How to use After Effects to clean up crappy DV footage?
I second the Steve Hullfish book, sadly there isn’t much out there in regards to colour correction how-to’s. Stu Maschwitz, a director and one of the founders of the Orphanage (which developed Magic Bullet), has a great blog and is a great proponent of DV and DIY film-making. He has a book coming out in a few days The DV Rebels Guide: How to Make Killer Action Movies on the Cheap. His stuff is very after effects-centric. The one thing about the DVXuser shots mentioned above is that the originals are very well shot, with lots of information in the shadows and highlights. The tell tale sign of crummy DV is noise, clipped whites and crushed blacks. You can always try the old standard of layering a shot on top of itself and on the upper layer apply a fast blur and set the transfer mode to screen. This can soften some of the highlights, eliminte some noise and give a glow effect.
I actually do this for a living, and am regularly called upon by directors to make shitty DV footage look “amazing”. Color correction is THE single most important thing you can do to make *any* DV footage look decent and professional. You’d be amazed at how far you can take even the crappiest DV footage, using the color-correction tools in AE. It’s a simple fact that ALL footage that originates on DV inherently looks like crap, straight off the camera (the most apparant characteristic of DV is elevated black levels, which makes footage looked washed out and flat), and will never look like “polished” stuff, unless you take the effort to do at least some basic color correction. As skrike mentioned, first set your black and white levels using the Levels filter. If you know how to do this in Photoshop, it’s pretty much the exact same process in AE–look at the histogram, and close up the gaps at the front and back of the histogram so that the output levels are remapped to maximize the full
