Inertia Unlimited Overcomes Camera-Matching Issues with FOR-A DCC-7000 Color Corrector

During Fox’s World Series production in October, specialty-camera provider Inertia Unlimited was having trouble matching one of its camera systems to the rest of the Fox’s broadcast cameras. With a bit of quick thinking, Inertia Unlimited President Jeff Silverman brought in FOR-A’s DCC-7000 color corrector as a quick fix.

“We were having great difficulty getting one of our cameras to match the other cameras,” he explains. “A lot of time had been spent prior to that using whatever available handles we had in the camera to make it match the others, but we continued to have difficulty.”

The FOR-A DCC-7000 color corrector enables an individual color to be changed without affecting others.

Delivered to the stadium, the FOR-A unit solved the problem, allowing Inertia to seamlessly match images from the camera that had produced a jarring mismatched look.

“The advantage the FOR-A color corrector gave us was the ability to change individual colors without affecting any of the other colors — just like most broadcast camera would already have built into it. So we could change the hue of a particular red to be correct for that particular team color without affecting the white of the ball, green of the grass, or blue in the sky.”

That quick fix has become a semi-regular tool for Inertia Unlimited, which has since purchased the FOR-A DCC-7000 and deployed it on a variety of shows that presented similar camera-matching issues, including Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) on Fox at the Staples Center last month.

“We are being faced with more and more shows that are using cameras that provide fewer controls than we would like,” says Silverman. “In those situations when we are using certain types of drones, MOVI mounts, or POVs, the FOR-A color corrector becomes very useful in correcting things that other correctors don’t have the ability to do.”

Inertia Unlimited has been using the DCC-7000 primarily on MōVI systems.

He explains that the key to a video engineer’s ability to match cameras often comes down to the breadth of color-matching controls provided. Often with the latest prosumer cameras used in specialty systems, these controls can be limited, creating the need for a tool on the level of the FOR-A DCC-7000.

“Part of the video engineer’s art is the set of numbers, and they have a different set of numbers for each type of camera,” says Silverman. “With the limited subset of controls that some of the more prosumer-level cameras have, you don’t have the ability to make that adjustment that would be routine for a traditional broadcast camera. The FOR-A [DCC-7000] gives you that extra ability in a single-rack unit: you simply loop the video in and out of it, and you suddenly have a slew of controls at the turn of a knob.”
Although Inertia Unlimited has used the DCC-7000 primarily on MōVI systems thus far, Silverman sees the potential for the color corrector to be an invaluable tool for drones.

“Right now, we’re using it on shows for MōVI systems mostly, but I think it could be even more useful for drones,” he says. “A lot of the cameras used on drones right now struggle to match broadcast cameras, and, if it’s a drone, you are cutting against other cameras, then it’s really going to be revealed. You use a color corrector of this magnitude when you have a camera that is shooting a similar shot to other cameras. [When] a drone is doing that, it provides a perfect tool.”