Hey guys, so I'm coming to you with a semi-emergency.
I filmed an improv show (actually, several to get enough footage) and I'm cutting it down to the 'best' scenes into a compilation DVD. Right now I'm using the machines in one of my school's labs.
I'm using Adobe Premire Pro 1.5 (In hindsight, I think the new labs have 2.0 installed, but I started the project in 1.5 and I'm so far along that I don't want to start over now).
Basically my problem is that I'm trying to touch up the color and am getting a very strange problem during the fade-out. I think that the problem is coming from the fact that, even though I asked them to keep the lighting as constant as possible for me, they dropped the lights at the end of scenes and such (so that the raw footage basically has a built-in fade-out instead of me doing it in post). This bugged me filming and also during this whole post, but I wasn't running the show (and not getting paid for this) so I didn't have much say. So basically my problem is that during this, instead of going to black like the un-color balanced footage does, the color balanced footage fades to snow (It's pretty orange/blue snow). I guess Adobe is getting confused by the change in lighting/color temperature. This happens if I use both the auto-color as well as if I color correct manually.
I've also tried to set up the 'animation' sequence and as the footage fades out, the colors go back to default. It works a bit better, but it still doesn't really look right. Maybe it's just me and that is the 'correct' way it should be, but looking at it with and without the color correction just makes the fade look differently (or do you think this is mainly because, obviously, the colors are different?
I've also got the brightness/contrast touched up a bit (the scene I'll show you was meant to be a dark scene, so I had to play with that a bit to make it look better), and turning this off seems to help a bit, but not great.
I just am getting confused at this point because I'm not really sure what to try next. Because of that, I grabbed two clips out of my project to show you guys (sorry for the small res and heavy compression, but I don't think it really has to be high quality to get the point across). The first clip is simply the problem that's happening. The second clip I grabbed the footage 3 different times. The first is again the problem (same as first clip). The second part of it is with the contrast turned off and the color still enabled. And the third is just to give you an idea of what it looks like without contrast or color enabled (the raw, un-color corrected footage). Obviously from the third part, it needs color correction. I wanted to cut out the in-footage fade-out, but unfortunately it's too close to the end of the scene (I guess I'm not creative enough to figure out a way around it?).
In any case, I've put a ton of effort into this project and am just running out of steam right now. I want to get it finished before the holidays for them, but I'm stuck right now.  As always, thanks for any input!
The first vid:
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The second vid:
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