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

analog
Contributor

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

16 REPLIES 16

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.

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EOS C100 mk2 with the Canon EF-S 18-135mm IS STM lens - Atomos Ninja 2 - Zoom H2n - Dell 8700 i7-4790 3.6Ghz, 24GB Ram, Win 10, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB - DaVinci Resolve Studio 18.6.5 - Blackmagic Speed Editor - Presonus Faderport 1

"   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.

 

 

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.

__________________________________________________________________________________________
EOS C100 mk2 with the Canon EF-S 18-135mm IS STM lens - Atomos Ninja 2 - Zoom H2n - Dell 8700 i7-4790 3.6Ghz, 24GB Ram, Win 10, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB - DaVinci Resolve Studio 18.6.5 - Blackmagic Speed Editor - Presonus Faderport 1

"   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.

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.

__________________________________________________________________________________________
EOS C100 mk2 with the Canon EF-S 18-135mm IS STM lens - Atomos Ninja 2 - Zoom H2n - Dell 8700 i7-4790 3.6Ghz, 24GB Ram, Win 10, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB - DaVinci Resolve Studio 18.6.5 - Blackmagic Speed Editor - Presonus Faderport 1

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

newsense52
Rising Star

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

 

The photo shows insufficient lighting.

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