Just playing around with Avisynth filters for color grading. Yes, you heard me right, I graded this with Avisynth. It started out as dull, somewhat underexposed 24p cinemode footage from my HV20.

I started out by removing pulldown via Avisynth script. Then, in a separate script (loading the first one as an AVI to avoid transcoding), I applied a curves adjustment to bring up the shadows while preserving a roll-off in the highlights. Next, I used channel mixer to boost the saturation in a pleasing way. I blurred the red channel a bit and added fairly coarse grain to the blue channel, in an attempt to emulate film somewhat. I also added some finer overall grain to all the color channels. Lastly, I lanczos resized it to 720p, converted to YV12, and encoded to 10Mbps x264 with MeGUI.

As for the people in the video: The little one is my first cousin once removed, and the girl with him is one of my cousins, who is his aunt.

The filters whose effects are visible are:
GiCoCu - Loads .amp curve files from photoshop
ChannelMixer - videohelp.com/forum/archive/nice-results-with-avisynth-color-channel-mixer-t339327.html - Hard to find - Equivalent to Adobe's channel mixer
AddGrain

Download the MP4 for best quality!

Someone asked, so here's the script I used (sorry about the clutter):

#~ AVISource("F:\HDV\AlyssaBDay\AVI\AlyssaBDay-2008_05_24-15_55_24_24p.avi")
AVISource("F:\HDV\AlyssaBDay\AVI\AlyssaBDay-2008_05_24-15_55_24_.avs")
#~ ConvertToRGB(matrix="PC.601", interlaced=false)

GiCoCu("F:\HDV\AlyssaBDay\AVI\15_55_24_24p.amp", false, true, false)

SUB = Int(-20)
ADD = Int(0-SUB*2+100)

ChannelMixer(ADD, SUB, SUB, SUB, ADD, SUB, SUB, SUB, ADD)

VAR = Int(40)
CORR = float(0.3)

INI = Last
RED = INI.ShowRed("YV12").Blur(1.00).Blur(1.00).Blur(1.00).Blur(0.0,1.00)
GRN = INI.ShowGreen("YV12")
BLU = INI.ShowBlue("YV12").AddGrain(400, 0.3, 0.4)
MergeRGB(RED, GRN, BLU, pixel_type="RGB24").AddGrain(VAR, CORR*.75, CORR)



#~ ChannelMixer(100, 0, 0, 0, 100, 0, -40, 140, 0)

#~ LanczosResize(720, 480, src_left=0, src_top=6, src_width=720, src_height=528, taps=3)
#~ LanczosResize(720, 480, src_left=0, src_top=12, src_width=1440, src_height=1056, taps=3)
LanczosResize(1280,720)
ConvertToYV12()
Trim(638, 1117)