HELP!! (WALTER?, anyone?) DVCPRO HD Photoshop Graphics in FCP Image included.

[Bryan Arnold]

I guess I need to learn the ways of the DVCPRO HD workflow.

Take a look at this image.

https://www.visiontracks.com/bryan/Picture-2.jpg

Why is there a gamma shift in the After Effects rendered output. I added highlights on the earing of the doll, when the rendered output from After Effects is put back into FCP there is a change in the levels/colors.

DVCPRO HD 720 –> QT reference –> After Effects 6.5 composite –> render QT animation –> import and render into FCP timeline gets the above change.

I also tried to render from AE to the DVCPRO HD codec with the same results. Does it have something to do with RGB/YUV? Or the color profile in System Preferences?

Thanks,
Bryan

[Walter Biscardi]

Looks like a low resolution graphic or you’ve blown the graphic up too much resulting in the stepping.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Bryan Arnold]

The graphic is a native 1280×720 photoshop document imported into FCP. I checked to see if there was any zoom on the image in FCP and there was not.

Strange… I guess you do not ever see this?

Also, about the gamma thing. I just did some codec tests, and when I render out in AJA Kona 2vuy (NOT Vuy) there is very minimal gamma shift. So small that no one would ever see it. So that seems to be the fix for that problem.

The still image thing though? Could it be bit depth in Photoshop or pixel aspect ratio? I set them to 8 bit and square pixels.

[Shane Ross]

Does it look like this with the Canvas set to 100%? Or on your external monitor? Never judge the quality of anything using the computer monitor.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Bryan Arnold]

Yes, canvas and viewer set to 100% looks like this both on comps screen and External JVC HD monitor. I actually set the canvas and viewer to 200% in the screenshot to show what is going on more, but the same is there at 100%

[Chris Borjis]

I have sometimes seen ugly jaggies like this before with still graphics and I don’t know why.

What fixed the issue was rendering the still frame as an uncompressed 10-bit quicktime file.

The jaggies were gone completely.

I know it doesn’t solve the issue, but you can at least finish the job and have it look right.

[Walter Biscardi]

[MixTracks] ”
Strange… I guess you do not ever see this?”

I’ve seen minor compression but not anything as dramatic as that, but then you are zooming in the image and you are capturing this off your Canvas which shows more compression than the actual video output.

DVCPro HD is a very clean format even for graphics, but there will limits depending on color selection and actual format used.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Bryan Arnold]

I think that is exactly it Walter, I tried to make the logo and text black, and there were less artifacts in the image. It was a combination of the colors in the image that made it worse.

There is still compression in the image, but not very noticeable.

I also tried to render the image as a 10-bit uncompressed mov with the same results. That makes me think even more that it is a result of the colors used.

[Ben Oliver]

you could always…get your hands on teh camera, print out the graphic on nice paper, and shoot it with the camera…..

[Graeme Nattress]

In the graphic you’ve got a edge defined by a colour transition from multi-colour to blue. Because of the 4:2:2 chroma sampling, colour is half the rez of the luma, and hence that transition will not be very well defined. FCP displays chroma rather blocky on screen, whereas the deck’s outputs smooth the chroma making it less noticible. Either way, it’s bad form to use a chroma transition for text – change colours yes, but put it on a strong luma transition also, and that will help make it look a lot better. Remember worse things will be done to the graphic in broadcast than are ever done by your codecs in your NLE, so make it look extra robust now, for transmission’s sake.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP