FCP 7 suddenly video in Viewer & Canvas incredibly dark/severe gamma.

[Bryan Rowland]

Thank you so much! This fixed the problem for me. Bad Munki.

[Joshua Sandler]

I never thought I would be the one to figure this out. Colormunki should pay me for all the hours of internet research i’ve done trying to crack the case. I was not at all optimistic i would find a solution anytime soon. I’ll have to drink a few beers tonight in celebration… I now have my CM preferences set to ICC Version 2 and Gamma set to 1.8 and everything in FCP looks good.

[Matt Lyon]

Great sleuthing Joshua, and thanks for posting a follow up. I’m sure many people will find this thread helpful.

[joshua sandler] “But i must say I am still a little confused about this 1.8/2.2 Gamma issue. As I am running Lion, should my display always be set at 1.8? Should it be set at 2.2?”

I don’t mind posting about this again 🙂 It’s probably faster for me then searching for my old posts. I guess the answer is “it depends.” I’ve profiled my displays with a Spyder, and have made setting for 1.8 6500k (for FCP video), 2.2 6500k (for sRGB standard) and 1.8 5000k, for working with the photo lab I sometimes use (as per their spec).

So I guess it depends on what else you are doing on your machine? And how much of your time is it worth it to sweat about?

Honestly I find it more often then not a PITA to keep switching profiles all the time, so I generally stay w/ my FCP preset all the time.

Of course, my preferred way to work is always with a video break-out-box and a calibrated broadcast monitor; in that case I would leave my computer monitors at 2.2, and judge everything video related on the broadcast monitor.

hth,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Joshua Sandler]

Thanks for sticking with us Matt! Most of the important work I do on my computer is in FCP or AE so i am just going to create profiles w/ Colormunki at 1.8 and keep em there. The next time i create a profile I will take a look and see if the default is 6500K and if its not i will give it a try. Thanks for taking the time to answer the question again though. I really appreciate it. I am planning on buying a broadcast monitor soon when i hopefully have the cash.

Also, i wrote an email to colormunki explaining this issue and expressing that i think they should try to get the word out to their customers, many of whom i assume might be FCP users.

[Jason Jones]

And for those of you who are following this thread because of suddenly, inexplicably dark FCP7 AND X images in the Viewer and Canvas, it’s not just Colormunki, but also at least one other calibration system, X-Rite’s iDisplay Pro. I’ve just run across this thread, and so haven’t actually applied what I hope it a solution, but I’ve been having the same experience, and only after reading the above realized that the sudden extreme darkness occured following a re-calibration of my monitors using X-Rite. I’ve switched to Premiere Pro recently, and so didn’t catch the problem with FCP7 until I had to return to an earlier project and voila: unbelievably dark images, even though the scopes look fine and the xmp-ed version into PP looks fine there. It’s clearly a FCP/X-Rite problem.

[Christopher Adams]

Actually. i think what you guys are doing is trying to trick the system and might cause a ton of other issues with other programs.. If your calibrating for a 1.8 gamma curve then the other programs other then FCP will then be incorrect. Far as I know calibrate your monitors as 2.2 period. Lion is now correct for the system wide gamma of 2.2. all programs *modern* will adhere to this. FCP is legacy and this more the likely will not be fixed. Not sure what is up if your getting this in fcpx though. I know the QT players and New 64bit VLC are correct as well as Adobe premiere. This is isolated to FCP at this point. *ie it lies* Do not trust the preview pane. Just go by your scopes *you are looking at those right?* They won’t lie to you about where your white and black points are. If you are crushing stuff they will show you that with a bunched up trace at the bottom. I suspect you should ignore FCP preview window and just move on and judge it in something more modern that doesn’t have this bug. I always look at my stuff on a THX calibrated external reference monitor with HD-SDi. and YES FCP is way way too dark compared to this or to davinci resolve. setting your systems to 1.8 i would think is a mistake. it will only make other things then tcp look wrong. If your a one program guy then maybe it is fine. Otherwise i would say don’t do it.
CJ Adams
colorist
simplexity digital post

[Matt Lyon]

Christopher, your points are all well taken, but I think everyone has different needs and it is important to get this information out there so everyone can decide the right course of action for their situation. I don’t see a problem setting your monitors to 1.8, as long as you understand the ramifications it has on other programs. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, it is possible to have multiple profiles calibrated for different situations.

We’d all love to work with calibrated broadcast monitors all the time, but that isn’t realistic. My current gig is all monitored via “digital desktop preview.” So I can’t just leave my computer monitors at 2.2 and have everything look dark all the time. The director and producer would not really abide by that. Eventually, the material will be handed off to another facility for grading in a proper, calibrated environment. But for the time being, things need to look “good enough” to at least not be distracting so we can focus on the story.

Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary…

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Andrew Johnstone]

I have a similar issue at the moment, running FCP 7 on Snow Leopard.

I have just shot a load of material on my new HPX250 and the imported images in FCP seem appreciably darker than on the camera’s preview screen and the chroma levels do not appear to be so great… I appreciate that I should not necessarily trust the camera’s monitoring, but at the same time how else do we judge exposures! I checked with a colleague in London who cuts regularly for broadcast and the only tweak he suggested was to check user preferences and that FCP was importing gamma settings from ‘source’. FCP can apply different gamma settings to the image if you ask it too, but the default gamma settings at import is ‘source’.

My monitors are calibrated using Eye-one and the images are bang on for photo with a gamma setting of 2.2. Setting gamma to 1.8 is an old mac trick and is now officially ‘wrong’ as far as I can tell. The images I am importing can all be tweaked using scopes and 3 way colour corrector, but this is the first time I have had this issue. I have previously only shot and imported from Sony systems. This is my first foray into the p2 workflow. So perhaps the issue is something to do with the P2 workflow/import?

I am used to my images always looking better in an online FCP studio where they have super fancy monitors etc, but I have never had a noticeable difference in Chroma/gamma levels right out of the camera before.

thoughts?

[Adam Pearson]

Just a quick simple check for anyone having serious image issues which have seemingly come out of nowhere…I’ve had this happen on one of my projects before and before you drive yourself crazy make sure that the viewer and canvas windows are set to have a BLACK BACKGROUND. Changing the background to anything other than black (White, Checkerboard 1 or Checkerboard 2) can have a huge effect on the appearance of your footage in both the Viewer and Canvas windows.

Hope this saves someone some time and hair ripping manic confusion.

Black BG:

Checkerboard BG (same effect from white):

[Grayson Markle]

I also recently got an iMac running Lion and, sure enough, I had the same issue with FCP. I’ve figured out a go around though and though I don’t understand why it works, it works. Go to Final Cut Pro-System Settings-Playback Control and change Gamma Correction from Accurate to Approximate then click ok. This should fix the issue. Then go back through all that change it back to Accurate and you’re good as gold. Again, this is stupid and I don’t know why it works and it was a frustrating process to figure out but there it is. Happy editing!

Grayson M.