Once you’ve got your camcorder it’s time to think about which Mac you want to edit with. All of the latest range of Macs, from eMac up to the G5 are capable of running editing software – even advanced programs such as Final Cut Pro. However, because digital video rendering can be a slow process, it is wise to consider a dual processor G4 or G5 if you are going to be working professionally. The PowerBook is one of the few laptops capable of handling the demands of digital video and it may be worth the extra expense if you will be working in the field.
We would always advise a SuperDriveenabled model, because soon after you get into video editing you will want to begin making your own DVDs. Also, iDVD doesn’t officially work with an external DVD writer.
Whichever machine you buy, it is vital that you get some extra memory put in. Video editing will require a minimum of 512Mb and you may even want to consider 1Gb of RAM or more if you’re serious. The extra memory is a massive help when rendering finished projects and some of the more recent video editing products feel sluggish on just 512Mb.
It is also important to get a big internal hard drive and consider buying an external hard drive too. Digital video files are massive with just four-and-a-half minutes of recording video taking up a gigabyte of hard drive space and, if using Final Cut, it is wise to have an external drive dedicated to storing captured video footage. Aside from
this there is little else you need to edit digital video – the only other purchase you should consider is an analogue to digital converter such as the ADVC1394 from Canopus (www.canopus-uk.com). This lets you hook up a VCR directly to your Mac via the FireWire socket so you can capture from, and record to VHS tapes directly.
One feature that you should definitely take into consideration, though, is the optical zoom size. The standard size for a digital camcorder is 10x, but some manufacturers are offering optical zooms at up to 24x magnification. As with digital cameras, you should ignore digital zoom, even though some promise 700x. Digital zoom causes massive degradation in picture quality and you can perform digital zoom much better afterwards using software. Also avoid any promise of built-in effects such as wipes, black-and-white or sepia tones – again these can be added later with the advantage that you can adjust the effect to your heart’s content while still keeping a pristine recording of the original.
There is also the prospect of different recording formats to choose from including MiniDV, MicroMV, DVD and memory card. Fortunately the choice is easy: no matter what you do only buy a MiniDV camcorder. MicroMV doesn’t work with Macs, DVDs are cumbersome to edit with and memory cards are ridiculously expensive.
The colour adjustments we’ve looked at here have largely been aimed at correcting or enhancing colours. But many of the techniques can be adapted to produce more extreme colour alterations. Using Photoshop, it’s possible to mimic many of the effects once generated in darkrooms, including solarisation, sepia-toning, cross-processing and more. Indeed, with a little experimentation, it’s possible to come up with effects never seen before – and sometimes effects you’ll never want to see again… Apart from the ideas we introduce here, you can try out Photoshop’s different layer blending modes, either blending two images together, or duplicating the current image layer then changing the way it interacts with the layer below. Don’t just stop with a single modification or filter, but try combining them. There are so many permutations in Photoshop that you may never exhaust them all.
Brightness/contrast adjustments are the easiest to understand, but they’re also the most destructive with regard to image quality. Why? Because increasing the contrast pushes dark and light pixels off the scale, so that shadow areas of your image become blocked in and highlight areas bleach out.
You need to use the Brightness/Contrast dialog with care, then. If you display Photoshop’s Histogram palette while you work, you’ll see what we mean. The image we’re starting with is rather light and lacking in contrast, so our first attempt at repair is simply to reduce the Brightness value. This looks OK superficially, but the histogram shows the highlights are no longer a true white, and a lot of shadow detail has been ‘clipped’. Increasing the contrast strengthens the colours (remember the link between contrast and saturation), but yet more shadow and highlight detail has been lost.
Like many digital camera images, the shot we’re starting with looks a bit flat, even though the histogram shows a full range of tones. Our fi rst attempt at adjustment uses an ‘S-shaped’ curve which darkens the shadows slightly and lightens the highlights but, because the curve is steeper in the centre section, it adds contrast to the midtones. Our final example is more extreme. It exaggerates the contrast in a specifi c tonal range – the red brickwork.
The way to do this is to open the Curves dialog, then drag the mouse pointer (it changes to an eyedropper) over a critical area of the image. The tones at that point are displayed on the curve as you drag. This is the point on the curve where the curve gradient needs to be made much steeper. Note how increasing contrast also increases saturation. The two are inextricably linked, and if you sort out your image’s contrast properly, you’ll often fi nd out you don’t need to increase its saturation.
By default, the Levels dialog displays the combined RGB values of the pixels in the image, but you can open the menu at the top to view and edit the red, green and blue colour channels independently. This explains the difference between applying Auto Contrast and Auto Levels. Auto Contrast maximises the tonal range without altering the ratios of the three colour channels. Auto Levels optimises the channels individually, which can correct colour casts, or introduce colour casts where you didn’t have any!
Our original shot has a strong yellow cast because we used a coloured graduated fi lter over the sky. Simply applying Auto Levels restores a much more natural colour balance. In the fi nal version, though, we’ve gone further by moving the red channel’s midtone slider to the left to make the colours redder, then gone back to editing all three RGB channels and moved the midtone slider to the right to darken the image.
It’s not possible to compensate for every single light source, and sometimes the colour of the light doesn’t fall neatly on the warm-cool colour temperature scale. White balance adjustments work by shifting the whole spectrum of the light source up or down the scale. They rely on the light having a full spectrum of colours, but simply shifted one way or the other.
Some light sources don’t have a full spectrum of colours. The prime example is orange streetlamps. They look orange because that’s all there is – no blue, no green. It’s impossible to correct orange streetlighting to produce a full range of colours.
Fluorescent lighting is the other oddity because it contains excess green. Digital cameras deal with this with one or more dedicated ‘fluorescent’ settings. These increase the levels of magenta (green’s complementary colour) to restore a naturallooking colour balance.
Night poses special problems for colour photography. It’s not the level of illumination that’s the problem, but the colour of the lighting. If you shoot in a busy city centre, you may have a mixture of tungsten lights, fluorescent lamps, yellow/orange streetlamps and even multicoloured neon. How are you supposed to reconcile all these with a single white balance setting? Our advice would be not to try. This is one situation where your camera’s auto white balance should just be left to get on with it. Only if the colours look completely wrong should you worry about taking over manually.
Another exceptional photographer selected by National Geographic to be a Photographer-in- Residence, Doubilet is a master of his craft. He began shooting underwater at the age of 12 using a makeshift housing (a plastic bag, essentially) to take his Brownie Hawkeye camera beneath the waves. He’s now one of the leaders in his field, photographing aquatic life from Scotland to Japan to the Okavango Delta in Botswana.
While it might appear to be ‘easy’ to get colourful shots of fish and corals, it’s David’s superb eye for composition and masterful mix of natural and strobe light which makes his colourful combinations stand out from the crowd.
If you use fi lters on your camera, this can have an effect on the white balance, depending on the filter type. Polarisers are neutral – they don’t change the colour balance, only the depth of colour.
Warm-up or other colour-adjusting fi lters will, of course, change the colour of the light. The thing to make sure of here is that you don’t leave the camera set to auto white balance, because it will simply attempt to compensate for the changed light colour. Always choose an appropriate white balance preset before using a coloured filter. One interesting alternative to a ‘straight’ coloured fi lter is to use a coloured graduate. This will add a colour to the sky without changing the foreground colours. A blue grad can add a sunny feel to an overcast day, while a yellow/orange grad can add drama to a stormy sky. With these, it’s wise to take your meter reading before you fit the filter.
