FCP Export H264 – collor difference with original

[David Roth weiss]

[jef langbeen] “So how do i get the H264 export at the same original level as the 10 bit uncompressed?”

Jef,

For thousands of years alchemists tried to turn lead into gold. You’re essentially wanting to accomplish the same thing.

In order to achieve its magic of squeezing your huge uncompressed video file into a much smaller h.264 video file, video compression is used. Compression essentially does two things:

1) it compares nearby frames and figures out which pixels are identical, and it tosses out as many duplicated pixels as it can while doing its best to preserve enough of the original image to satisfy the tolerance of human perception.

2) it interpolates color, meaning it make a good guess, in terms of how many separate and distinct colors it can also toss out and replace with fewer similar colors, while still satisfying the tolerance of human perception.

So, your uncompressed image, which has millions if not billions of variations of colors in its color space, is being compressed into a much smaller color space by h.264 compression with just hundreds of thousands of colors instead. And, while the sophisticated algorithms it uses to do that are quite remarkable in their capabilities, no one has yet figured out a way to toss out that information and still wind-up with something identical in every way to the original. When they do, they will have finally succeeded in doing what alchemists have always been trying to do.

Does this make sense?

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Jef Langbeen]

Thxs David

Yes, it makes sense to me,
Compression will coss loss of information.

I runned the test on collorbars, i just wanted to have the basic collors to be right.

[David Roth weiss]

Cedric,

Somehow your post got tacked onto another thread, in any case…

Whenever exporting always use Quicktime Movie at current settings, which creates a file which is essentially identical to your timeline.

Use that file in Compressor to create a SD DVD just as you would if making a DVD from a SD source, just make certain to set the aspect ratio to 16×9 in the Encoder tab of the Inspector, which will flag the MPEG2 so that your DVD displays 16×9 on a widescreen TV and letterboxed on a 4×3 TV.

In order to view HD you do need to invest in a device of one sort or another. The cheapest solution is Matrox MXO, which is really just for viewing, but you would be far better off with an I/O device such as Kona card.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Anthony Dalesandro]

Jef,
I also noticed some color and gamma shifting when doing H.264 exports. I’ve found 2 solutions in Compressor to get the H.264 to more closely match the original file.

In Compressor, in the Inspector Filters tab, on the Video sub-tab set Gamma to 1.10 and in the Color sub-tab change the pulldown to Preserve Source.

I’ve found these 2 changes to make a big difference.

—
Anthony Dalesandro
anthony@anthonydalesandro.com
https://www.anthonydalesandro.com

[David Roth weiss]

[Cedric Nairn- Smith] “I am an avid feature assistant editor”

Condolences!!! Just kidding, Avid make the job of an assistant easier than FCP in many ways…

[Cedric Nairn- Smith] “When I log and transfered that data into FCP I began working with DVCPRO HD 720p60 quicktimes. Are those DVCPRO files down converted from the MXF? Hence, I am not really viewing true HD because I do not have a Kona card or similar product?”

The MFX files are converted to DVCProHD in a QT wrapper and are HD unless you downconverted from the camera and ddn’t mention that.

You’d be viewing HD on your computer monitor, just not seeing an accurate HD image, as no computer monitor is really capable of displaying video in the manner of a proper video monitor.

I always suggest cutting the video in HD and later down-converting to SD. That way you always have the HD on hand and are thus “future-proofed.” You can export an HD Quicktime without an I/O card, as I mentioned above, using current settings. And you can take that file on a firewire drive to a facility with a Kona card to get it output to tape. Or, you can use Compressor to down-convert to 8-bit uncompressed SD to print to tape to Beta or DigiBeta tape.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Also, go to your QuickTime Player preferences. At the bottom, you will see a preference for, I forget the verbage, “Match Gamma for Final Cut Compatiblity”

Jeff Bernstein

Digital Desktop Consulting
Apple Pro Video VAR
XSAN Certified
MetaSAN Master Reseller

323-653-7611

[Andrzej Artymowicz]

Jef,

I know your pain and the color problems with Compressor, even with 8bit video when encoding to h264.

But I bet you’ll be amazed how good colors you can get using Episode 5.0…

And the speed of encoding is several times faster… with very good output.

It costs (I’m using regular not Pro version) but it’s good piece of software.

regards
arti