Colour flickering when adding any titles / generators / images over timeline

[Jeremy Garchow]

This is just for testing purposes. Drag one of the mts files in a library and see if it plays back without flicker.

[Jagster Rana]

ok ill try that and report back .. in the mean time as time is a factor i transcoded on my other machine which has fcp7 ( the old log and transfer ) prores 422 setting…

have now imported THAT footage into fcpx … and It works… no colour flicker …
conclusive proof that its fcpx transcoding process that is the issue… i also know ( have a few diff cameras ) it doesn’t affect all cameras only some.. go figure .. !

… APPLE PLS SORT THIS OUT >>>>

JR

[Jeremy Garchow]

Did you ever try trashing FCPX and redownloading and reimporting?

[Jagster Rana]

No i didnt bcos i read by at least 3 other ppl with same issue that does not fix it … so i value my life time… LOL… im not gonna put my self thru that since others have tried that and it doesnt work… 😕

JR

[Mark Kolodziej]

I had a similar issue. I took the original footage and used an online converter to convert the original footage from .mp4 to .mov file and whatever the error was disappeared. Hope this helps.

Seems like my file was corrupted somehow from the camera I was using. (DJI OSMO+) And converting it to a different file format tricked FCPX into fixing it.

[Joe Marler]

This is likely a known issue with 10.4.x color space identification. The solution is manually use Inspector to flag all clips as REC 709, even if the library and clips are already REC 709. Note you must select “settings” at bottom of Inspector to get this option.

It’s a transient, elusive glitch whereby light colors will intermittently flicker or fluctuate in brightness. It is very difficult to reproduce but typically requires two layers such as connected clips, titles or generators over the primary storyline. I have only seen it on my iMac Pro, not the 2017 iMac, but others have seen it on regular iMacs.

I’ve only seen it on 4k H264 source material. When I used 4k optimized media or 4k ProRes sources it didn’t happen. However I have seen it on proxies, which are ProRes. Others have reported it on 1080p AVCHD (which uses H264). The behavior is very elusive and difficult to reproduce, and implies a possible underlying race condition or cache state issue.

This is unrelated to render files or 3rd party plugins. Reformatting the hard drive, reinstalling macOS and FCPX does not eliminate it.

It is not just a display problem but the results are encoded into an exported file (whether ProRes or H264). That is gravely serious, as it’s essentially corrupting the integrity of the material. If that machine was used to transcode material for downstream consumption, it’s possible a huge amount of work could be subtly “poisoned”. The behavior is very hardware-like and may appear to be thermally-related (it’s not), which in turn could lead to unnecessary hardware troubleshooting and machine replacement.

I’ve reported this to Pro Apps escalation support.

[Jagster Rana]

In the end Mark thats more or less what i ended up doing … i still have FCP 7 on an older mac and so used that to LOG and TRANSFER …THAT WORKED… proving that the issue is fcpx transcoding engine for come codecs… AVCHD > h.264 is def affected MP4 seems ok ( tried that 1)

Also did you see the possible solution that Joe Marler posted .. ill try that also… we should all contact Apple and report…

JR

[Jagster Rana]

Joe you are a life saver.!!! Thank you !! . im gonna try that i hope it does work for me also

thanks v v much !!

cheers

JR

[Jagster Rana]

HI Joe

i just tried what you suggested following your instructions .. it didn’t work ? ☹

heres what i did :
click on clip in browser window
inspector
change from BASIC > SETTINGS
Colour space override is default to off change to REC 709 in drop down menu
put clip on timeline

( i also note that its default to Upper for field dominance but shld be progressive so changed that too from upper to Progressive but still no joy and back again )

but it still displays the same issue … using canon c100 AVCHD ( h.264)

is that correct or did i miss something ?

thanks again

cheers

JR

[Joe Marler]

[Jagster rana] “click on clip in browser window
inspector
change from BASIC > SETTINGS
Colour space override is default to off change to REC 709 in drop down menu
put clip on timeline “

If it is the same problem, this should work. If you have any render files or proxies, the corruption could be encoded to those, so it’s probably safer to delete those and regenerate them. I definitely saw cases where I moved a project and media from my iMac Pro to my iMac, and it happened there until render files and proxies were regenerated.

There are cases where a file in the timeline might not inherit the change made in the browser, but you added the file after you flagged it REC 709, so that should handle it.

In my case to be absolutely certain I re-flagged all the files in both browser and timeline to REC 709. I think for multicam I opened each one in the browser and re-flagged those also, not just the parent clips. I’m not sure if that’s needed but this problem was so serious and time-consuming to identify, I didn’t want to take any chances.