Yes you can and should use a white balance card when shooting, keeping in mind that HD requires higher lighting (lower ISO) than most digital still cameras due to the nature of the CCD (CMOS, usually a lot smaller size versus near- or full-frame sensors found in DSLRs). To answer your question, Final Cut Pro and FCE both have filters to correct gamma, white balance, and contrast (luminance) with some pretty intuitive yet sophisticated plug-ins. Also, Color is an app that can be used for batch processing of files when working on large projects.

I’ve found that it’s best to white balance where the camera is. A white balance card is best, and I’d spend no less than 20 minutes working the w/b. FCP, Premiere, Avid, et al., have gamma correction, but it comes with at a price in quality.

winblowz is right about that…being in audio myself, I try to describe the analogy as “garbage in, garbage out” as with audio recording; start with a poor source audio signal, and you’ll be “polishing a turd” in post. And I’ve polished many a turd in my days.

Plus, if you do your w/b on the spot, you won’t have to wait as long for a vid to finish rendering because you didn’t have to adjust anything. Color reproduction will be almost perfect by doing it on the camera.

OK, thanks for your answers. I am very familiar with the ol’ “garbage in, garbage out” concept, doing audio myself but must ask you guys again… With the digital photography, RAW files can in the post-processing be white balanced without loosing quality. This is a major benefit from compressed JPGs and thought there must be a similar approach fro video… is this not true? Thanks for your clarification!

Very much analagous in compressed HD world as well…your camera is HDV format, which is derived from MPEG-2, and undergoes compression on acquisition, similar to cameras that only take JPEG images. A true, unconpressed native HD signal at 10-bit resolution takes up approximately 150MB per second of 60-frame progressive frame rate. And that’s not full-frame either! A true full frame image (such as with the Red One) takes about 6 times the bandwidth and captures in RAW format (near a GB per second!). Even they have their own version of a lossless codec as well.

Thanks sndfreQ! So I guess that means that the video once in the computer is already compressed of course. Also meaning that setting the white balance in the camera is crucial to maintain maximum quality throughout the post-processing. So do you guys know which camera actually could deliver the highest picture quality in the consumer range? The Canon HV series is pretty goo, I know that much, but how are the cameras with built-in harddrives? Are they better than HD video on DV tapes?

Once it gets on the tape, it’s compressed.

If I should get a video cam now in the consumer range <1000 dollars that delivers FullHD, are there any general remarks to be made, or special brands to especially look at? Maybe HD is better than tapes? Or is the newer Canon HV30 a nice camera in this range? I look mainly for picture quality, optical zoom and maybe a nice slow-motion feature.

Even HDV is a tape.

Sorry I meant harddrive not HD… :-)

Is there any advantage using harddrive based cams or are the tape based better?

In short, it’s more an issue of workflow; with tape, you have to transfer media in “real time” where you copy or “ingest” media off of the camera via playback and capture via firewire. A time consuming issue, not to mention that due to more moving parts, tape transports are more prone to failure than the other two options.

Hard Disk-not as problematic, but remember that these are the same 1.8” SATAs found in iPods in most cases. These are also prone to failure and although more convenient (more storage/record time, no removable media), replacing hard drives can be a daunting service request…most camera warranties don’t cover…

Removable solid state media (SD, etc.) seems to be the way things are going-you want to make sure to buy the “Class 6” media which costs a bit more but will hold up to bandwidth requirements and robust enough for repeated use…the main issue is to fit data onto that media, it must be compressed a bit more than HDV. So with AVCHD, the compression is greater, but the codec itself is a lot newer (based on MPEG-4 H.264 AVC). HDV, while used by “prosumer” companies such as Canon and Panny, also have a drawback-an older codec/standard (MPEG-2), and a different method for compression (GOP- or group of pictures, takes a full frame every 13 frames, and in-between those full frames, only writes “changed” data in the frames inbetween). The result is more rendering time in the editing process.

Final Cut Pro allows importing of HDV files but any processing/filters will always draw a red “render bar” as the frames will always have to be filled in before rendering fades/filters, etc. This is pretty readily apparent on PowerPC (G5) and older, not so much an issue with Intel.

AVCHD, on the other hand, is just starting to be supported as a codec in FCS, and since it doesn’t use GOP, it is full-frame rendered upon ingest. The issue with AVCHD is that since it’s a newer codec, all of the editing platforms need to develop new decoders to accommodate it. FCP / FCE supports AVCHD, but only on Intel processors…so there’s the caveat.