Color Fix for Color Shifts of segments in Final Cut, when they get to Quicktime movies

[Howard Ferguson]

Whoops . . .

Correction from my original posting. It’s Opacity, not Occupancy . . .
This is a total restatement of the posting:

I just wanted to post this in one place, since it involved a number of different color related issues in other threads.

I’ve had a problem in one of my 23.98 Sequences, with the color shifting at places along the Timeline-
Not during playback in Final Cut, but after Export to Quicktime.

This Sequence has video clips, along with clips of still PNG images at times.

In this case, the images are of White text on a transparent background, hence the PNG format.
And that fades in and out via Opacity controls, and it moved around the screen via location and size controls in the Motion controls. All of these commands are Key Frames.

The problem was:
The Exported Quicktime movie shifted in color in various places, compared to what I’d been working with in Final Cut.

When I compared the Quicktime movie with the Timeline in Final Cut, I realized that one of my PNG files that was transparent, was causing the Exported Quicktime movie to display the correct color, in the Quicktime export.

The difference of this clip, from all the other clips was:
It’s Alpha was set to White.
The other clips were all either None/Ignore, Straight, or Black.

So, I created a new video track at the top of the window,
expanded that clip to it’s longest length possible,
then copied and pasted that clip into that video track, the entire length of the piece.

Those clips are never visible . . .
But somehow, they fix the color shifting problem.

The clip has a soft focus filter and some motion controls.
It’s always set with the Opacity at Zero.

And having it there makes the color in the resulting Exported Quicktime movies stop shifting in color at various locations along the Timeline.

This doesn’t fix the overall color paleness in the Exported QT movies, but the actual shifting of color from one part to the next in the same Sequence seems to get fixed doing this.

More on that-
Exporting via Quicktime Conversion, using the Animation Codec, seems to resolve the overall color paleness issue.

But I’m confused.
Those QT Conversion files aren’t supposed to be as high rez as the full rez Export to Quicktime format. If both are Exported at the same high quality settings.

The QT Conversion Export is 8.21 GB.
The Export via the Quicktime format, with the same settings, is 6.92 GB.

In the QT Movie Inspector Window-
I see the only difference in these two files, other than size, is the data rate.
125.5 for the QT Conversion.
105.79 for the QT format (the top one).

In the Final Cut 5.1.4 browser-
I see two differences in these two files,
other than size,
is the data rate and the Alpha setting.

Data Rate:
14.9 MB/sec for the QT Conversion.
12.6 MB/sec for the QT format (the top one of the Export menu).

Alpha Setting:
Straight for the QT Conversion.
None/Ignore for the QT format (the top one of the Export menu).

Which of these two setting would you consider to be best ?
Would there be a better setting for Exporting at the highest quality, and best color ?

I very much appreciate any and all thoughts on this stuff !

Thanks for your time in considering my problem !

Howard Ferguson