I color corrected & onlined a 30-minute documentary

I've been mostly working with short form audiovisual production such as trailers, promos, advertisements. So getting a chance to color correct and online a half an hour documentary was a nice opportunity to try something new.

Name of the documentary is 'My brother, the buddhist monk' and it tells about Santeri (26) who decides to become a monk in Thailand and give up everything he has in Finland. His sister and the director of documentary Anja Ahola, wants to understand her brother's great decision to leave behind his possessions, friends and family and to become an ascetic Buddhist monk for the rest of his life.

Anja shot all the video herself. Mostly with Sony HDR-FX1 but also with some cheap HDV camcorders. So I got all the material in HDV format. I decided to master documentary in 720p because I had to reframe, deinterlace and noise reduce many shots so after all the post-processing there wouldn't have been actual resolution up to 1080p.

I onlined documentary inside Final Cut Pro 7. For color correction I used mainly Red Giant's Colorista 2 and Mojo. For deinterlacing shots from cheap HDV camcorders I used Red Giant's Frames. Almost all the products from Red Giant are great but I have to say what really saved some shots is Neatvideo's excellent denoiser. There were some really dark noisy shots with lots of HDV compression and Neatvideo did excellent job getting rid of all the artifacts. I think Neatvideo is one those plugins everyone who shots in not so ideal conditions should own. It really makes your production value higher.

(Click on picture to see it larger.)

And if you're in Finland remember to watch it!
Documentary premieres on April 5th at 8pm on Yle TV1.