I personally don't think it looks that bad, but that's just me. I also have a hard time looking at blue illumination, it tends to look fuzzy to me.

LEDs are strange beasts in that they have very peaky spectrums, which means that a blue LED is mostly a very narrow blue peak and not much else. This excites the blue sites in the RGB CMOS sensor but not much else so it's hard to get any other color information to come out when doing correction in post. This is why you have a tough time shifting the blue, because there just isn't any other color information that was encoded.

Blue filters over tungsten still let a lot of other spectra through and don't have such sharp peaks, which is why they are a bit easier to work with in post.

I don't really have anything to suggest, maybe a little de-saturation and then some de-sharpening?

Throw some black and white in there where it looks really bad.

edit - no surrender beat me to it

Hi all, thank you!

It's my own band so in a way it's not like a paying client - all the same though, the purpose is to show what we sound / look like, so it would be nice to be able to use it. The band is set on having it on DVD to hand out to various people for club bookings, so in a way that might cover some of the issues (ie, lower def generally - allowing me to zoom in / hiding a few sins!).

@Oedipax, in the end I did something a bit like this to the finished footage - desaturated the worst ones, and then added a layer of blue tint to bring it back to a sort of monochromatic blue. It sort of works, but the shots where I'm playing the harp at around 0.46 look particularly bad and I only have the two cameras (the GH2 safety footage I thought I had, ran out just before this item). However, because of the repetitive chords I might be able to fiddle in a bit of unused footage from somewhere else, or even just get rid of the odd section. It was a sort of improvisation anyway.

If you want to see the current state of play it it's here:



Cheers all, and thank you for the thoughts. As the band seem to like the sound, which was mixed from a multitrack feed I took at the same time, I'll have a further play with the footage over the next few days.

@HenryO I don't have Cineform (I use Vegas 10) but have played around with different curves in Vegas. For the shots where you have whitish light on the soloists I've tried playing with indiv RGB curves to adjust the background colour without affecting the foreground particularly - see the two examples below, which is original and with some adjustment to the B and R curves, which while less colourful is also less harsh to look at over an extended period. That probably might benefit from more work.

However, for the essentially monochromatic scenes (most of the rest of it) I think all I can do is affect the level because it's essentially one colour and I realise I'm trying to do something essentially impossible as I can't create colours out of nothing - I can change them or take them up / down a bit in level. Monochroming them doesn't seem to help that much as they just look bad, but without any colour! And curves make them go noisy. Given there wasn't much light, the cameras were doing pretty well, but blue isn't an easy colour to work with.

For those weird shots like the one in my OP I can possibly do something with the "whitish" areas on those shots in amongst the general blue wash, and I'll look into the ideas you suggested. Given it's an imperfect live performance and I'm working with what I've got, there's probably a limit to what it's worth doing to this, but if I can make it more watchable as a whole then that's a plus. Thanks for those suggestions!

I took your still and placed it in Vegas and using colour fixer this is what I got with one click. Bear in mind that this is on your compressed still image. With tweaking I am sure you can rescue your footage.

edit - added another one with a more natural look. YMMV