Hi, there,
When I colour correct/manage whatever movie I'm doing, I always face the same problems. With time, I've figured out a workaroud for both cases that somewhat take time but become very precise and eventually compensate at the end. For colour management, I use mostly brigh/cont, hue/sat, col bal and videoscope (still, 4 effects!). What I do is: - I create an additional video track, above or between the ones I am adding the effect to. Then I name it "garbage" or "delete it!" or anything that will let me know this is a temporary track; - I copy/paste one asset - or series os assets that may have similar light/colour conditions - to this track. If you double-click the asset, you can (in this order) copy, mute it, move your mouse to the next track and SHIFT-TAB it, and paste the video there. You'll realize all this is done via shortcuts, so it's repetitive but somehow easy and not-that-time-consuming; - I add the effects, keyframe them, finish whatever I have to do with the asset regarding effects; - Now here is the trick: I copy/mute/arm/paste it in the previous track. Whenever you do that repeatedly, the video effects will be pasted besides the other ones! It won't go down forever like when you just insert new effects in a track - they remain as if the track had only, say, 4 effects! So I'll just do that till the end of the movie and the whole track will have effects related to each separate asset but occupy a space as if we had only inserted four effects in the whole timeline! Now, the other process, when I have to precisely correct the colour of a video, I use Gimp-Gap. I talked to Raffa once about this: gimp is way more precise to do a proper colour correction of any image - and gimp-gap is fine for videos. You'd then have to render it as uncompressed YUV and open it in Gimp-Gap, colour correct it and re-export it. For the last year, I've been reading some technical books on photography (btw, I can recommend Ansel Adams books and Ron Bigelow's articles at his website for anyone interested in the subject) and was trying to find a precise and safe way to guarantee a proper correction of colour casts. To me, Cinelerra's histogram or white balance funcion are not precise the way they have to be (note that I'm not talking about the colour coherence in the video, as we can use Videoscope for that with very nice results). If they could be integrated to gimp/gimp-gap to colour-correct (as an effect, for example), it would be an immense and most-welcome evolution in this area. The bad thing about this process, as you can imagine, is that it takes way too much time, so I only do it in extreme cases, when I really want the thing to be perfect, so be warned =) rock on, flavio
