Best Black and White workflow?

[Simon Hughes]

Curious if anyone here has figured out the best workflow for B&W filming. From still digital work, I typically always shoot RAW (capturing in color) and then turn to B&W in post. (Although with one of my digicams (Ricoh GRD) however, I capture B&W jpegs as it does a really nice job of it.)

With the HV20, and Final Cut Express as my NLE, I can reduce the saturation to get monochrome but I'd like to have more control than that. Plus, you can only capture B&W in-camera when in P mode, which I would rarely, if ever, use. For example, I would like to be able to get the effect that a red filter gives to darken a blue sky and add drama. Are there filters that could emulate this in post (and work with FCE)?

What would you guys and gals recommend?

[um3k]

Capture in color. Then, find a good B&W conversion plugin. I don't have any experience with NLEs, so I can't make a recommendation. Google might have some suggestions, though.

[Simon Hughes]

I did find one so far:

"Too Much Too Soon" which has a B&W conversion. Anyone know of others, and more specifically, is anyone else actively doing B&W conversions? Good B&W films are stunning to see, and I'd love to hear from anyone doing this well.

[semicolon]

I'm interested to see what you find, Simon, as I am shooting a feature length "mockumentary" this summer which will be made black and white in post.

I was planning on using Magic Bullet for the conversion, but it does not yet have the feature such as you mentioned where the plugin tries to use the color information to see how it would actually be filtered and captured to black and white film, then allowing you to add things like a "red filter" for cloud definition in the blue sky.

When it comes to still image black and white conversion I swear by Nik Color Efex (http://www.niksoftware.com/colorefexpro/usa/entry.php). It has the best color / black and white analysis and conversion that I've seen or used.