Legalizing HD with FCP

[Chris Borjis]

Broadcast Safe doesn’t always work for everything if you apply it to the entire timeline especially if you have an uncorrected clips, so I hear.

Have you watched the entire hd timeline through the scopes in fcp? any illegal levels there? There should be if your running into problems.

[Michael Alberts]

It’s virtually impossible to see the hot video levels in the FCP scopes. Even with the Broadcast Safe filter set to Extremely Conservative there are a dozen or so spots in the program that are coming out illegal. We took the HDCAM output (with the Safe filter set to Extreme) to a QC facility and it’s still registering 720-740 mV in sections. We’ve color corrected the entire show, but using the highlight control in the 3 way CC cuts too wide a swath to use it to clamp too far down on certain shots.
We had hoped that the Broadcast Safe filter would protect us, but all the HD shows are being rejected by the network. The SD’s are all passing. The spec at the network calls for the HD masters to be no hotter than .700mV in the highlights. FCP’s scopes only show IRE, not mV, and I’m not exactly sure how to translate between the two. The engineer at the QC facility told me 714mV = 100 IRE. Yes, the network’s spec seems to call for an HD master with highlights BELOW 100 IRE.
We’re now faced with either renting or purchasing an HD legalizer box such as the Harris DL-860.
We’ve used Color on another program, but the workflow is too unreliable to use on a regular series with deadlines, not to mention the crazy render times necessary.

Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net

[Walter Biscardi]

HD has a much wider range of levels than SD.

Broadcast Safe by itself will not protect you from hot levels either in HD than SD. Use the color correction tools in FCP, or even add Magic Bullet Colorista from Red Giant to assist.

Generally we run three levels of Colorista, then the Broadcast Safe, then the Levels filter on each and every shot. We’ve passed every QC check for about 65 broadcast masters so far.

My guess is you have a shot or shots that have a little bit of a spike which can be pulled down easily enough with the CC tools. Your QC report should have timecode notations so you can see the shot(s) in question.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

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[Chris Borjis]

[walter biscardi] “Generally we run three levels of Colorista,”

can you expand on that Walter?

I’m about to start delivering HDCam for a network and the last thing I need is a rejected master.

Your posts here on your experiences with good eats has been a tremendous help to me. 🙂