How can you automatically correct White Balance in Video?

[Undead Sega]

How can you automatically correct White Balance in Video?

i know the manual way, but because its video and every scene or so the colours changes, so having correct the white balance for one scene, it wont work for others.

so i was wondering if there is a software around that does what im looking for.

i dont know if Adobe Premiere does it or VirtualDub Mod either.

can anyone help me with this?

[Alex_ander]

AviSynth:

ColorYUV(autowhite=true)

From docs:

autowhite can be true or false. This setting will use the information from the analyzer, and attempt to center the color offsets. If you have recorded some material, where the colors are shifted toward one color, this filter may help. But be careful - it isn't very intelligent - if your material is a clear blue sky, autowhite will make it completely grey!

[Undead Sega]

cool, sounds alrght, but may i ask, is there a better one or more sophisticated one maybe?

[Alex_ander]

I don't know other tools but the problem mentioned is not completely inside a software: there are types of picture unfavourable for auto-balance, like a frame filled with a single color.
Professional studio cameras use auto-balance for adjustment before they are used and need a white object as a reference. The main purpose is to compensate for lighting source spectral properties. Then the settings are used from memory.
In case you want to use it with mixed material, I'd first try to apply the filter and test the script for finding ranges where autowhite shouldn't be used. Then separate into clips and adjust manually where necessary (e.g. with Tweak filter).

[Undead Sega]

hi, i know its been awhile, but it has come to an emergency as part for my college assignment.

i havent yet tried AviSynth, but i am hoping someone here can help me find a really good White Balance corrector, because i went out filming and used a crappy JVC MiniDV cam with its auto white balance, and now i got different colours for each scenario cause of the wheather, and wanting to basically correct all htat to one colour so throughout it will look pro done, and not ametuerly.

anyone please? i read that AviSynth autowhitebalance is not intelligent and i need something that can do the real stuff.

thanks

[Soopafresh]

Try this virtualdub plugin: http://acobw.narod.ru/file/ACOBW_A.ZIP

[edDV]

White balance is subjective to scene content and the clips that appear before and after. No matter what tools, eyes are needed for quality "color correction".

[Undead Sega]

that one is excellent, im definetely going to try that one out, even though it is in russian.

can someone tell me how does this one compare to the one in AviSynth?

[grannyGeek]

Soopafresh, is there any chance you could upload a copy of acobw to Rapidshare? If too much hassle, I totally understand.

Grrrrr--- every link that is ever posted for xxxxx.narod.ru/ is never accessable for me, I ALWAYS get dns error (what is it they do different there???) And folks keep posting links about mouth-watering delicious filters that I drool over!

[AlanHK]

Soopafresh, is there any chance you could upload a copy of acobw to Rapidshare? If too much hassle, I totally understand.

Grrrrr--- every link that is ever posted for xxxxx.narod.ru/ is never accessable for me, I ALWAYS get dns error (what is it they do different there???) And folks keep posting links about mouth-watering delicious filters that I drool over!

Only 32k
Try this

acobw_a.zip

[Soopafresh]

Thanks, Alan . Yeah, Narod.ru has a plethora of cool and useful apps and filters, but I swear it is run from a server powered by a hamster running on a wheel.

[grannyGeek]

@ AlanHK, THANK YOU so very much.



Soopafresh, I think it might even be a three-legged hamster with ADDS who forgets which direction he's supposed to go and does about-face every 5 minutes. And the wheel hasn't been oiled in decades!


Ah, the guys at videohelp come through again.
What would granny do without your help?

[Marvingj]

Enosoft Dv Processor is very good also.......Can help with a lot of adjustment....

[Undead Sega]

No matter what tools, eyes are needed for quality "color correction".

well i tried out the filter, it did a minor god job, but now since from what u said, maybe what im looking for is a colour corrector for video.

may i ask, is there such thing or tool that will automatically correct colour, as well the white balance?

[grannyGeek]

I've never had luck trying to find an automatic *anything* (that includes household appliances, you must at a minimum press a button )

I think you might have to tweak separate scenes manually, but you might be able to find filter settings that will work "generically" for a lot of different areas, so you could use AviSynth Trim or ApplyRange functions (or my favorite, JDL_ApplyRange which lets you use named arguments) to apply your settings to different sections.

I like VirtualDub filter Color Mill, also RGB Equalizer -available at these links
http://fdump.narod.ru/
http://user.rol.ru/~eugekhor/
You can adjust light, mid, and dark ranges Colors, Levels, Saturation.
Also adjust color gamma and mid-point. Very excellent filter.
I usually find my settings, and then call them in an avisynth script.

You could try AviSynth filter HDR AGC to adjust bright/dark, and it includes parameters to adjust u and v channels that can result in a subtle white-balance adjustment. This one is very good for brightening dark areas without blowing out brights, but takes some tweaking.

[Undead Sega]

ohh right, thats sounds cool.

but with HDR AGC, does it do the job automatically, besides the fact of the little tweaking?

[grannyGeek]

well, I'm not TOO sure --- how "automatic" do you mean?
Once you set the HDRAGC parameters, the filter analyzes the clip and applies those settings to achieve the desired bright/darkness. It also has an optional parameter called "freezer" that you can assign a single frame as the basis for analysis of the entire clip, and it will apply settings to everything based on that one frame.

You should read through the "official" thread at doom9,
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=93571
but the first couple of pages discuss a lot of settings that have been dropped out of the new version. There are some good tips in that thread to help you get started.

Try setting up the filter in a script, using the named arguments and assign the default settings, then change them one at a time to extremes to see how the filter behaves.
The default settings are too bright for my taste, so I tweak a lot. I also often overlay the filtered clip over the original clip with a certain percentage of opacity (3% - 8%), which gives better results to me for shadows and black areas (I learned about that on the doom9 thread.)

You might want to give ColorMill a try first, much easier to tweak with sliders than with arbitrary scripted number settings.

[AlanHK]

You might want to give ColorMill a try first, much easier to tweak with sliders than with arbitrary scripted number settings.

Have you tried Avsp?
Very useful for playing with any Avisynth filters.
It's an editor that lets you make sliders for any Avisynth function. It saves the chosen settings into the AVS file, so you can use it to encode as-is, stores its sliders as Avisynth comments (rather like Javascript in HTML).
The other main feature is tabs, you can have several different version of an AVS file and compare their output at a click.

[grannyGeek]

I skimmed the Avsp thread a long time ago when it was first released, and it looked very complex to script the sliders, so I put it on my "learn that one *someday*" list.
Probably, like most software, it will turn out to sound complicated in discussion, and be simpler in practice. I hope.

[FulciLives]

I skimmed the Avsp thread a long time ago when it was first released, and it looked very complex to script the sliders, so I put it on my "learn that one *someday*" list.
Probably, like most software, it will turn out to sound complicated in discussion, and be simpler in practice. I hope.

I tried it once and it wasn't too hard to get working if you used the info in the thread.

Unfortunately my system crashed and I am on a new fresh install of WinXP Pro so I'd have to do it all over again myself LOL

So I can't offer any real help other than it was a copy and paste kinda thing to get the sliders working for the color correction stuff.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[AlanHK]

I skimmed the Avsp thread a long time ago when it was first released, and it looked very complex to script the sliders, so I put it on my "learn that one *someday*" list.
Probably, like most software, it will turn out to sound complicated in discussion, and be simpler in practice. I hope.

Jump in. From what I've seen of your posts on various filters you'll get it pretty quickly.

The Doom9 forum is pretty active, I got the program, tried it out , a few days later made some observations and requests and they were fixed a week later...

It's got command completion, start typing a known command or function and options present themselves as a popup. When you come to a "(" it lists the parameters. At this point you can insert a slider, give it a name and max, min and starting value. You can store your sliders as a "preset" definition to be autocompleted.

It's not hard to just code a slider by yourself:

for instance, Sharpen:

Sharpen([<"Sharpen", 0.0, 1.0, 0.0>])

Will give you a slider for Sharpen, going from a value of 0.0 to 1.0, default 0.
The number of decimal places gives the sensitivity: 0.0 means it goes up in units of 0.1.

And one for "Levels", with 5 sliders:

Levels([<"input_low", 0, 255, 25>],[<"gamma", 0.00, 2.00, 1.0>],[<"input_high", 0, 255, 255>],[<"output_low", 0, 255, 0>],[<"output_high", 0, 255, 255>])


MSmooth, where I've made two sliders, and left the other parameters fixed:

MSmooth(threshold=[<"MSmooththreshold",0,255,12>], strength=[<"MSmoothstrength",0,25,9>], highq=true, chroma=false, mask=false)

I use the gui to create most sliders, if it looks useful I'll save it as a "preset".

And it has several other interesting features, including a whole macro language which I haven't got into yet.

But even if you don't use the sliders, just opening a different script in each tab is useful, it keeps them all in sync, showing the same frame if possible.

Take care if you edit the AVS file in another app. AVSp keeps its own backups and opens them by default if they were open when you exitted. To make sure you don't overwrite your file with an old version close all tabs before shutting it down.

[grannyGeek]

Ok, Fulci, Alan --- here y'all go again, teaching me stuff.

I guess I must quit being lazy and "someday....." and just do it.
The way you describe it, doesn't sound any worse than learning VBA, so I might survive the learning curve after all. ( I program a lot of custom Excel and Word mini-applications for my job, and Visual Basic for Applications is the only programming language I know.)

Alan, I'm gonna copy&paste your stuff as Fulci suggests, and see where I land.

Thanks, guys.

[Undead Sega]

well, i thought i would finally give you an example of one of the hting im trying to fix, which i assume is related to White Balance.

the camera is places steadily, and this took around 20 mins altogether to film and htus been edited and a image stablizer was added to smooth any frame movements by a pixel.

as through those minutes, the sky changes and thus we would get warm and cold looks on the film, thus seeing how light is reacted on the building.

i was hoping if there is any way to keep it one colour to make it more genuine and ...you get the idea when u see it.

http://www.wikiupload.com/download_page.php?id=167955

its in DivX, so please let me know ASAP on what u think and what can be done.

thanks.

[grannyGeek]

I can't access your clip. I guess firewall & policy settings are blocking me.

Is this supposed to be a downloadable file?
(sorry, haven't dealt with wikiupload before)

Any chance of uploading to a file-hosting site?

[Undead Sega]

yes it is suppose to be downloadable.

scroll all the way down, and on the right corner, there should be somehting called, download file.

try now.

[grannyGeek]

nope, I'm blocked
Right-click, Save Target As gets "IE cannot download file"

Left-click, WMP opens, "WMP Cannot connect to the server"

[Undead Sega]

okay....try this one then:

http://files-upload.com/330023/UPTOWNGIRLMVpillarsresized.avi.html

anyone else may i ask?

[grannyGeek]

Got it now

I'll have to check it tonight, there is no xVid / DivX installed on this computer.

Later . . . . . . .

[Undead Sega]

ahh okay. please do.

anyone else have a go please?

[Undead Sega]

anyone else?

did they get to see the video?

can someone tell me how to correct it? and probably is it related to white balance may i ask?