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FCP to AE round trip – best practices
I’ve been researching the issues with FCP to After Effects, and there are numerous problems in the YUV to RGB (and back) conversion with Gamma Shift, Clipping, etc…
Many of the articles I’ve read mention this or that version of Quicktime, and many of them are quite out of date.
Has any of this been fixed in recent updates to FCP, QT, CS4?
If not, has anyone sorted this out yet in a reliable way? Are there different issues with different codecs?
I know I’m trying to simplify a complicated issue with quite a few variables, but is there a “Best Practices” guide or article that spells out the do’s and don’ts?
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4 Replies
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You might get better advice if you’d tell us about your specific needs. There are no universal solutions that cover all formats and codecs and bit depths. That’s one of the reasons the available information is rather dated.
We are strictly DV in my shop. We’re not getting any new toys until the global economy stabilizes or the workers finally rise up against their oppressors who own the means of production!Umm, with our everyday workflow, these issues everyone are experiencing are things with I which i can only sympathize.
bogiesan
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see, that’s the thing – we have dozens of different circumstances, with different formats/codecs, etc…, rather than have to trouble shoot every single circumstance, I was hoping there was a methodology we could adopt that could keep us out of trouble in the first place.
Basically, we have source footage in everything from DV to XDCAM to 1080p ProRes – and finish in everything from web delivery formats, to SD DigiBeta to HDCAM-SR 10bit Uncomp.
We’ll often send a scene to our After Effects guys for compositing, then bring it back into FCP for final layoff. But we often see shifts in color space, gamma, clipping, etc… – some of which is to be expected, but I was looking for words of wisdom for to minimize headaches that occur in that YUV to RGB to YUV chain. That might be special codecs, specific apps that do a better RGB conversion, legalizing colors before compositing, etc…
We also will offline in FCP, and online in a Flame across town, or down in LA. Back in the old days, we’d show up with an EDL and a stack of tapes, which they’d recapture – no problem. But now we’re showing up with P2 or XDCAM, or ProRes quicktimes, and the Flame artist bitches and moans about the FCP/Quicktime RGB shift, “damned consumer editing toys”, etc… Then other times, we’ll have the Flame artist composite a specific shot, but then give it back to us for final conform. He’ll give us a series of TIFFs, but then there’s another color shift when we convert it back to QT.
My hope is that if we can establish a YUV to RGB workflow that works for After Effects, it will also work with getting things to a Flame RGB space and back.
Does that help? I’m sure many of you have jumped through these hoops before, right? I realize it’s a lot to write out in a forum post – anyone know of any published articles that deal with this? Come on, show me some links!
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[David Jahns] “My hope is that if we can establish a YUV to RGB workflow that works for After Effects, it will also work with getting things to a Flame RGB space and back.
Does that help? I’m sure many of you have jumped through these hoops before, right? I realize it’s a lot to write out in a forum post – anyone know of any published articles that deal with this? Come on, show me some links!”
Not that I know of.
You might want to spend of few hours cruising the AE forum at adobe.com. If anyone knows, some of those heavy wonks might.bogiesan
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One thing you could at least give a try is to take your FCP project and import it into Premiere Pro. Then you could import your AE comps directly into Premiere Pro and have a round trip workflow.
There are certainly challenges with any workflow, but at a minimum, this one would allow you to view your video and AE comps in a single timeline to see how they look relative to one another.
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