[cejones]

I converted some 8mm film to MiniDV and have captured it on my mac using FCP. each one hour tape takes up around 12 gigs of disk space. Well, now I would like to use a program to clean up the video... it was very old and I would apply some filters to it to adjust the color. Something similar to Photoshop's Adjust Auto-levels... as well as sharpen it up and try to remove the artifacts from film projection.,.

Any suggestions on plugins, software and websites that talk about this type of job is greatly appreciated...

I was trying to see if FCP has everything I need for this, but maybe I need to move up to After Effects? Can anyone give me some advice on that?

Thanks!

Chris

[Nap]

If you have a registered version of QT Player ($30) it does have some filters built-in. No auto levels but it does have a HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) filter that works well. Only catch with QT Player is that you can only use one filter (HSL however does have 3 sliders for the 3 functions I mentioned). If you have the disk space you could save the HSL modified version in uncompressed format and then do it again, using a different filter.
If you use the sharpen filter you are probably going to increase the noticabilty of the artifacts you mention so you may have to choose either sharpness and increased artifacts or blur it to reduce the artifacts. I am not sure how you can do both.
If you are running OSX you might try looking for MediaPipe on Versiontracker. If apparently can use more than one filter in one export operation. Since I am running 8.6 I have no direct experience with the program.

[msuper69]

Originally posted by cejones:
I converted some 8mm film to MiniDV and have captured it on my mac using FCP...

What method did you use to do the transfer?

[cejones]

I paid a company to transfer the film to DV for 5 cents per foot... Not a bad price. the technique they used was to clean the film and then play it in a projector... and video taped it via digital camcorder... I would have done that myself, but my old projector was broken and I didn't want the hassle of fixing it or buying a used one from ebay...

My footage contains multiple filmstrips... all put together on one DV tape... Some scenes look good, some have color problems, some are blurry, etc... The more I think about it, the more I realize that I am going to have to save each scene individually and apply whatever appropriate filter is needed... more time consuming... but it doesn't look like there is a method to "adjust auto levels" to an entire movie frame by frame similar to photoshop's technique.... Manually adjusting looks about the only way ... unless I run across a specific plugin that is designed for that...