FCP colour correction solution to DSP ‘washed out’ encoding?

[Aaron Shedlock]

DSP does not reconvert your media to MPEG2 when you add buttons over footage that is already compressed.

On a side note. I’ve seen many students make a similar mistake as yours, which might not be a compression issue. Sometimes it’s as simple as forgetting to properly set your colors up for your buttons and overlays.

For some reason, DSP defaults to a semi transparent white overlay for your button colors. It looks as if it is washing out the menus. i.e., a solid black screen will look gray. The best part is, if you don’t have the button state selected which is causing it, you won’t see it.

Highlight your main menu in the project outline window, then check your inspector’s color tab. Click through the button states and look at the sliders.

If you see the top slider set in the middle, I believe with a setting of 7, it is basically overlaying a white layer set to 50% transparency over your entire menu, not just your buttons. Drag the slider back to 0.

This may or may not be your problem. Like I said, I’ve had people come to me with the same issue time and again, and 80% of the time, that’s why.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Aaron, thanks so much for the reply. I really thought you might have had it.

Unfortunately, I still get washed out menus. Even if I bring in a solid menu with no overlay layers, you can see the gamma shift as soon as you drag it in to DVDSP. There is obviously a conflict or an update needed to fix this.

If you have any more great ideas, I am all ears.

Jeremy

[Harry Powell]

Thanks to all your kind suggestions I’ve made some progress! … though not quite there yet…

Rafael – I finally tried your suggestion of encoding in Compressor first, then adding to DSP, and there is an improvement. It is now only a bit washed-out rather than very washed-out. I’d say 20 percent bad rather than 90 percent bad.

Jeremy – my DSP ‘washed-out’ fault is perhaps a different one to yours? i.e. I only see the washed-out image after a build, and only from the VIDEO_TS folder. i.e. it never looks wrong even after a render within DSP itself.

Aaron (welcome!) – are you sure DSP does not reconvert when you add buttons? Are we talking about the same kind of buttons? Overlay buttons (I think)?

I did a test. I removed all buttons on the main menu and did a build, i.e. made a VIDEO_TS folder. There was no render time AND more importantly, the menu looks great! i.e. no washed-out image! So this must be the original DSP rendered menu, as there was no render time..

When I put the buttons back though, the same problem returns on ‘build’. And it looks like it is definitely rendering to me, i.e. it takes a few minutes rather than a few seconds to build.. and it’s very washed out again.

I also checked my menu inspector’s color tab, and the top one is on 0 (though black is selected rather than white in my case). However, when I move it to 7 (middle), in my case it only affects the text buttons, not the menu. (I have ‘include text in highlight’ ticked if that is relevant)

So where does that leave us I wonder?

Thank you all, and any more thoughts very welcome!
(Apologies in advance though if I don’t respond promptly, as I’ll be away for a couple of days)