topic Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings in Camcorders

Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 19:17:08 GMT

I have four of these cameras, an r800, an r50 and two r500s. All of them have the same issue - they look fantastic on the screen and even on the HDMI out on a TV, but when I go look at the files the colors are washed out and the brightness is really low. I don't understand how they look so good on the camera screen (or TV) but not in the recorded files. I fix them in post, but it's a pain. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

Richard — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:38:01 GMT

Hi Analog,

Thanks for posting.

How are you transferring your movies from the camcorder to your computer (e.g. "dragging" movies from the card in a card reader, using the Pixela Transfer Utility LE (recommended), etc)?

Also, which video player(s) have you used to play your movies?

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:56:42 GMT

I'm taking the memory card out of the device and then copying the file from the memory card to the computer, or just viewing the video directly on the memory card on the computer. I use VLC and PowerDirector to view/edit the movies. It's dull in both viewers. It's dull on every computer I watch the videos on, not just my editing computer.

Why would using some tranfer utility make any difference? Why have a SD card slot if you can't use it to move the files over like I am doing?

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:58:34 GMT

I should clarify when I say HDMI out, it's when I am using the HDMI out as a monitor while recording. I haven't tried playing them back after the fact on a TV from the camcorder itself.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

Richard — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 20:38:50 GMT

Thanks for your reply Analog.

Please do playback from your camcorder, for a comparison and let us know how the movie appears.

Also, in which format (AVCHD or MP4) have you recorded your videos?

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 21:16:39 GMT

MP4 but why should that make a difference either? Obviously I'm not going to be watching these videos from my camcorder when I need to use them to edit with, so it shouldn't make any difference whether or not playback on the camcorder to a TV looks okay or not. I just tried it though and it does look fine played back from the camcorder. The camcorder must be doing some kind of processing on the output... because taking the file on any PC looks a lot less bright and less vivid on the colors.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:09:21 GMT

I'm also not the only person who has said this. I found amazon reviews that talk about this too. So it's either the cameras are messed up or there is some setting that needs to be found.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:36:45 GMT

Just so you have some idea what's going on here.... the first image here is what plays on the recording off the MP4 files. The second image is color corrected with my video editing software, and is a fairly close representation to what is shown on the screen of the camcorder and on the TV.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

newsense52 — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 16:06:40 GMT

Are you using card with 45 MB/sec. 300x or more, class 10 ?

The photo shows insufficient lighting.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

Richard — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 19:15:12 GMT

Hi Analog,

Thanks for your replies.

The format matters because movies shot in the AVCHD format tend to be more fragile than those shot in MP4. Dragging them off can permanently damage them. Based on the images you've supplied (thanks), that doesn't appear to be the case here.

From your images, it looks like a different white balance setting should resolve this issue. The Auto White Balance (AWB) setting is good for many scenes, but sometimes, a manually selected white balance setting works better. This appears to be such case.

You may manually select the white balance setting when your camera is set to its "P", "Cinema" or "Highlight Priority" modes. To access this setting, choose "Home" icon, then "Main Functions" (camcorder with gear icon), then choose "White Balance" then choose the white balance based on the light source for the scene you're shooting, the "X" out of the menu.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

analog — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 07:50:16 GMT

It's not just the white balance, the brightness of the image is significantly more on the screen. Also, I went through all the white balance settings, including setting it manually with a white sheet of paper. The image you see pre-processing is the best one I could do. It's not about lighting. I have studio lighting.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

IamintheUK — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 12:53:09 GMT

I take it the videos look great if you play them direct from the camcorders, but not if you import them off the SD cards onto your computer. Do they play properly in a media player such as VLC or Windows Media Player? Also, what edit software are you using?

As you have this problem with all those cameras, the problem lies elsewhere. The two comparisons you posted, to me, show the more correct colour balance. The second one is way off with what I take to be a white surface looking very blue. Going back to the media players, if it looks wrong with them then I would suggest a first check would be your computers' graphics card as this may be causing problems. Make sure it has an up to date driver.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

newsense52 — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 12:57:02 GMT

" I don't understand how they look so good on the camera screen ( or TV monitor ) but not in the recorded files "

When you compare the video on TV monitor and video on computer ( recorded ) they look different - is this your findings that recorded video is inferior than the one seen in TV monitor? Well the video uploaded to computer looks low quality ( degraded ) because of software compression and decompression process. The video on TV is well upscaled and match the input signal ( P or I signal ) but in computer the MP4 or AVCHD file is read depending on H.264 codecs of your computer after it has been decompressed and another codecs by your VLC player and quality of computer monitor to sum it all.

To have a good video, it must be edited only in camera and not in computer, download direct to DVD.

If your video is uploaded to like Movie maker of windows 8 or other editing software the more video is degraded.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

IamintheUK — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 13:14:46 GMT

I'm sorry, but this is just not the case. If you put the SD card into a card reader and download it to your computer, no processing takes place. The same happens when you use the transfer file utility to transfer from the camera to your computer. In both cases it is just a digital stream with no decoding or re-encoding taking place. A DVD uses MPEG 2 compression and is lower resolution than AVCHD or MP4.

Back to the original post. Because your second pic is blue, but you said it looks more like what you see via HDMI, is your computer monitor set-up at fault or is it failing? Just another thing to consider.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

newsense52 — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 16:12:41 GMT

" If you put the SD card into a card reader and download it to your computer, no processing takes place. "

The computer codecs is not match to the SD cards file and it will not read.

A DVD is only a container of file, it depends on its formatting.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

IamintheUK — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 18:23:20 GMT

No codecs are involved in the transfer to the computer. If you edit in the camera you are using a codec. All my shot footage is transferred off the SD cards straight to a hard drive in my computer from the card reader.

DVDs are a delivery medium, not a format container. Transcoding from h264 to DVDs h262 uses codecs. All NLEs use codecs. MP4 is also a container, usually in h264 format. H264 is the most common delivery format and is supported by all modern players. In any case none of this has anything to do with the colour problems of the OP.

Re: Vixia HF R800, R500 & R50 Washed out colors - Looks good on screen but not recordings

newsense52 — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 19:40:24 GMT

The topic seems to me deviated from original post: "Looks good on screen but not ( in ) recordings." Lets continue,

Looks good in preview at the camera ( also in TV monitor via HDMi) and looks degraded in computer?

Things to look at that causes the quality : video media player, and mp4,mts codecs and monitor resolution.

If anyone of these did not match, then the video is said to be in low quality.