On Tue, 28 May 2002 09:47:37 EDT, Stuart Hunter wrote:

>OK as a relative newbie to digital video editing I am getting the hang
>of it with Premiere 6. Quite happy with the results except for one
>thing.
>
>I took some video of my daughter's birthday party but on viewing it for
>the first time everything seemed flat. I manages to spice it up a bit
>by using the Adjust Levels effect but the colors are still kind of
>lifeless.
>
>I tried playing with the color adjustment effect but couldn't really
>get the balance right, basically I am clueless when it comes to color
>correction.
>
>Anyone know of a good tutorial on color correction or give some tips?

Assuming DV, what went out to tape after editing should
be the same as what went in (except for modified parts...).
If the light levels were too low for the camera, high gain
effects will "kill" the color and increase "grain". There
are often work-arounds for this (more light, turn off the
stabilizer, switch to manual exposure and underexpose a
bit to recover color and restore the brightness during
editing, use "portrait" mode, etc. can help with some
cameras), but once the color is lost, it is hard to do
much during editing to restore it... If the color is
nearly monochrome from poor white-balance, you can
sometimes improve the color with color filtering and
saturation adjustments. Best: shoot it nearly right to
begin with (underexposure, slight color balance and
saturation errors, and contrast/brilliance errors can
be corrected fairly well, but overexposure, no-color,
etc. cannot...).