-
Renders from AE look Dark in FCP
I’m working on a Spot, cutting in FCP 6.0.1 and doing my effects work in AE CS3.
The footage was all shot in DVCPROHD720p 24pn. I’ve got my cut up in FCP in a DVCPROHD720p 23.98fps timeline.I’m bringing in the original capture scratch straight to AE, working on a DVCPROHD 720p comp. Doing my effects and rendering out to queue. I’ve rendered out using the Animation Codec, 10 bit uncompressed, 8 bit uncompressed and DVCPROHD 720p 60p.
No matter which render codec I use, the render comes out of AE dark. A buddy of mine told me he had the same problem so I thought there would have been a post on here, but I couldn’t find one. I saw one post relating a similar problem to Color management, but there was no solution posted. Any ideas? Thanks.
-
13 Replies
-
Try setting the working space of your project to something appropriate for the footage like HDTV (rec. 709). You may also need to re-interpret the colors of any footage items you’ve imported.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Thanks Darby,
I’m new to AE. How do I set the workspace to HDTV? How do I re-interpret the colors of the footage? What does HDTV mean in reference to the workspace? When would I and when would I not want to use it?
-
Try this experiment:
Got to the bottom of the File menu. Project settings. Enable Color Management.Now select your footage in the Project Pane. Cmd/Ctrl F. There’s a Color Management tab.
Put some footage through and let us know how it worked.
-
Thanks Ian,
I tried the color managment for the the project settings. HDTV looks good in the AE Comp, but when I render out to queue and bring it into FCP, it looks exactly the same as it did before. Still equally dark.
I also tried Apple RGB. When I rendered that one it came out better, but still dark. Is there a way to just turn off color management and have the footage match the original? It’s seems counter-intuitive that AE would need to use a special feature to keep the footage untouched. But when color management was set to NONE as the default, everything was coming out dark, via my original post.
Is it possible this issue is unrelated to color management? I’ve tried to sync up my footage settings in AE with FCP to the best I could. Is there something I’m missing?
-
I HAD THIS EXACT SAME PROBLEM !
I am doing some rotoscoping on a Feature Film that I cut. I masked out a fire hydrant, then when I dump out of AE into FCP the footage is 4 shades darker just like yours. I looked for hours for a solution until I just now stumbled upon your post. I read the project settings method and tried it, but it didn’t work. I STUMBLED UPON THE SOLUTION ! ! This is what you do.
File > Project Settings >
then CHECK BLEND COLORS USING 1.0 GAMMA & MATCH LEGACY AFTER EFFECTS QUICKTIME GAMMA ADJUSTMENTS ! !
I am thinking maybe Quicktime 7.4.1 is the culprit on this one. It has never done this to me in the past.
After doing this, I rendered back out using *NONE* in format. Imported into FCP, WAM! Perfect matching colors ! ! This was a real pain in my butt and I couldn’t figure it out until I read your post. Even though you didn’t find the answer, you helped me discover it ! Thank you very very much. Please email me if you get this post!
I hope it works for you as it did for me.
Take care.
FrEditor -
I took some DVCPRO HD 720p footage from After Effects to FCP then to Color. The clips that AE handled were completely FUBAR. I don’t know how else to say it. Somehow the gamma gets tweaked. I will use the above solution, maybe post my findings.
-
He’s right! This setting works.
-
I was in the same boat, I had to figure out a work around for a recent project that did work, but required a couple passes of rendering to get it to match up. I will give these settings a try as well. Awesome info guys, thanks!
—
Jeremey @ DI -
There is sort of an explanation of this issue on the adobe webpage: https://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402801
-
I had a very similar issue… gamma inconsistencies when moving from Final Cut Pro 6.0 AE CS3, and quicktime 7.4 using DVCpro HD codec.
Both Final Cut Pro and After Effects are causing gamma shifts that are darker than the source footage displayed by quicktime in the OS. They appear darker within the applications and when exported as new quicktime movies. Or possibly Quicktime is gamma shifting them lighter when playing?
Is there a way to sync the color profiles across these applications?
The platform is MAC OS 10.4.11 .The footage was shot on HVX200 DVCpro HD 960 x 720 (1.33) PAR Original format .mxf converted to quicktime in FCP. Edit was FCP. Effects in AE.
So far I’ve discovered two solutions. 1) Use match legacy 2) Use color management. The question is which is better? I don’t fully understand embedding a gamma tag in quicktime. How do these color space options effect export of .tga sequences? Does anyone have any advice?
Below are links to tech notes with related passages.
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Afte…3BB88B886.html
The gamma adjustments performed by After Effects CS3 differ from the gamma adjustments performed by these QuickTime codecs. Gamma adjustments performed by After Effects CS3 on Windows are the same as gamma adjustments performed by After Effects CS3 on Mac OS. Also, by not using QuickTime codecs, After Effects preserves over-range values in 32-bpc projects.
1) MATCH LEGACY
Select Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments in the Project Settings dialog box to accomplish any of the following:
Avoid color shifts when working with projects created in After Effects 7.0 or earlier
Match the colors in a project created in After Effects 7.0 or earlier
Ensure that colors in Composition panel match colors in QuickTime player
The Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments option is selected by default for projects created in After Effects 7.0 or earlier. You should create new projects without this option selected.2) Color management
https://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view…nalId=kb4028012) Enable color management in After Effects and use a color managed workflow.
Color management ensures that color and tones in your movies remains consistent and predictable between applications and devices. Color management will benefit any video workflow, and it can specifically improve the color and tone of your video if you use a YUV codec (such as a DV or v210 codec) and you use the QuickTime movie exported from After Effects in other video editing applications (such as Apple Final Cut Pro).
Additional info:
When QuickTime Player displays a movie file, it adjusts the gamma in order to make the image look correct. QuickTime Player bases the amount of gamma adjustment on the codec in use (if the file is not tagged with a specific gamma value). However, the gamma adjustments that QuickTime Player makes are not consistent between Mac OS and Windows, meaning that the same file may not look the same in QuickTime Player on Mac OS and Windows.
Note: On Windows, the result may be dependent on whether QuickTime Player is set to display through DirectX or Safe Mode (GDI). Refer to the documentation for QuickTime for more information about QuickTime settings.
In order to provide consistency between platforms, After Effects CS3 adds a metadata tag to exported QuickTime movie files that specifies what gamma adjustment to use. When this tag is present, QuickTime Player uses that value instead of what it normally would use for that codec, and the resulting adjustment is consistent between Mac OS and Windows.
So, what is the best solution to clone footage in a consistent color space? Legacy? Color Managment?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up