b/w to color conversion

[mark3958]

Hello!

This is should be a bad question but......... Is it possible to convert any b/w DivX film to color?

Thanks
Mark.

[FOO]

Sure. What color do you want ?

[BJ_M]

sure -- its possable ...

a diVinci system can do it basicly -- requires frame by frame monitoring (or at the least scene by scene) ...

cost you about 150k for a base system plus a few extras (costing another 100k) .. runs only on sgi ..


or you can use other video paint apps .. most start in the 60k range (plus hardware) and many only run on special hardware (sgi, etc... )

[FOO]

I think even with frreeware (avisynth) and millions of hours of your time
you could use the Layer function to replace each small range of grey level
with a particular color. Different areas with the same grey level, but
different desired colors would not be possible.

Call up Ted Turner, He's ruined lots of movies, and is pretty good at it

[housepig]

you can also use Virtualdub, and another software called Makeavi (do a google search). totally free solution, if you have a Windows pc.

- Using Virtualdub, strip out the audio and save it somewhere.
- Export the video as an image sequence. Each frame will be a .bmp file.
- Import those frames into Windows Paint and add color.
- Once you're done, use Makeavi to turn the .bmps back into an avi file, then use Virtualdub to re-mux your audio stream.

Simple!

BJ_M... should I make a guide for this?

Mark - in all seriousness, the problem with your question is that it can be done, but not without a large amount of money, time and effort. There is no magic filter or program that will re-color black & white footage, which sounds like more of what you are looking for.

[FOO]

The obvious problem is how would it know what color to use
?

[lordsmurf]

Convert every frame of the video into a still image. Edit them one by one. It's easy and effective. But it takes time.

Nevermind.... housepig beat me to it.

I've done it in TMPGEnc and used Photoshop for a 8-second sequence. Took several days.

[Rookie64]

It depends on what you mean by color.

You can easily apply a color tint or gradient filter in a simply click of the mouse using SonicFoundry Vegas Video 4.0

I know it sounds like I'm endorsing this here, for as often as it seems I mention it
but it's the program I use for most of my video editing, I can't recommend it enough...it's easy to use and I probably wouldn't have gotten into making my own DVD-Rs if it weren't for this program.
Once I saw all I could do with it, I was hooked.

I should warn you it's not free though.
However, it is trialware that you could at least use free for you project.

I stress 4.0, 'cause the filters are included in that version

If you want to paint over each frame, you can follow the advise and suggestions already given, but I would add that you can use Flaming Pear's Aetherize plugin for Photoshop to get some quick color presets, that can save you a lot of time on painting each frame individually.

Other plugins might also help, but you'd be amazed what you can do with Aetherize if you play around a little with it.

It's also trailware though.