Difference in color between Blackmagic and AJA codecs

[Gary Adcock]

[Chris Poisson] “What I am noticing is that the converted project looks much richer, and slightly more saturated. Not a complaint by any means, it looks great. Just wondering if anyone else percieves this?”

Chris,

this is my experience also, and I have found that decklink captures can show issues for HDSDI content not matching the FW capture of the same footage when using DVCPROHD original content. My tests have only been with 720p HD footage however.

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Gary,

I don’t know if you are comparing a FireWire DVCPRO HD capture with a HD-SDI capture to a DVCPRO HD timeline or an uncompressed 8 or 10-bit timeline. Either way, DeckLink 5.x drivers are using the same Apple Uncompressed 422 codecs (8 and 10-bit), and also the same Apple/Panasonic DVCPRO HD codec, as is used by AJA cards. Where there might be a difference is in working with 4:4:4 and RGB material as Apple don’t yet have a RGB colorspace in their codec so you can see some differences moving between After Effects (RGB) and FCP (YUV). To help compliment the Apple codecs in these scenarios, we use Blackmagic codecs in some specific scenarios (especially with After Effects) to ensure proper color space conversion.

If Chris was also working in an application such as After Effects, then this might explain the difference he is now seeing on a system that doesn’t use our codecs. However if files were simply captured with FCP on Blackmagic and AJA systems via HD-SDI, then I would expect no difference as they should both be using the same Apple codecs.

Feel free to send me an email if you are seeing some difference that you can’t figure out. It would be helpful to have a frame of video which might show up some difference as well as driver versions and the workflow you used to reach that result.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design