5.1 Mac drivers and gamma

[Chris Tomberlin]

Felix,

Yeah got the same **!#$&##$ thing here. Looks like somebody at BMD maybe didn’t “get the memo” on some of the fixes done in 5.01r2. The crazy green lines are back when you take something from FCP into AE and put it into 16bit mode, AND there is no option for rendering to the old BMD 10-bit codec, just the screwy apple 10-bit codec. Almost makes you want to buy an Avid…

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Toby Angwin]

I have never had a problem with the different gamma levels, besides if you view your work on two different brands of broadcast monitor they will look different. Can’t you just make sure your clips match each other. As in if you are grading in AE, just have a reference image either loaded into Color Finesse or side by side. You should always be grading relative to other shots anyway. This method is unbeatable.

Also most of this is an After Effects problem, not BM or FCP. After Effects has never had a great internal YUV to RGB conversion. Years ago my colleagues and I decided that you just couldn’t drop an after effects rendered shot in between other shots. Or if you must, render it our to trillions of colours and let fcp render it to video, that might help.

Cheers,

Toby

[Felix Mack]

For the sake of science, I installed 10.3.8, QT6.5.2, FCP4.5 and BM 4.8.1 on a fresh drive.

I did the same test as before, and it is a thing of beauty. While there is still a minute shift between AE and FCP, it is negligible compared to anything I have seen on 10.4/FCP5.

A ramp from AE is linear in FCP and vice versa. RGB material from AE renders properly. All is well in 10.3.8!

So the question remains, why did this work before and now it is kaputt?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Felix,

I’m not at work at the moment and so can’t test this but will check it out on Monday and get back to you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Felix Mack]

Thanks – help on this matter is greatly appreciated.

-Felix

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Felix,

Here’s a little information but more will follow after the engineers have returned from IBC.

The DeckLink 5.0 drivers did away with Blackmagic codecs and solely adopted Apple codecs in SD and HD. Unfortunately, gamma issues became apparent.

We contacted Apple about this and worked with them on a solution. They suggested that we reintroduce our codecs in a few specific scenarios to help avoid these gamma issues. This is something that we could do immediately without having to wait for an update to FCP and/or QuickTime. We released DeckLink 5.0.1 but unfortunately it had a bad installer which lead to stability issues so we withdrew it. We quietly re-released it with a “good” installer and gave it the version number 5.0.1r2. The “r2” refers to the second revision of the installer but there were no changes to the software itself otherwise we would have incremented the version number.

We were close to releasing the DeckLink 5.1 drivers and we did not have enough firm information to tell us whether all of the stability issues with the DeckLink 5.0.1 drivers could be attributed to a bad installer or not and so, after discussions with Apple in which they could not identify any immediate reasons for certain kinds of FCP crashes, we took our codecs out of the drivers before releasing the DeckLink 5.1 drivers so we’re back to many of the same gamma issues. This is frustrating but we wanted to ensure stability.

The DeckLink 5.0.1r2 drivers are available from our web site for anyone wanting to test the gamma fixes.

Once the engineers return, we will pursue this again and it would be great if we can ask you further questions if necessary as you clearly have a good understanding of the issues involved and have run some excellent tests to demonstrate the problems.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Felix Mack]

Hi –

thanks. I am very keen on getting this fixed, since I use AE>FPC everyday. . . I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

-Felix

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Felix,

That is great and I’ll let you know when we have some ready for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Christo]

Luke,

Is there any update on the codecs; I’m getting a lot of really odd behaviour in AE working with the Apple Uncompressed codec. I’m re-rendering out effects shots I did for a feature in order to put a reel together, and the renders are horrendous, with tons of distortion. Even my captured footage (no effects added) shows up with artifacts due to the Uncompressed codec (I take it into my MiniMac, which I use for rendering and still has the 4.7 BM codecs, and it looks just fine). I’ll try to throw in what frames show up as now w/ the Uncompressed. Really disappointed. The BM codecs were so stable…

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