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Footage looks darker in AFX???
We’ve been shooting a bunch on our new HVX-200 in full DVCPro HD 720p24 and using HDV Rack to record on a laptop. DV Rack lets you do a pretty good calibration of the laptops monitor, and our editing monitors are farily well set-up also. The footage recorded/played back in DV rack, and when viewed in quicktime player on the editing computers has great shadow detail, but when the raw footage is thrown into AFX instantly it becomes darker, and say, a dark-gray suit becomes the purest of black (no color-space settings in the project settings, or levels effect etc can bring the detail back out–its gone). I don’t know where this conversion is happening since it seems that I’ve exhausted all AFX’s options…its driving me nuts! We’re new to HD so there’s a lot I dont know about it or formats etc. Has anyone else run into this problem? And what is it after effects is doing, since the project setting’s color-space selector (even when set to the same that the operating sysetm is set to) does zero to fix it (even color spaces that lightens everthing unpleasantly and dramatically arent affecting the blacks on our imported footage, so I’m assuimg its being crushed before this process). Thanks for the help in advance
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6 Replies
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Have you tried searching the COW on YUV vs. RGB issues?
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Well I had read I think on another forum where someone asked about that, and even if he should put them through Final Cut first, and a few people came back and said not to worry–that AFX handles the conversion well so I hadn’t considered it. But I’ll look that up, thanks for the tip!
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can you shoot to P2 rather than use DVRack. I believe DVRack does its own encoding.
I have an HVX200 and often use AE with the footage. I use Raylight to convert the mxf files to raylight AVIs Raylight is a lossless codec. I can then render any kind of file from AE.
Check out the Cow’s HVX forum here: https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/193 -
i agree, i think you should shoot to p2…
i think you may be losing color information by using hdv rack… i’m not sure, but i believe you are sending your dvcpro100/hd data to a hdv system that then spits out an mpeg2. your dvcpro100 codec has a data rate of 100Mb/sec, hdv is the same or less than dv, 20Mb/sec or 25Mb/sec. so your stream out of the camera may have 4-5 times the data than your input device can handle, so i think the hdv rack is converting to hdv data rates and then compressing again to mpeg2.
if you don’t have an nle that will bring in the mxf files put the dvcpro100 files into a quicktime wrapper or convert to a lossless codec, there are other tools taht will do it. if you are pc based panasonic should have sent a p2 viewer witht he camera taht i believe will convert the mxf to other file types/codecs to bring into ae, if your mac based there are a few tools that cost around $150, hd logger i believe is one.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
No we can and have shot to P2, but I had no idea DVRack was degrading it so much. It does make sense, i’ve been scratching my head at times with some of the artifacting… but even so–looking at the QT files that DVrack spits out, after the fact, on our editing computer, they look dynamically conservative compared to the same file imported into after effects which comes out far more crushed. I’m not arguing with what you guys are saying, that’s great (or not so great!) to know, but it doesn’t explain what’s going on with AFX… maybe I’ll try A/Bing the last shots we still have on the P2 card and see A if it looks better and B imports into AFX more nicely. Sucks to hear about DV rack though, the way it changes shooting with a video camera is indispensible! I guess the solution is to monitor with DV rack but use the P2 card for transfer…
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I would consider instead converting your DVRack AVI’s into Raylight AVI’s. Raylight
handles the YUV to RGB conversion better. You can continue using DVRack for capture. Try installing the demo version of Raylight atand then see
https://dvfilm.com/cgi-bin/board/main.cgi?board=Raytricks
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