Working with colors on cartoons
 

What is the best program that will allow me to manipulate color saturation, particularly on cartoon sources? And I don't mean working with color channel saturation. I mean individual colors. I was considering Sony Vegas, but I'm open for advice.

There really no easy way to work with individual colors because all colors affect one another due to the supplemental nature of color, as well as the unique YUV (non-RGB) storage of color. Adjusting red, for instance, alters orange, purple, pink, magenta, brown, peach, flesh, and others.

At the high end (and this includes something I don't currently know) are applications like Blackmagic Designs DaVinci Resolve. It's not just software, but has a hardware component. If you're curious, learn more at http://www.blackmagic-design.com/pro...davinciresolve

In the middle range, you have the various NLEs: Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas Pro, Final Cut Pro, Grass Valley (Canopus) Edius
There's also the compositing tools: Adobe After Effects, The Foundry Nuke, and others.

At the low end, you have freeware and consumer software like VirtualDub (using the ColorMill plugin) or TMPGEnc Plus.
There's also some controls within the limited-edition versions of the pro tools: Adobe Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas Movie Studio

I'll often pre-process in VirtualDub, using ColorMill (or a mix of filters, where ColorMill is included), because Avisynth is usuallyrequired for the project, therefore VirtualDub is already part of the workflow (may as well use it!). Remember, we deal with some of the most messed-up videos possible -- not a lot of easy ready-to-convert work comes our way these days. And then I'll follow it up with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3/CS4/CS5 work.

Sony Vegas Pro should be great. :)