• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  3D renderings and Rec. 709

  Posted by Steve Renard on July 20, 2010 at 7:49 pm

  Hi all – I have encountered the limits of my technical and engineering knowledge and I’m hoping someone can explain to me something that seems pretty basic but in practice has made my brain very sore as I try to sort this out. I am working on a project with a client that does high-quality animated 3D renderings of architectural projects. Here is the workflow:

  1. They do their work in 3DSMax, and use vRay to render 1920×1080 frames as .exr files with 32bpc color. As I understand it, these are sRGB files with a linear color space/gamma 1.0.
  2. The rendered files are brought into Fusion for compositing and various effects like depth of field. In Fusion, they apply color correction to bring the gamma to 2.2. Fusion renders out .tga frames, which are still in the sRGB color space.
  3. The .tga frames are sent through QuickTime Pro and converted to ProRes 4444, then brought into FCP. The FCP timeline is set up for ProRes 4444 1920×1080 – as far as I know, FCP has no effect on and no setting to adjust the color space of the entire timeline, and it will just take what you give it an spit it out the other end.
  4. The FCP sequence is sent to Color, where color grading is done with a Rec.709 monitor to show us what we’re really going to get. Color corrections are rendered out and sent back to FCP.
  5. From FCP, we export a master QuickTime file, still in ProRes4444. This file is sent through Adobe Media Encoder or Compressor to make an H.264 (for BluRay production) or an MPEG-2 (for DVD production).

  So far, the results have been good, but we’re trying to refine the process and make sure we’re doing everything we can to get the highest quality result. Does anyone have any suggestions? Does this process sound right? Are there other issues that I haven’t considered? Is there any way to simplify this, so that we only have to worry about dealing with color correction and color space at one point in the process, and everything else can just be plugged into a pre-set box?

  Thanks to anyone who can enlighten me!

  Cheers,
  Steve

  Steve Renard replied 15 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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