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FCPX Color match tool not working ?
running 10.5.2 on an M1 Mini- Which has been a solid experience so far. I have a multicam clip that needs a little tune up color matching wise – I shot with.a C330 mk2 and a BMPC 4k . I shot color charts so I know what’s going on with each camera and while to the eye they are close there are differences. I thought I would try to use the color match tool just for fun and it does not work- Specifically , I select a clip in the time line, park the skimmer on a frame, take the pointer over to a frame I want to match in another clip and the dual screen that I am supposed to see in the viewer never pops up and I can’t make a match. The tool seems to be designed to work this way but it just doesn’t – am I missing the secret handshake or password some how?
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2 Replies
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The built-in FCP color match tool is fairly simple and is not designed for complex cases. It does not know there’s a color card in the frame. This often gives the impression it’s not doing much.
Without using a 3rd party tool, you can use the procedure in this video to match shots from different cameras based on a ColorChecker chart. However IMO he should be adding correction effects before the Log-to-Rec709 conversion LUT, not after. The LUT has no idea the color balance is off and will blindly translate those colors, which might make it harder to correct if “grading under the LUT”.
There are ways to automate this. The Color Finale plugin can recognize a standardized color card (at least the XRite ColorChecker Video; don’t know about others). You draw a little box around the card on both source and destination clips and it visually identifies each tile on the card and matches based on that.
Resolve Studio has a similar feature built in.
If both cameras were in a log profile, that’s better than a “baked in” color look, but each camera has its own unique log implementation (often more than one). E.g, Canon CLog2, CLog3, Sony SLog2, SLog3, Blackmagic FilmLog, etc. In theory the camera-specific log conversion LUT should help but the color science is nonetheless different between cameras.
There’s a plugin for Premiere and Resolve (and planned for FCP) called CineMatch which tries to match different profiles and sensor characteristics. It doesn’t replace the above matching methods but is designed to better match cameras which are properly white balanced and exposed: https://www.cinematch.com
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I’m not asking color match to do much. I already have done a manual match myself for the same 2 cameras on another project, and I figured I would try the tool just for th heck of it. The FCPX tool is simple, I’m simply surprised that it does not work as intended on my machine . I’m on the verge of getting color Finale, I already use their transcode tool for my Braw files and I had an earlier version of the app that I got some use out of but let go out of date.
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