and then push new color into only those areas.

Skintone tends to live in the midrange luminance levels in an image, so you can select only the mids, then push hue/saturation from the yellow-through-magenta range, just enough so that there's a perceptible skintone color in the midranges. You'll have to use masking in order to limit this treatment to only the skin areas, of course.

You'll find that some types of shots work better than others. For example, if you look at this video demo, the "Last Woman on Earth" clip would actually be much simpler to colorize, because the luminance range and contrast of the skintones are well defined, relative to the rest of the image. And since the overall movement of the subjects is relatively stable, you wouldn't need to do much heavy frame-by-frame masking.

If you're lucky, there might actually be differences between the individual Red, Green and Blue channels of the video that you can use to get a better selection. This is a very common trick that Photoshop retouchers use, and it's equally applicable to video and film.

The "Bride of the Gorilla" example would be much more difficult, because of its much wider dynamic range (there are too many other areas in the image that are of the same luminance level as the skintones). You'd have to motion track the guy so you can attach your masks to the tracker, which would help make masking a bit easier, but you still have to do a ton of precise frame-by-frame tweaking.

So, while that demo clip demonstrates that it's totally possible to do what you want using desktop software, this process would only be tolerable for only the shortest of clips. The video would have to be pretty damn special and unique if I were to do this on more than 10 or 15 seconds of footage.
posted by melorama at 2:47 AM on February 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

In all my videojaculation, I neglected to mention that the whole point of paying special attention to the skintones is that the viewer is more likely to subconsciously "forgive" or believe any wacky color treatment you perform on an image, as long as the skintones are relatively believable.

There is a renaissance in filmmaking nowadays where people like to push greens and blues into the blacks (a look that was already tired and overused a few years after The Matrix did it...but now it's back), but what makes the modern versions of these looks tolerable is that colorists are now hip to protecting the skintones so that such hyper-stylized imagery retains an element of normalcy that doesn't upset the viewer over the course of the film.
posted by melorama at 2:57 AM on February 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

UPDATE!

I just want to thank everyone for their advice. I am so inspired by your expertise. I can only say all of these answers were useful. Perhaps someday I will have enough experience to play with these processes more.

Here is my finished video (with insert of 'acrobats on artcar' in - sort of artsy- B&W). Mahalo, mahalo to all who advised me. I am happy I didn't bang my head on a wall about this one.

http://www.youtube.com/user/dktrsus#p/a/u/0/w8rCsdM1fAE
http://www.vimeo.com/9841982

This little project is mainly for my family and friends ... although, I believe what we are doing should be extended to a web page on childrens' collaborative art as a meditative and transformation opportunity (or something like that?) ... That project is on my 'to do' list ...
posted by Surfurrus at 5:51 PM on March 1, 2010

Whoops ...

http://www.youtube.com/user/dktrsus#p/a/u/0/w8rCsdM1fAE

http://www.vimeo.com/9841982



posted by Surfurrus at 5:53 PM on March 1, 2010