I was interested if anybody knows what method the movies like Sin City and Schindler's List used to pull color out of a B&W video.

"Sin City" was shot in High Definition video and "Schindler's List" was shot on 35mm film. With "SC", they simply took all the chroma (color) out of the picture except for the specifc color elements they wanted. With Schindler's I'd guess they digitally added color to the few shots with color, but the film was shot black and white film.

Scott

That is what I thought, However, when I adjusted my settings I got alot of color where I didn't want the color to be.

There's actually alot of art direction that goes into that...you need to make sure the color you are highlighting or pulling is found nowhere else in the frame...that means you control the color palette in the background and in the costumes/makeup.

Ok, that makes sense, since I was only experimenting with spare footage. Thanks for the info :)

Although I don't exactly know HOW to do the color isolation, I can recommend the DVD for the movie Pleasantville. In the movie, a 50's B&W sitcom settings gets corrupted by 20th century teens, and things gradually start becoming color (cars, flowers, eventually people). There are some excellent scenes where B&W makeup is applied to a "colored" person's face that makes the face go back to being B&W. I recommend the DVD because in the special features there are some long talks with one of the cinematographers where he talks about how they set up some of the shots and the painstaking task of making sure the lighting worked both for color and B&W. He also talks about the makeup shot--they had to make green makeup that had the exact greyscale value as the flesh tone of the person's face, it's really cool special features, and a decent movie too.

Pleasantville is an excellent movie, yes. :)

Boardmember HailToTheKing had a recent short called "I Will Never Be Homeless (http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=6581)" that had an effect like the Schindler's girl.

He briefly mentioned how he did that in another thread... can't find it. :)